Four Scarpetta Novels
Author: Patricia Cornwell
Date: 1996-01-01 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Mystery
Description: FOUR EXTRAORDINARY NOVELS FEATURING KAY SCARPETTA From the world's #1 bestselling crime writer PATRICIA CORNWELL "When it comes to forensic sciences, nobody can touch Cornwell." -"The New York Times Book Review" "Cornwell has created a character so real, so compelling, so driven that this reader has to remind herself regularly that Scarpetta is just a product of an author's imagination." -"USA Today" "The Last Precinct" Patricia Cornwell takes her readers deeper into Kay Scarpetta's heart and soul than ever before, as she discovers that the so-called Werewolf murders may have extended to New Y
Publisher: Penguin
Rights: Copyright © 2007 by Cornwell Enterprises, Inc.

Titles by Patricia Cornwell

SCARPETTA SERIES

The Scarpetta Factor

Scarpetta

Book of the Dead

Predator

Trace

Blow Fly

The Last Precinct

Black Notice

Point of Origin

Unnatural Exposure

Cause of Death

From Potter’s Field

The Body Farm

Cruel & Unusual

All That Remains

Body of Evidence

Postmortem

ANDY BRAZIL SERIES

Isle of Dogs

Southern Cross

Hornet’s Nest

WIN GARANO SERIES

The Front

At Risk

NONFICTION

Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed

BIOGRAPHY

Ruth, A Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham

(also published as A Time for Remembering: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham)

OTHER WORKS

Food to Die For: Secrets from Kay Scarpetta’s Kitchen

Life’s Little Fable

Scarpetta’s Winter Table

Four Scarpetta Novels

Book of the Dead
The Last Precinct
Blow Fly
Predator

Patricia Cornwell

Contents

Book of the Dead

The Last Precinct

Blow Fly

Predator

Book of the Dead

Patricia Cornwell

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

NEW YORK

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Publishers Since 1838
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Copyright © 2007 by Cornwell Enterprises, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.
Purchase only authorized editions.
Published simultaneously in Canada

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cornwell, Patricia Daniels.
Book of the dead / Patricia Cornwell.
p. cm.
ISBN: 1-101-15590-6
1. Scarpetta, Kay (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Medical examiners (Law)—Fiction. 3. Forensic pathologists—Fiction. 4. Women physicians—Fiction. 5. South Carolina—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3553.O692B65       2007        2007028170

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Acknowledgments

I am especially grateful to Dr. Staci Gruber, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, and Associate Director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory, McLean Hospital.

This book is dedicated
to my publisher,
Ivan Held.

Rome

Water splashing. A gray mosaic tile tub sunk deep into a terracotta floor.

Water pours slowly from an old brass spout, and darkness pours through a window. On the other side of old, wavy glass is the piazza, and the fountain, and the night.

She sits quietly in water, and the water is very cold, with melting ice cubes in it, and there is little in her eyes—nothing much there anymore. At first, her eyes were like hands reaching out to him, begging him to save her. Now her eyes are the bruised blue of dusk. Whatever was in them has almost left. Soon she will sleep.

“Here,” he says, handing her a tumbler that was handblown in Murano and now is filled with vodka.

He is fascinated by parts of her that have never seen the sun. They are pale like limestone, and he turns the spigot almost off, and the water is a trickle now, and he watches her rapid breathing and hears the chattering of her teeth. Her white breasts float beneath the surface of the water, delicate like white flowers. Her nipples, hard from the cold, are tight pink buds. Then he thinks of pencils. Of chewing off nubby pink erasers when he was in school, and telling his father and sometimes his mother that he didn’t need erasers because he didn’t make mistakes. When in truth, he liked to chew. He couldn’t help it, and that also was the truth.

“You’ll remember my name,” he says to her.

“I won’t,” she says. “I can forget it.” Chattering.

He knows why she says it: If she forgets his name, her destiny will be rethought like a bad battle plan.

“What is it?” he asks. “Tell me my name.”

“I don’t remember.” Crying, shaking.

“Say it,” he says, looking at her tan arms, pebbly with goose bumps, the blond hair on them erect, her young breasts and the darkness between her legs underwater.

“Will.”

“And the rest of it?”

“Rambo.”

“And you think that’s amusing,” he says, naked, sitting on the lid of the toilet.

She shakes her head vigorously.

Lying. She made fun of him when he told her his name. She laughed and said Rambo is make-believe, a movie name. He said it’s Swedish. She said he isn’t Swedish. He said the name is Swedish. Where did she think it came from? It’s a real name. “Right,” she said. “Like Rocky,” she said, laughing. “Look it up on the Internet,” he said. “It’s a real name,” he said, and he didn’t like that he had to explain his name. This was two days ago, and he didn’t hold it against her, but he was aware of it. He forgave her because despite what the world says, she suffers unbearably.

“Knowing my name will be an echo,” he says. “It makes no difference, not in the least. Just a sound already said.”

“I would never say it.” Panic.

Her lips and nails are blue, and she shivers uncontrollably. She stares. He tells her to drink more, and she doesn’t dare refuse him. The slightest act of insubordination, and she knows what happens. Even one small scream, and she knows what happens. He sits calmly on the lid of the toilet, his legs splayed so she can see his excitement, and fear it. She doesn’t beg anymore or tell him to have his way with her, if that’s the reason she’s his hostage. She doesn’t say this anymore because she knows what happens when she insults him and implies that if he had a way it would be with her. Meaning she wouldn’t give it willingly and want it.

“You realize I asked you nicely,” he says.

“I don’t know.” Teeth chattering.

“You do know. I asked you to thank me. That’s all I asked, and I was nice to you. I asked you nicely, then you had to do this,” he says. “You had to make me do this. You see”—he gets up and watches his nakedness in the mirror over the smooth marble sink—“your suffering makes me do this,” his nakedness in the mirror says. “And I don’t want to do this. So you’ve hurt me. Do you understand you’ve critically hurt me by making me do this?” his nakedness in the mirror says.

She says she understands, and her eyes scatter like flying shards of glass as he opens the toolbox, and her scattered gaze fixes on the box cutters and knives and fine-tooth saws. He lifts out a small bag of sand and sets it on the edge of the sink. He pulls out ampules of lavender glue and sets them down, too.

“I’ll do anything you want. Give you anything you want.” She has said this repeatedly.

He has ordered her not to say it again. But she just did.

His hands dip into the water, and the coldness of the water bites him, and he grabs her ankles and lifts her up. He holds her up by her cold, tan legs with their cold, white feet and feels her terror in her panicking muscles as he holds her cold ankles tight. He holds her a little longer than last time, and she struggles and flails and thrashes violently, cold water splashing loudly. He lets go. She gasps and coughs and makes strangling cries. She doesn’t complain. She’s learned not to complain—it took a while, but she’s learned it. She’s learned all of this is for her own good and is grateful for a sacrifice that will change his life—not hers, but his—in a way that isn’t good. Wasn’t good. Can never be good. She should be grateful for his gift.

He picks up the trash bag he filled with ice from the ice maker in the bar and pours the last of it in the tub and she looks at him, tears running down her face. Grief. The dark edges of it showing.

“We used to hang them from the ceiling over there,” he says. “Kick them in the sides of their knees, over and over. Over there. All of us coming into the small room and kicking the sides of their knees. It’s excruciatingly painful and, of course, crippling, and, of course, some of them died. That’s nothing compared to other things I saw over there. I didn’t work in that prison, you see. But I didn’t need to, because there was plenty of that type of behavior to go around. What people don’t understand is it wasn’t stupid to film any of it. To photograph it. It was inevitable. You have to. If you don’t, it’s as if it never happened. So people take pictures. They show them to others. It only takes one. One person to see it. Then the whole world does.”

She glances at the camera on the marble-top table against the stucco wall.

“They deserved it anyway, didn’t they?” he says. “They forced us to be something we weren’t, so whose fault was it? Not ours.”

She nods. She shivers, and her teeth chatter.

“I didn’t always participate,” he says. “I did watch. At first it was difficult, perhaps traumatic. I was against it, but the things they did to us. And because of what they did, we were forced to do things back, so it was their fault that they forced us, and I know you see that.”

She nods and cries and shakes.

“The roadside bombs. Kidnapping. Much more than you hear about,” he says. “You get used to it. Just like you’re getting used to the cold water, aren’t you?”

She isn’t used to it, only numb and on her way to hypothermia. By now her head pounds and her heart feels as if it will explode. He hands her the vodka, and she drinks.

“I’m going to open the window,” he says. “So you can hear Bernini’s fountain. I’ve heard it much of my life. The night’s perfect. You should see the stars.” He opens the window and looks at the night, the stars, the fountain of four rivers, and the piazza. Empty at this hour. “You won’t scream,” he says.

She shakes her head and her chest heaves and she shivers uncontrollably.

“You’re thinking about your friends. I know that. Certainly they’re thinking about you. That’s too bad. And they aren’t here. They aren’t anywhere to be seen.” He looks at the deserted piazza again and shrugs. “Why would they be here now? They’ve left. Long ago.”

Her nose runs and tears spill and she shakes. The energy in her eyes—it’s not what it was when he met her, and he resents her for ruining who she was to him. Earlier, much earlier, he spoke Italian to her because it changed him into the stranger he needed to be. Now he speaks English because it no longer makes a difference. She glances at his excitement. Her glances at his excitement bounce against it like a moth against a lamp. He feels her there. She fears what’s there. But not as much as she fears everything else—the water, the tools, the sand, the glue. She doesn’t comprehend the thick black belt coiled on the very old tile floor, and she should fear it most of all.

He picks it up and tells her it’s a primitive urge to beat people who can’t defend themselves. Why? She doesn’t answer. Why? She stares at him in terror, and the light in her eyes is dull but crazed, like a mirror shattering right in front of him. He tells her to stand, and she does, shakily, her knees almost collapsing. She stands in the frigid water and he turns off the spout. Her body reminds him of a bow with a taut string because she’s flexible and powerful. Water trickles down her skin as she stands before him.

“Turn away from me,” he says. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to beat you with the belt. I don’t do that.”

Water quietly laps in the tub as she turns away from him, facing old, cracked stucco and a closed shutter.

“Now I need you to kneel in the water,” he says. “And look at the wall. Don’t look at me.”

She kneels, facing the wall, and he picks up the belt and slides the end of it through the buckle.

Chapter 1

Ten days later. April 27, 2007. A Friday afternoon.

Inside the virtual-reality theater are twelve of Italy’s most powerful law enforcers and politicians, whose names, in the main, forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta can’t keep straight. The only non-Italians are herself and forensic psychologist Benton Wesley, both consultants for International Investigative Response (IIR), a special branch of the European Network of Forensic Science Institutes (ENFSI). The Italian government is in a very delicate position.

Nine days ago, American tennis star Drew Martin was murdered while on vacation, her nude, mutilated body found near Piazza Navona, in the heart of Rome’s historic district. The case is an international sensation, details about the sixteen-year-old’s life and death replayed nonstop on television, the crawls at the bottom of the screen doing just that—crawling by slowly and tenaciously, repeating the same details the anchors and experts are saying.

“So, Dr. Scarpetta, let’s clarify, because there seems to be much confusion. According to you, she was dead by two or three o’clock that afternoon,” says Captain Ottorino Poma, a medico legale in the Arma dei Carabinieri, the military police heading the investigation.

“That’s not according to me,” she says, her patience beginning to fray. “That’s according to you.”

He frowns in the low lighting. “I was so sure it was you, just minutes ago, talking about her stomach contents and alcohol level. And the fact they indicate she was dead within hours of when she was seen last by her friends.”

“I didn’t say she was dead by two or three o’clock. I believe it is you who continues to say that, Captain Poma.”

At a young age he already has a widespread reputation, and not an entirely good one. When Scarpetta first met him two years ago in the Hague at the ENFSI’s annual meeting, he was derisively dubbed the Designer Doctor and described as extraordinarily conceited and argumentative. He is handsome—magnificent, really—with a taste for beautiful women and dazzling clothes, and today he is wearing a uniform of midnight blue with broad red stripes and bright silver embellishments, and polished black leather boots. When he swept into the theater this morning, he was wearing a red-lined cape.

He sits directly in front of Scarpetta, front row center, and rarely takes his eyes off her. On his right is Benton Wesley, who is silent most of the time. Everyone is masked by stereoscopic glasses that are synchronized with the Crime Scene Analysis System, a brilliant innovation that has made the Polizia Scientifica Italiana’s Unità per l’Analisi del Crimine Violento the envy of law enforcement agencies worldwide.

“I suppose we need to go through this again so you completely understand my position,” Scarpetta says to Captain Poma, who now rests his chin on his hand as if he is having an intimate conversation with her over a glass of wine. “Had she been killed at two or three o’clock that afternoon, then when her body was found at approximately eight-thirty the following morning, she would have been dead at least seventeen hours. Her livor mortis, rigor mortis, and algor mortis are inconsistent with that.”

She uses a laser pointer to direct attention to the three-dimensional muddy construction site projected on the wall-size screen. It’s as if they are standing in the middle of the scene, staring at Drew Martin’s mauled, dead body and the litter and earthmoving equipment around it. The red dot of the laser moves along the left shoulder, the left buttock, the left leg and its bare foot. The right buttock is gone, as is a portion of her right thigh, as if she had been attacked by a shark.

“Her lividity…” Scarpetta starts to say.

“Once again I apologize. My English isn’t so good as yours. I’m not sure of this word,” Captain Poma says.

“I’ve used it before.”

“I wasn’t sure of it then.”

Laughter. Other than the translator, Scarpetta is the only woman present. She and the translator don’t find the captain amusing, but the men do. Except Benton, who hasn’t smiled once this day.

“Do you know the Italian for this word?” Captain Poma asks Scarpetta.

“How about the language of ancient Rome?” Scarpetta says. “Latin. Since most medical terminology is rooted in Latin.” She doesn’t say it rudely, but is no-nonsense because she’s well aware that his English becomes awkward only when it suits him.

His 3-D glasses stare at her, reminding her of Zorro. “Italian, please,” he says to her. “I never was so good in Latin.”

“I’ll give you both. In Italian, ‘livid’ is livido, which means bruised. ‘Mortis’ is morte, or death. Livor mortis suggests an appearance of bruising that occurs after death.”

“It’s helpful when you speak Italian,” he says. “And you do it so well.”

She doesn’t intend to do it here, although she speaks enough Italian to get by. She prefers English during these professional discussions because nuances are tricky, and the translator intercepts every word anyway. This difficulty with language, along with political pressure, stress, and Captain Poma’s relentless and enigmatic antics, add to what already is rather much a disaster that has nothing to do with any of these things. But rather, the killer in this case defies precedents and the usual profiles. He confounds them. Even the science has become a maddening source of debate—it seems to defy them, lie to them, forcing Scarpetta to remind herself and everyone else that science never tells untruths. It doesn’t make mistakes. It doesn’t deliberately lead them astray or taunt them.

This is lost on Captain Poma. Or perhaps he pretends. Perhaps he isn’t serious when he refers to Drew’s dead body as uncooperative and argumentative, as if he has a relationship with it and they are squabbling. He asserts that her postmortem changes may say one thing, and her blood alcohol and stomach contents say another, but contrary to what Scarpetta believes, food and drink should always be trusted. He is serious, at least about that.

“What Drew ate and drank is revealing of truth.” He repeats what he said in his impassioned opening statement earlier today.

“Revealing of a truth, yes. But not your truth,” Scarpetta replies, in a tone more polite than what she says. “Your truth is a misinterpretation.”

“I think we’ve been over this,” Benton says from the shadows of the front row. “I think Dr. Scarpetta has made herself perfectly clear.”

Captain Poma’s 3-D glasses—and rows of other 3-D glasses—remain fixed on her. “I regret if I bore you with my reexamination, Dr. Wesley, but we need to find sense in this. So please indulge me. April seventeenth, Drew ate very bad lasagna and drank four glasses of very bad Chianti between eleven-thirty and twelve-thirty at a tourist trattoria near the Spanish Steps. She paid the bill and left, then at the Piazza di Spagna parted company with her two friends, who she promised to rejoin at Piazza Navona within the hour. She never appeared. That much we know to be true. What remains a mystery is everything else.” His thick-framed glasses look at Scarpetta, then he turns in his seat and speaks to the rows behind him. “Partly because our esteemed colleague from the United States now says she’s convinced Drew didn’t die shortly after lunch or even that same day.”

“I’ve been saying this all along. Once again, I’ll explain why. Since it seems you are confused,” Scarpetta says.

“We need to move on,” Benton says.

But they can’t move on. Captain Poma is so respected by the Italians, is such a celebrity, he can do whatever he wants. In the press he is called the Sherlock Holmes of Rome, even though he is a physician, not a detective. Everyone, including the Comandante Generale of the Carabinieri, who sits in a back corner and listens more than he speaks, seems to have forgotten that.

“Under normal circumstances,” Scarpetta says, “Drew’s food would have been fully digested several hours after she ate lunch, and her alcohol level certainly wouldn’t have been as high as the point-two determined by toxicological testing. So, yes, Captain Poma, her stomach contents and toxicology suggest she died shortly after lunch. But her livor mortis and rigor mortis suggest—rather emphatically, let me add—that she died possibly twelve to fifteen hours after she ate lunch at the trattoria, and these postmortem artifacts are the ones we should pay the most attention to.”

“So here we are. Back to lividity.” He sighs. “This word I have so much trouble with. Please explain it again, since I seem to have so much trouble with what you call postmortem artifacts. As if we are archaeologists digging up ruins.” Captain Poma’s chin rests on his hand again.

“Lividity, livor mortis, postmortem hypostasis, all the same thing. When you die, your circulation quits and the blood begins to accumulate in the small vessels due to gravity, rather much like sediment settling in a sunken ship.” She feels Benton’s 3-D glasses looking at her. She dares not look at him. He isn’t himself.

“Continue, please.” Captain Poma underlines something several times on his legal pad.

“If the body remains in a certain position long enough after death, the blood will settle accordingly—a postmortem artifact we call livor mortis,” Scarpetta explains. “Eventually, livor mortis becomes fixed, or set, turning that area of the body purplish-red, with patterns of blanching from surfaces pressing against it or constricting it, such as tight clothing. Can we see the autopsy photograph, please?” She checks a list on the podium. “Number twenty-one.”

The wall fills with Drew’s body on a steel table in the morgue at Tor Vergata University. She is facedown. Scarpetta moves the laser’s red dot over the back, over the purplish-red areas and blanching caused by lividity. The shocking wounds that look like dark red craters she has yet to address.

“Now, if you’ll put the scene up, please. The one that shows her being placed into the body bag,” she says.

The three-dimensional photograph of the construction site fills the wall again, but this time there are investigators in white Tyvek suits, gloves, and shoe covers lifting Drew’s limp, naked body into a sheet-lined black pouch on top of a stretcher. Around them, other investigators hold up additional sheets to block the view from the curious and the paparazzi at the perimeter of the scene.

“Compare this to the photograph you just saw. By the time she was autopsied some eight hours after she was found, her lividity was almost completely set,” Scarpetta says. “But here at the scene, it’s apparent that lividity was in its early stages.” The red dot moves over pinkish areas on Drew’s back. “Rigor was in its early stages as well.”

“You rule out the early onset of rigor mortis due to a cadervic spasm? For example, if she strenuously exerted herself right before death? Maybe she struggled with him? Since you’ve not mentioned this phenomenon so far?” Captain Poma underlines something on his legal pad.

“There’s no reason to talk about a cadervic spasm,” Scarpetta says. Why don’t you throw in the kitchen sink? she’s tempted to ask. “Whether she strenuously exerted herself or not,” she says, “she wasn’t fully rigorous when she was found, so she didn’t have a cadervic spasm….”

“Unless rigor came and went.”

“Impossible, since it became fully fixed in the morgue. Rigor doesn’t come and go and then come again.”

The translator suppresses a smile as she relays this in Italian, and several people laugh.

“You can see from this”—Scarpetta points the laser at Drew’s body being lifted onto the stretcher—“her muscles certainly aren’t stiff. They’re quite flexible. I estimate she’d been dead less than six hours when she was found, possibly considerably less.”

“You’re a world expert. How can you be so vague?”

“Because we don’t know where she’d been, what temperatures or conditions she was exposed to before she was left in the construction site. Body temperature, rigor mortis, livor mortis can vary greatly from case to case and individual to individual.”

“Based on the condition of the body, are you saying it’s impossible she was murdered soon after she had lunch with her friends? Perhaps while she was walking alone to Piazza Navona to join them?”

“I don’t believe that’s what happened.”

“Then once again, please. How do you explain her undigested food and point-two alcohol level? They imply she died soon after she ate lunch with her friends—not some fifteen, sixteen hours later.”

“It’s possible not long after she left her friends, she resumed drinking alcohol and was so terrified and stressed, her digestion quit.”

“What? Now you’re suggesting she spent time with her killer, possibly as much as ten, twelve, fifteen hours with him—that she was drinking with him?”

“He might have forced her to drink, to keep her impaired and easier to control. As in drugging somebody.”

“So he forced her to drink alcohol, perhaps all afternoon, all night, and into the early morning, and she was so frightened her food didn’t digest? That’s what you’re offering us as a plausible explanation?”

“I’ve seen it before,” Scarpetta says.

The animated construction site after dark.

Surrounding shops, pizzerias, and ristorantes are lit up and crowded. Cars and motor scooters are parked on the sides of the streets, on the sidewalks. The rumble of traffic and the sounds of footsteps and voices fill the theater.

Suddenly, the lighted windows go dark. Then silence.

The sound of a car, and the shape of it. A four-door black Lancia parks at the corner of Via di Pasquino and Via dell’Anima. The driver’s door opens and an animated man gets out. He is dressed in gray. His face has no features and, like his hands, is gray, from which everyone in the theater is to infer that the killer hasn’t been assigned an age, race, or any physical characteristics. For the sake of simplicity, the killer is referred to as male. The gray man opens the trunk and lifts out a body wrapped in a blue fabric with a pattern that includes the colors red, gold, and green.

“The sheet wrapped around her is based on silk fibers collected from the body and in the mud under it,” Captain Poma says.

Benton Wesley says, “Fibers found all over the body. Including in the hair, on the hands, the feet. Certainly an abundance of them were adhering to her wounds. From this we can conclude she was completely wrapped from head to toe. So, yes, obviously we have to consider a large piece of colorful silk fabric. Perhaps a sheet, perhaps a curtain…”

“What’s your point?”

“I have two of them: We shouldn’t assume it was a sheet, because we shouldn’t assume anything. Also, it’s possible he wrapped her in something that was indigenous to where he lives or works, or where he held her hostage.”

“Yes, yes.” Captain Poma’s glasses remain fixed on the scene filling the wall. “And we know there are carpet fibers which are also consistent with carpet fibers in the trunk of a 2005 Lancia, which is consistent also with what was described driving away from that area at approximately six a.m. The witness I mentioned. A woman in a nearby apartment got up to see about her cat because it was—what is the word…?”

“Yowling? Meowing?” the translator says.

“She got up because of her cat yowling and happened to look out her widow to see a dark luxury sedan driving away from the construction site as if in no hurry. She said it turned right on dell’Anima, a one-way street. Continue, please.”

The animation resumes. The gray man lifts the colorfully wrapped body out of the car trunk and carries it to a nearby aluminum catwalk that is barricaded only by a rope, which he steps over. He carries the body down a wooden plank that leads into the site. He places the body to one side of the plank, in the mud, and squats in the dark and quickly unwraps a figure that turns into the dead body of Drew Martin. This is no animation, but a three-dimensional photograph. One can see her clearly—her famous face, the savage wounds on her slender, athletic, naked body. The gray man balls up the colorful wrapping and returns to his car. He drives off at a normal rate of speed.

“We believe he did carry the body instead of dragging it,” Captain Poma says. “Because these fibers were only on the body and on the soil beneath it. There were no others, and although this isn’t proof, it certainly does indicate he didn’t drag her. Let me remind you, this scene has been mapped with the laser mapping system, and the perspective you’re seeing and the position of objects and the body are completely precise. Obviously, only people or objects that weren’t videotaped or photographed—such as the killer and his car—are animated.”

“How heavy was she?” the minister of the interior asks from the back row.

Scarpetta replies that Drew Martin weighed one hundred and thirty pounds, then converts that to kilograms. “He had to be reasonably strong,” she adds.

Animation resumes. Silence and the construction site in early-morning light. The sound of rain. Windows in the area remain dark, the businesses closed. No traffic. Then the whine of a motorcycle. Getting louder. A red Ducati appears on Via di Pasquino, the rider an animated figure in a rain slicker and a full-face helmet. He turns right on dell’Anima and suddenly stops, and the bike drops to the pavement with a loud thud, and the engine quits. The startled rider steps over his bike and hesitantly steps onto the aluminum catwalk, his boots loud on metal. The dead body below him in the mud looks more shocking, more gruesome, because it’s a three-dimensional photograph juxtaposed to the motorcyclist’s rather stilted animation.

“It’s now almost half past eight, the weather, as you can see, overcast and raining,” Captain Poma says. “Please move ahead to Professor Fiorani at the scene. That would be image fourteen. And now Dr. Scarpetta, you can, if you will, examine the body at the scene with the good professor, who isn’t here this afternoon, I’m sorry to say, because, can you guess? He’s at the Vatican. A cardinal died.”

Benton stares at the screen behind Scarpetta, and it knots her stomach that he is so unhappy and won’t look at her.

New images—video recordings in 3-D—fill the screen. Blue lights strobing. Police cars and a midnight-blue Carabinieri crime scene van. More Carabinieri with machine guns guarding the perimeter of the construction site. Plainclothes investigators inside the cordoned-off area, collecting evidence, taking photographs. The sounds of camera shutters and low voices and crowds on the streets. A police helicopter thud-thuds overhead. The professor—the most esteemed forensic pathologist in Rome—is covered in white Tyvek that is muddy. Close on, his point of view: Drew’s body. It’s so real in the stereoscopic glasses, it’s bizarre. Scarpetta feels as if she can touch Drew’s flesh and her gaping dark red wounds that are smeared with mud and glistening wet from the rain. Her long blond hair is wet and clings to her face. Her eyes are tightly shut and bulging beneath the lids.

“Dr. Scarpetta,” Captain Poma says. “You may examine her, please. Tell us what you see. You have, of course, studied Professor Fiorani’s report, but as you look at the body itself in three-dimension and are placed at the scene with it, please give us your own opinion. We won’t criticize you if you disagree with Professor Fiorani’s findings.”

Who’s considered as infallible as the Pope he embalmed several years earlier.

The laser’s red dot moves where Scarpetta points, and she says, “The position of the body. On the left side, hands folded under the chin, legs slightly bent. A position I believe is deliberate. Dr. Wesley?” She looks at Benton’s thick glasses looking past her, at the screen. “This is a good time for you to comment.”

“Deliberate. The body was positioned by the killer.”

“As if she’s praying, perhaps?” says the chief of the state police.

“What was her religion?” asks the deputy director of the Criminal Police National Directorate.

A peppering of questions and conjectures from the barely lit theater.

“Roman Catholic.”

“She didn’t practice it, I understand.”

“Not much.”

“Perhaps some religious connection?”

“Yes, I wonder that, too. The construction site is so close to Sant’Agnese in Agone.”

Captain Poma explains, “For those unfamiliar”—he looks at Benton—“Saint Agnes was a martyr tortured and murdered at the age of twelve because she wouldn’t marry a pagan like me.”

Peals of laughter. A discussion about the murder having a religious significance. But Benton says no.

“There’s sexual degradation,” he says. “She’s displayed, and she’s nude and dumped in plain view in the very area where she was supposed to meet her friends. The killer wanted her found, he wanted to shock people. Religion isn’t the overriding motive. Sexual excitement is.”

“Yet we found no evidence of rape.” This said by the head of the Carabinieri forensic labs.

He goes on to say through the translator that it appears the killer left no seminal fluid, no blood, no saliva, unless it was washed away by rain. But DNA from two different sources was collected from under her fingernails. The profiles have proved useless so far because, unfortunately, he explains, the Italian government doesn’t allow DNA samples to be taken from criminals, as it’s considered a violation of their human rights. The only profiles that can be entered into an Italian database at this time, he says, are those obtained from evidence, not from individuals.

“So there’s no database to search in Italy,” Captain Poma adds. “And the most we can say right now is the DNA collected from under Drew’s fingernails doesn’t match the DNA of any individual in any database outside Italy, including the United States.”

“I believe you’ve ascertained that the sources of DNA collected from under her nails are males of European descent—in other words, Caucasian,” Benton says.

“Yes,” the lab director says.

“Dr. Scarpetta?” Captain Poma says. “Please continue.”

“May I have autopsy photo number twenty-six, please?” she says. “A posterior view during the external examination. Close-up of the wounds.”

They fill the screen. Two dark red craters with jagged edges. She points the laser, and the red dot moves over the massive wound where the right buttock used to be, then to a second area of flesh that has been excised from the back of the right thigh.

“Inflicted by a sharp cutting instrument, possibly with a serrated blade, that sawed through muscle and superficially cut the bone,” she says. “Inflicted postmortem, based on the absence of tissue response to the injuries. In other words, the wounds are yellowish.”

“Postmortem mutilation rules out torture, at least torture by cutting,” Benton adds.

“Then what explanation? If not torture?” Captain Poma asks him, both men staring at each other like two animals that are natural enemies. “Why else would a person inflict such sadistic, and, I would suggest, disfiguring, wounds on another human being? Tell us, Dr. Wesley, in all your experiences have you seen anything like this before, perhaps in other cases? Especially when you were such a famous profiler with the FBI?”

“No,” Benton says curtly, and any reference to his former career with the FBI is a calculated insult. “I’ve seen mutilation. But I’ve never seen anything quite like this. Especially what he did to her eyes.”

He removed them and filled the sockets with sand. Afterward, he glued her eyelids shut.

Scarpetta points the laser and describes this, and Benton is chilled again. Everything about this case chills him, unnerves and fascinates him. What is the symbolism? It’s not that he’s unfamiliar with the gouging out of eyes. But what Captain Poma suggests is far-fetched.

“The ancient Greek combat sport pankration? Perhaps you’ve heard of it,” Captain Poma says to the theater. “In pankration, one uses any means possible to defeat his enemy. It was common to gouge out the eyes and kill the person by stabbing or strangulation. Drew’s eyes were gouged out, and she was strangled.”

The general of the Carabinieri asks Benton, through the translator, “Then maybe there’s a connection to pankration? That the killer had this in his mind when he removed her eyes and strangled her?”

“I don’t think so,” Benton says.

“Then what explanation?” the general asks, and like Captain Poma, he wears a splendid uniform but with more silver and ornamentation around the cuffs and high collar.

“A more interior one. A more personal one,” Benton says.

“From the news, perhaps,” the general says. “Torture. The Death Squads in Iraq that pull out teeth and gouge out eyes.”

“I can only suppose that what this killer did is a manifestation of his own psyche. In other words, I don’t believe what he did to her is an allusion to anything even remotely obvious. Through her wounds, we get a glimpse into his inner world,” Benton says.

“This is speculation,” Captain Poma says.

“It’s a psychological insight based on many years of working violent crimes,” Benton replies.

“But it’s your intuition.”

“We ignore intuition at our peril,” Benton says.

“May we have the autopsy picture that shows her anteriorly during the external examination?” Scarpetta says. “A close-up of her neck.” She checks the list on the podium. “Number twenty.”

A three-dimensional image fills the screen: Drew’s body on a stainless-steel autopsy table, her skin and hair wet from washing.

“If you look here”—Scarpetta points the laser at the neck—“you notice a horizontal ligature mark.” The dot moves along the front of the neck. Before she can continue, she’s interrupted by Rome’s head of tourism.

“Afterwards, he removed her eyes. After death,” he says. “Versus while she was alive. This is important.”

“Yes,” Scarpetta replies. “Reports I’ve reviewed indicate the only pre-mortem injuries are contusions on the ankles and contusions caused by strangulation. The photograph of her dissected neck, please? Number thirty-eight.”

She waits, and images fill the screen. On a cutting board, the larynx and soft tissue with areas of hemorrhage. The tongue.

Scarpetta points out, “Contusions to the soft tissue, the underlying muscles, and fractured hyoid due to strangulation clearly indicate damage inflicted while she was still alive.”

“Petechiae of her eyes?”

“We don’t know if there were conjunctival petechiae,” Scarpetta says. “Her eyes are absent. But reports do indicate some petechiae of eyelids and face.”

“What he did to her eyes? You’re familiar with this from anything else in your experiences?”

“I’ve seen victims whose eyes were gouged out. But I’ve never seen or heard of a killer filling eye sockets with sand and then sealing the eyelids shut with—in this instance—an adhesive that according to your report is a cyanoacrylate.”

“Superglue,” Captain Poma says.

“I’m keenly interested in the sand,” she says. “It doesn’t appear to be indigenous to the area. More important, scanning electron microscopy with EDX found traces of what appears to be gunshot residue. Lead, antimony, and barium.”

“Certainly it isn’t from the local beaches,” Captain Poma says. “Unless many people shoot each other and we don’t know it.”

Laughter.

“Sand from Ostia would have basalt in it,” Scarpetta says. “Other components from volcanic activity. I believe all of you have a copy of the spectral fingerprint of the sand recovered from the body and a spectral fingerprint of sand from a beach area in Ostia.”

The sounds of paper rustling in the theater. Small flashlights click on.

“Both analyzed with Raman spectroscopy, using an eight-point-milliwatt red laser. As you can see, sand from the local beaches of Ostia and sand found in Drew Martin’s eye sockets have very different spectral fingerprints. With the scanning electron microscope, we can see the sand’s morphology, and backscattered electron imaging shows us the GSR particles we’re talking about.”

“The beaches of Ostia are very popular with tourists,” Captain Poma says. “But not so much this time of year. People from here and the tourists usually wait until it’s warmer. Late May, even June. Then many people from Rome especially crowd them, since the drive is maybe thirty, maybe forty minutes. It’s not for me,” as if anybody asked his personal feelings about the beaches of Ostia. “I find the black sand of the beaches ugly, and I would never go in the water.”

“I think what’s important here is where is the sand from, which seems to be a mystery,” Benton says, and it’s late afternoon now and everyone is getting restless. “And why sand at all? The choice of sand—this specific sand—means something to the killer, and it may tell us where Drew was murdered, or perhaps where her killer is from or spends time.”

“Yes, yes,” Captain Poma says with a hint of impatience. “And the eyes and very terrible wounds mean something to the killer. And thankfully, these details aren’t known to the public. We’ve managed to keep them away from journalists. So if there is another similar murder, we will know it isn’t a copy.”

Chapter 2

The three of them sit in a candlelit corner of Tullio, a popular trattoria with a travertine facade, near the theaters, and an easy walk from the Spanish Steps.

Candlelit tables are covered in pale gold cloths, and the dark-paneled wall behind them is filled with bottles of wine. Other walls are hung with watercolors of rustic Italian scenes. It’s quiet here except for a table of drunk Americans. They’re oblivious and preoccupied, as is the waiter in his beige jacket and black tie. No one has any idea what Benton, Scarpetta, and Captain Poma are discussing. If anyone comes close enough to hear, they change their conversation to harmless topics and tuck photographs and reports back into folders.

Scarpetta sips a 1996 Biondi Santi Brunello that is very expensive but not what she would have picked had she been asked, and usually she is asked. She returns her glass to the table without removing her eyes from the photograph beside her simple Parma ham and melon, which she will follow with grilled sea bass, then beans in olive oil. Maybe raspberries for dessert, unless Benton’s deteriorating demeanor takes away her appetite. And it might.

“At the risk of sounding simple,” she is quietly saying, “I keep thinking there’s something important we’re missing.” Her index finger taps a scene photograph of Drew Martin.

“So now you don’t complain about going over something again and again,” Captain Poma says, openly flirtatious now. “See? Good food and wine. They make us smarter.” He taps his head, mimicking Scarpetta tapping the photograph.

She is pensive, the way she gets when she leaves the room without going anywhere.

“Something so obvious we’re completely blind to it, everyone’s been blind to it,” she continues. “Often we don’t see something because—as they say—it’s in plain view. What is it? What is she saying to us?”

“Fine. Let’s look for what’s in plain view,” says Benton, and rarely has she seen him so openly hostile and withdrawn. He doesn’t hide his disdain of Captain Poma, now dressed in perfect pinstripes. His gold cuff links engraved with the crest of the Carabinieri flash when they catch the light of the candle.

“Yes, in plain view. Every inch of her exposed flesh—before anybody touched it. We should study it in that condition. Untouched. Exactly as he left it,” Captain Poma says, his eyes on Scarpetta. “How he left it is a story, is it not? But before I forget, to our last time together in Rome. At least for now. We should drink a toast to that.”

It doesn’t seem right to raise their glasses with the dead young woman watching, her naked, savaged body right there on the table, in a sense.

“And a toast to the FBI,” says Captain Poma. “To their determination to turn this into an act of terrorism. The ultimate soft target—an American tennis star.”

“It’s a waste of time to even allude to such a thing,” Benton says, and he picks up his glass, not to toast but to drink.

“Then tell your government to stop suggesting it,” Captain Poma says. “There, I will say this bluntly since we’re alone. Your government is spreading this propaganda from behind the scenes, and the reason we didn’t discuss this earlier is because the Italians don’t believe anything so ridiculous. No terrorist is responsible. The FBI to say such a thing? It’s stupid.”

“The FBI isn’t sitting here. We are. And we aren’t the FBI, and I’m weary of your references to the FBI,” Benton replies.

“But you were FBI most of your career. Until you quit and disappeared from sight as if you were dead. For some reason.”

“If this were an act of terrorism, someone would have claimed responsibility by now,” Benton says. “I’d rather you don’t mention the FBI or my personal history again.”

“An insatiable appetite for publicity and your country’s current need to scare the hell out of everybody and rule the world.” Captain Poma refills their wineglasses. “Your Bureau of Investigation interviewing witnesses here in Rome, stepping all over Interpol, and they’re supposed to work with Interpol, have their own representatives there. And they fly in these idiots from Washington who don’t know us, much less how to work a complex homicide—”

Benton interrupts him. “You should know by now, Captain Poma, that politics and jurisdictional infighting are the nature of the beast.”

“I wish you would call me Otto. As my friends do.” He moves his chair closer to Scarpetta, and with him comes the scent of his cologne, then he moves the candle. He glances in disgust at the table of obtuse, hard-drinking Americans and says, “You know, we try to like you.”

“Don’t try,” Benton says. “No one else does.”

“I’ve never understood why you Americans are so loud.”

“Because we don’t listen,” Scarpetta says. “That’s why we have George Bush.”

Captain Poma picks up the photograph near her plate, studies it as if he’s never seen it before. “I’m looking at what’s in plain view,” he says. “And all I see is the obvious.”

Benton stares at the two of them sitting so close, his handsome face like granite.

“It’s better to assume there’s no such thing as obvious. It’s a word,” Scarpetta says, sliding more photographs out of an envelope. “A reference to one’s personal perceptions. And mine may be different from yours.”

“I believe you demonstrated that quite exhaustively at state police headquarters,” the captain says, while Benton stares.

She looks at Benton, a lingering look that communicates her awareness of his behavior and how unnecessary it is. He has no reason to be jealous. She has done nothing to encourage Captain Poma’s flirtations.

“In plain view. Well, then. Why don’t we start with her toes,” Benton says, barely touching his buffalo mozzarella and already on his third glass of wine.

“That’s actually a good idea.” Scarpetta studies photographs of Drew. She studies a close-up of Drew’s bare toes. “Neatly manicured. Nails painted recently, consistent with her getting a pedicure before she left New York.” She repeats what they know.

“Does that matter?” Captain Poma studies a photograph, leaning so close to Scarpetta that his arm is touching hers, and she feels his heat and smells his scent. “I don’t think so. I think it matters more what she was wearing. Black jeans, a white silk shirt, a black silk–lined black leather jacket. Also, black panties and a black bra.” He pauses. “It’s curious her body didn’t have any fibers from these, just the fibers from the sheet.”

“We don’t know for a fact it was a sheet,” Benton reminds him sharply.

“Also, her clothing, her watch, necklace, leather bracelets, and earrings haven’t been found. So the killer took these things,” the captain says to Scarpetta. “For what reason? Perhaps souvenirs. But we will talk about her pedicure, since you think it important. Drew went to a spa on Central Park South right after she got to New York. We have details of this appointment, charged to Drew’s credit card—her father’s credit card, actually. From what I’m told, he was most indulgent with her.”

“I think it’s been well established she was spoiled,” Benton says.

“I think we should be careful using words like that,” Scarpetta says. “She earned what she had, is the one who practiced six hours a day, trained so hard—had just won the Family Circle Cup and was expected to win other…”

“That’s where you live,” Captain Poma says to her. “Charleston, South Carolina. Where the Family Circle Cup is played. Odd, isn’t it. That very night she flew to New York. And from there to here. To this.” He indicates the photographs.

“What I’m saying is money can’t buy championship titles, and spoiled people usually don’t work as passionately as she did,” Scarpetta says.

Benton says, “Her father spoiled her but couldn’t be bothered with parenting. Same with her mother.”

“Yes, yes,” Captain Poma agrees. “What parents permit a sixteen-year-old to travel abroad with two eighteen-year-old friends? Especially if she’d been acting moody. Up and down.”

“When your child becomes more difficult, it gets easier to give in. Not resist,” Scarpetta says, thinking about her niece, Lucy. When Lucy was a child, God, their battles. “What about her coach? Do we know anything about that relationship?”

“Gianni Lupano. I spoke to him, and he said he was aware she was coming here and wasn’t happy about it because of major tournaments in the next few months, such as Wimbledon. He wasn’t helpful and seemed angry with her.”

“And the Italian Open here in Rome next month,” Scarpetta points out, finding it unusual the captain didn’t mention it.

“Of course. She should train, not run off with friends. I don’t watch tennis.”

“Where was he when she was murdered?” Scarpetta asks.

“New York. We’ve checked with the hotel where he said he stayed, and he was registered at that time. He also commented she had been moody. Down one day, up the next. Very stubborn and difficult and unpredictable. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could work with her. Said he had better things to do than put up with her behavior.”

“I’d like to know if mood disorders run in her family,” Benton says. “I don’t suppose you bothered to ask.”

“I didn’t. I’m sorry I wasn’t astute enough to think of it.”

“It would be extremely useful to know if she had a psychiatric history her family’s been secretive about.”

“It’s well known she’d struggled with an eating disorder,” Scarpetta says. “She’s talked openly about it.”

“No mention of a mood disorder? Nothing from her parents?” Benton continues his cool interrogation of the captain.

“Nothing more than her ups and downs. Typical teenager.”

“Do you have children?” Benton reaches for his wine.

“Not that I know of.”

“A trigger,” Scarpetta says. “Something was going on with Drew that no one’s telling us. Perhaps what’s in plain view? Her behavior’s in plain view. Her drinking’s in plain view. Why? Did something happen?”

“The tournament in Charleston,” Captain Poma says to Scarpetta. “Where you have your private practice. What is it they call it? The Lowcountry? What is Lowcountry, exactly?” He slowly swirls his wine, his eyes on her.

“Almost sea level, literally low country.”

“And your local police have no interest in this case? Since she played a tournament there just maybe two days before she was murdered?”

“Curious, I’m sure—” Scarpetta starts to say.

“Her murder has nothing to do with the Charleston police,” Benton interrupts. “They have no jurisdiction.”

Scarpetta gives him a look, and the captain watches both of them. He’s been watching their tense interaction all day.

“No jurisdiction hasn’t stopped anybody from showing up and flashing their badges,” Captain Poma says.

“If you’re alluding to the FBI again, you’ve made your point,” says Benton. “If you’re alluding to my being former FBI again, you’ve definitely made your point. If you’re alluding to Dr. Scarpetta and me—we were invited by you. We didn’t just show up, Otto. Since you’ve asked us to call you that.”

“Is it me or is this not perfect?” The captain holds up his glass of wine as if it is a flawed diamond.

Benton picked the wine. Scarpetta knows more about Italian wines than he does, but tonight he finds it necessary to assert his dominance, as if he has just plummeted fifty rungs on the evolutionary ladder. She feels Captain Poma’s interest in her as she looks at another photograph, grateful the waiter doesn’t seem inclined to come their way. He’s busy with the table of loud Americans.

“Close-up of her legs,” she says. “Bruising around her ankles.”

“Fresh bruises,” Captain Poma says. “He grabbed her, maybe.”

“Possibly. They aren’t from ligatures.”

She wishes Captain Poma wouldn’t sit so close to her, but there’s no where else for her to move unless she pushes her chair into the wall. She wishes he wouldn’t brush against her when he reaches for photographs.

“Her legs are recently shaven,” she goes on. “I would say shaven within twenty-four hours of her death. Barely any stubble. She cared about how she looked even when she was traveling with friends. That might be important. Was she hoping to meet someone?”

“Of course. Three young women looking for young men,” Captain Poma says.

Scarpetta watches Benton motion for the waiter to bring another bottle of wine.

She says, “Drew was a celebrity. From what I’ve been told, she was careful about strangers, didn’t like to be bothered.”

“Her drinking doesn’t make much sense,” Benton says.

“Chronic drinking doesn’t,” Scarpetta says. “You can look at these photographs and see she was extremely fit, lean, superb muscle development. If she’d become a heavy drinker, it would appear it hadn’t been going on long, and her recent success would indicate that as well. Again, we have to wonder if something recently had happened. Some emotional upheaval?”

“Depressed. Unstable. Abusing alcohol,” Benton says. “All making the person more vulnerable to a predator.”

“And that’s what I think happened,” Captain Poma says. “Randomness. An easy target. Alone at the Piazza di Spagna, where she encountered the gold-painted mime.”

The gold-painted mime performed as mimes do, and Drew dropped another coin into his cup, and he performed once more to her delight.

She refused to leave with her friends. The last thing she ever said to them was, “Beneath all that gold paint is a very handsome Italian.” The last thing her friends ever said to her was, “Don’t assume he’s Italian.” It was a valid comment, since mimes don’t speak.

She told her friends to go on, perhaps visit the shops of Via dei Condotti, and she promised to meet them at the Piazza Navona, at the fountain of rivers, where they waited and waited. They told Captain Poma they tasted free samples of crispy waffles made of eggs and farina and sugar, and giggled as Italian boys shot them with bubble guns, begging them to buy one. Instead, Drew’s friends got fake tattoos and encouraged street musicians to play American tunes on reed pipes. They admitted they had gotten somewhat drunk at lunch and were silly.

They described Drew as “a little drunk,” and said she was pretty but didn’t think she was. She assumed people stared because they recognized her, when often it was because of her good looks. “People who don’t watch tennis didn’t necessarily recognize her at all,” one of the friends told Captain Poma. “She just didn’t get how beautiful she was.”

Captain Poma talks on through their main course, and Benton, for the most part, drinks, and Scarpetta knows what he thinks—she should avoid the captain’s seductions, should somehow move out of range, which in truth would require nothing less than her leaving the table, if not the trattoria. Benton thinks the captain is full of shit, because it defies common sense that a medico legale would interview witnesses as if he is the lead detective in the case, and the captain never mentions the name of anyone else involved in the case. Benton forgets that Captain Poma is the Sherlock Holmes of Rome, or, more likely, Benton can’t stomach the thought, he is so jealous.

Scarpetta makes notes as the captain recounts in detail his long interview with the gold-painted mime, who has what appears to be an infallible alibi: He was still performing in his same spot at the base of the Spanish Steps until late afternoon—long after Drew’s friends returned to look for her. He claimed to vaguely remember the girl, but he had no idea who she was, thought she was drunk, and then she wandered off. In summary, he paid little attention to her, he said. He is a mime, he said. He acted like a mime at all times, he said. When he’s not a mime, he works at night as a doorman at the Hotel Hassler, where Benton and Scarpetta are staying. At the top of the Spanish Steps, the Hassler is one of the finest hotels in Rome, and Benton insisted on staying there in its penthouse for reasons he has yet to explain.

Scarpetta has barely touched her fish. She continues to look at the photographs as if for the first time. She doesn’t contribute to Benton and Captain Poma’s argument about why some killers grotesquely display their victims. She adds nothing to Benton’s talk of the excitement these sexual predators derive from the headline news or, even better, from lurking nearby or in the crowd, watching the drama of the discovery and the panic that follows. She studies Drew’s mauled naked body, on its side, legs together, knees and elbows bent, hands tucked under the chin.

Almost as if she’s sleeping.

“I’m not sure it’s contempt,” she says.

Benton and Captain Poma stop talking.

“If you look at this”—she slides a photograph closer to Benton—“without the usual assumption in mind that this is a sexually degrading display, you might wonder if there’s something different. Not about religion, either. Not praying to Saint Agnes. But the way she’s positioned.” She continues to say things as they come to her. “Something almost tender about it.”

“Tender? You’re joking,” Captain Poma says.

“As in sleeping,” Scarpetta says. “It doesn’t strike me that she’s displayed in a sexually degrading way—victim on her back, her arms, her legs spread, et cetera. The more I look, I don’t think so.”

“Maybe,” Benton says, picking up the photograph.

“But nude for everyone to see,” Captain Poma disagrees.

“Take a good look at her position. I could be wrong, of course, just trying to open my mind to other interpretations, putting aside my prejudices, my angry assumptions that this killer is filled with hate. It’s just a feeling I’m getting. The suggestion of a different possibility, that maybe he wanted her found but his intention wasn’t to sexually degrade,” she says.

“You don’t see contempt? Rage?” Captain Poma is surprised, seems genuinely incredulous.

“I think what he did made him feel powerful. He had a need to overpower her. He has other needs that at this moment we can’t possibly know,” she says. “And I’m certainly not suggesting there’s no sexual component. I’m not saying there isn’t rage. I just don’t think these are what drive him.”

“Charleston must feel very lucky to have you,” he says.

“I’m not sure Charleston feels anything of the sort,” she says. “At least, the local coroner most likely doesn’t.”

The drunk Americans are getting louder. Benton seems distracted by what they’re saying.

“An expert like yourself right there. Very lucky is how I would consider it if I were the coroner. And he doesn’t avail himself of your talents?” Captain Poma says, brushing against her as he reaches for a photograph he doesn’t need to look at again.

“He sends his cases to the Medical University of South Carolina, has never had to contend with a private pathology practice before. Not in Charleston or anywhere. My contracts are with some of the coroners from outlying jurisdictions where there’s no access to medical examiner facilities and labs,” she explains, distracted by Benton.

He indicates for her to pay attention to what the drunk Americans are saying.

“…I just think when it’s undisclosed this and undisclosed that, it’s fishy,” one of them pontificates.

“Why would she want anybody to know? I don’t blame her. It’s like Oprah or Anna Nicole Smith. People find out where they are, they show up in droves.”

“How sickening. Imagine being in the hospital…”

“Or in Anna Nicole Smith’s case, in the morgue. Or in the damn ground…”

“…And mobs of people out there on the sidewalk, yelling out your name.”

“Can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen, is what I say. Price you pay for being rich and famous.”

“What’s going on?” Scarpetta asks Benton.

“It would seem our old friend Dr. Self had some sort of emergency earlier today and is going to be off the air for a while,” he replies.

Captain Poma turns around and looks at the table of noisy Americans. “Do you know her?” he asks.

Benton says, “We’ve had our run-ins with her. Mainly, Kay has.”

“I believe I read something about that when I was researching you. A sensational, very brutal homicide case in Florida that involved all of you.”

“I’m glad to know you researched us,” Benton says. “That was very thorough.”

“Only to make myself familiar before you came here.” Captain Poma meets Scarpetta’s eyes. “A very beautiful woman I know watches Dr. Self regularly,” he says, “and she tells me she saw her on the show last fall. It had something to do with her winning that very big tournament in New York. I admit I don’t pay much attention to tennis.”

“The U.S. Open,” Scarpetta says.

“I’m not aware Drew was on her show,” Benton says, frowning as if he doesn’t believe him.

“She was. I’ve checked. This is very interesting. Suddenly, Dr. Self has a family emergency. I’ve been trying to get in touch with her, and she has yet to respond to my inquiries. Perhaps you could intercede?” he says to Scarpetta.

“I seriously doubt that would be helpful,” she says. “Dr. Self hates me.”

They walk back, following Via Due Macelli in the dark.

She imagines Drew Martin walking these streets. She wonders who she encountered. What does he look like? How old is he? What did he do to inspire her trust? Had they met before? It was daylight, plenty of people out, but so far no witnesses have come forward with convincing information that they saw anybody who fit her description at any time after she left the mime. How can that be possible? She was one of the most famous athletes in the world, and not one person recognized her on the streets of Rome?

“Was what happened random? Like a lightning strike? That’s the question we seem no closer to answering,” Scarpetta says as she and Benton walk through the balmy night, their shadows moving over old stone. “She’s by herself and intoxicated, perhaps lost on some deserted side street, and he sees her? And what? Offers to show her the way and leads her where he can gain complete control of her? Perhaps where he lives? Or to his car? If so, he must speak at least a little English. How could no one have seen her? Not one person.”

Benton says nothing, their shoes scuffing on the sidewalk, the street noisy with people emerging from restaurants and bars, very loud, with motor scooters and cars that come close to running them over.

“Drew didn’t speak Italian, scarcely a word of it, so we’re told,” Scarpetta adds.

The stars are out, the moon soft on Casina Rossa, the stucco house where Keats died of tuberculosis at age twenty-five.

“Or he stalked her,” she goes on. “Or perhaps he was acquainted with her. We don’t know and probably never will unless he does it again and is caught. Are you going to talk to me, Benton? Or shall I continue my rather fragmented, redundant monologue?”

“I don’t know what the hell’s going on between the two of you, unless this is your way of punishing me,” he says.

“With who?”

“That goddamn captain. Who the hell else?”

“The answer to the first part is nothing’s going on, and you’re being ridiculous to think otherwise, but we’ll get back to that. I’m more interested in the punishment part of your statement. Since I have no history of punishing you or anyone.”

They begin climbing the Spanish Steps, an exertion made harder by hurt feelings and too much wine. Lovers are entwined, and rowdy youths are laughing and boisterous and pay them no mind. Far away, what seems a mile high, the Hotel Hassler is lit up and huge, rising over the city like a palace.

“One thing not in my character,” she resumes. “Punishing people. Protect myself and others, but not punish. Never people I care about. Most of all”—out of breath—“I would never punish you.”

“If you intend to see other people, if you’re interested in other men, I can’t say I blame you. But tell me. That’s all I ask. Don’t put on displays like you did all day. And tonight. Don’t play fucking high school games with me.”

“Displays? Games?”

“He was all over you,” Benton says.

“And I was all over everywhere else trying to move away from him.”

“He’s been all over you for all day long. Can’t get close enough to you. Stares at you, touches you right in front of me.”

“Benton…”

“And I know he’s this good-looking, well, maybe you’re attracted to him. But I won’t tolerate it. Right in front of me. Goddamn it.”

“Benton…”

“Same with God knows who. Down there in the Deep South. What do I know?”

“Benton!”

Silence.

“You’re talking crazy. Since when, in the history of the universe, have you ever worried about my cheating on you? Knowingly.”

No sound but their footsteps on stone, their labored breathing.

“Knowingly,” she repeats, “because the one time I was with someone else was when I thought you were…”

“Dead,” he says. “Right. So you’re told I’m dead. Then a minute later you’re fucking some guy young enough to be your son.”

“Don’t.” Anger begins to gather. “Don’t you dare.”

He is quiet. Even after the bottle of wine he drank all by himself, he knows better than to push the subject of his feigned death when he was forced into a protected witness program. What Benton put her though. He knows better than to attack her as if she’s the one who was emotionally cruel.

“Sorry,” he says.

“What’s really the matter?” she says. “God, these steps.”

“I guess we can’t seem to change it. As you say about livor and rigor. Set. Fixed. Let’s face it.”

“I won’t face whatever it is. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no it. And livor and rigor are about people who are dead. We’re not dead. You just said you never were.”

Both of them are breathless. Her heart is pounding.

“I’m sorry. Really,” he says, referring to what happened in the past, his faked death and her ruined life.

She says, “He’s been too attentive. Forward. So what?”

Benton is used to the attention other men pay to her, has always been rather unperturbed by it, even amused, because he knows who she is, knows who he is, knows his enormous power and that she has to deal with the same thing—women who stare at him, brush against him, want him shamelessly.

“You’ve made a new life for yourself in Charleston,” he says. “I can’t see your undoing it. Can’t believe you did it.”

“Can’t believe…?” And the steps go up and up forever.

“Knowing I’m in Boston and can’t move south. Where does that leave us.”

“It leaves you jealous. Saying ‘fuck,’ and you never say ‘fuck.’ God! I hate steps!” Unable to catch her breath. “You have no reason to be threatened. It’s not like you to feel threatened by anyone. What’s wrong with you?”

“I was expecting too much.”

“Expecting what, Benton?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“It certainly does.”

They climb the endless flight of steps and stop talking, because their relationship is too much to talk about when they can’t breathe. She knows Benton is angry because he’s scared. He feels powerless in Rome. He feels powerless in their relationship because he’s in Massachusetts, where he moved with her blessing, the chance to work as a forensic psychologist at the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital too good to ignore.

“What were we thinking?” she says, no more steps, and she reaches for his hand. “Idealistic as ever, I suppose. And you could return a little energy with that hand of yours, as if you want to hold mine, too. For seventeen years we’ve never lived in the same city, much less the same house.”

“And you don’t think it can change.” He laces his fingers through hers, taking a deep breath.

“How?”

“I suppose I’ve entertained this secret fantasy you’d move. With Harvard, MIT, Tufts. I guess I thought you might teach. Perhaps at a medical school or be content to be a part-time consultant at McLean. Or maybe Boston, the ME’s office. Maybe end up chief.”

“I could never go back to a life like that,” Scarpetta says, and they are walking into the hotel’s lobby that she calls Belle Époque because it is from a beautiful era. But they are oblivious to the marble, the antique Murano glass and silk and sculptures, to everything and everyone, including Romeo—that really is his name—who during the day is a gold-painted mime, most nights a doorman, and of late, a somewhat attractive and sullen young Italian who doesn’t want any further interrogations about Drew Martin’s murder.

Romeo is polite but avoids their eyes and, like a mime, is completely silent.

“I want what’s best for you,” Benton says. “Which is why, obviously, I didn’t get in your way when you decided to start your own practice in Charleston, but I was upset about it.”

“You never told me.”

“I shouldn’t tell you now. What you’ve done is right and I know it. For years you’ve felt you really don’t belong anywhere. In a sense, homeless, and in some ways unhappy ever since you left Richmond—worse, sorry to remind you, were fired. That goddamn piss-ant governor. At this stage in your life, you’re doing exactly what you should.” As they board the elevator. “But I’m not sure I can stand it anymore.”

She tries not to feel a fear that is indescribably awful. “What do I hear you saying, Benton? That we should give up? Is that what you’re really saying?”

“Maybe I’m saying the opposite.”

“Maybe I don’t know what that means, and I wasn’t flirting.” As they get out on their floor. “I never flirt. Except with you.”

“I don’t know what you do when I’m not around.”

“You know what I don’t do.”

He unlocks the door to their penthouse suite. It is splendid with antiques and white marble and a stone patio big enough to entertain a small village. Beyond, the ancient city is silhouetted against the night.

“Benton,” she says. “Please, let’s don’t fight. You’re flying back to Boston in the morning. I’m flying back to Charleston. Let’s don’t push each other away so it somehow makes it easier to be away from each other.”

He takes off his coat.

“What? You’re angry that I’ve finally found a place to settle down, started again in a place that works for me?” she says.

He tosses his coat over a chair.

“In all fairness,” she says, “I’m the one who has to start all over again, create something out of nothing, answer my own phone, and clean up the damn morgue myself. I don’t have Harvard. I don’t have a multimillion-dollar apartment in Beacon Hill. I have Rose, Marino, and sometimes Lucy. That’s it, so I end up answering the phone myself half the time. The local media. Solicitors. Some group that wants me as a luncheon speaker. The exterminator. The other day, it was the damn Chamber of Commerce—how many of their damn phone directories do I want to order. As if I want to be listed in the Chamber of Commerce directory as if I’m a dry cleaner or something.”

“Why?” Benton says. “Rose has always screened your calls.”

“She’s getting old. She can do but so much.”

“Why can’t Marino answer the phone?”

“Why anything? Nothing’s the same. Your making everyone think you were dead fractured and scattered everyone. There, I’ll say it. Everybody’s changed because of it, including you.”

“I had no choice.”

“That’s the funny thing about choices. When you don’t have one, nobody else does, either.”

“That’s why you’ve put down roots in Charleston. You don’t want to choose me. I might die again.”

“I feel as if I’m standing all alone in the middle of a fucking explosion, everything flying all around me. And I’m just standing here. You ruined me. You fucking ruined me, Benton.”

“Now who’s saying ‘fuck’?”

She wipes her eyes. “Now you’ve made me cry.”

He moves closer to her, touches her. They sit on the couch and gaze out at the twin bell towers of Trinità dei Monti, at the Villa Medici on the edge of the Pincian Hill, and far beyond, Vatican City. She turns to him and is struck again by the clean lines of his face, his silver hair, and his long, lean elegance that is so incongruous with what he does.

“How is it now?” she asks him. “The way you feel, compared to back then? In the beginning.”

“Different.”

“Different sounds ominous.”

“Different because we’ve been through so much for so long. By now it’s hard for me to remember not knowing you. It’s hard for me to remember I was married before I met you. That was someone else, some FBI guy who played by the rules, had no passion, no life, until that morning I walked into your conference room, the important so-called profiler, called in to help out with homicides terrorizing your modest city. And there you were in your lab coat, setting down a huge stack of case files, shaking my hand. I thought you were the most remarkable woman I’d ever met, couldn’t take my eyes off of you. Still can’t.”

“Different.” She reminds him of what he said.

“What goes on between two people is different every day.”

“That’s okay as long as they feel the same way.”

“Do you?” he says. “Do you still feel the same way? Because if…”

“Because if what?”

“Would you?”

“Would I what? Want to do something about it?”

“Yes. For good.” He gets up and finds his jacket, reaches into a pocket, and comes back to the couch.

“For good, as opposed to for bad,” she says, distracted by what’s in his hand.

“I’m not being funny. I mean it.”

“So you don’t lose me to some foolish flirt?” She pulls him against her and holds him tight. She pushes her fingers through his hair.

“Maybe,” he says. “Take this, please.”

He opens his hand, and in his palm is a folded piece of paper.

“We’re passing notes in school,” she says, and she’s afraid to open it.

“Go on, go on. Don’t be a chicken.”

She opens it, and inside is a note that says, Will you? and then a ring. It’s an antique, a thin platinum band of diamonds.

“My great-grandmother’s,” he says, and he slides it over her finger, and it fits.

They kiss.

“If it’s because you’re jealous, that’s a terrible reason,” she says.

“I just happened to have it with me after it’s been in a safe for fifty years? I’m really asking you,” he says. “Please say you will.”

“And how do we manage? After all your talk about our separate lives?”

“For Christ’s sake, for once don’t be rational.”

“It’s very beautiful,” she says of the ring. “You better mean it, because I’m not giving it back.”

Chapter 3

Nine days later, Sunday. A ship’s horn is mournful out at sea.

Church steeples pierce the overcast dawn in Charleston, and a solitary bell begins to ring. Then a cluster of them joins in, clanging in a secret language that sounds the same around the world. With the bells comes the first light of dawn, and Scarpetta begins to stir about in her master suite, as she wryly refers to her living area on the second floor of her early-nineteenth-century carriage house. Compared to the somewhat sumptuous homes of her past, what she has is a very odd departure.

Her bedroom and study are combined, the space so crowded she can barely move without bumping into the antique chest of drawers or bookcases, or the long table draped with a black cloth that bears a microscope and slides, latex gloves, dust masks, camera equipment, and various crime scene necessities—all eccentric in their context. There are no closets, just side-by-side wardrobes lined with cedar, and from one of them she selects a charcoal skirt suit, a gray-and-white-striped silk blouse, and low-heeled black pumps.

Dressed for what promises to be a difficult day, she sits at her desk and looks out at the garden, watching it change in the varying shadows and light of morning. She logs into e-mail, checking to see if her investigator, Pete Marino, has sent her anything that might confound her plans for the day. No messages. To double-check, she calls him.

“Yeah.” He sounds groggy. In the background, an unfamiliar woman’s voice complains, “Shit. Now what?”

“You’re definitely coming in?” Scarpetta makes sure. “I got word late last night we have a body on the way from Beaufort, and I’m assuming you’ll be there to take care of it. Plus, we have that meeting this afternoon. I left you a message. You never called me back.”

“Yeah.”

The woman in the background says in the same complaining voice, “What’s she want this time?”

“I’m talking within the hour,” Scarpetta firmly tells Marino. “You need to be on your way now or there will be no one to let him in. Meddicks’ Funeral Home. I’m not familiar with it.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll be in around eleven to finish up what I can with the little boy.”

As if the Drew Martin case isn’t bad enough. Scarpetta’s first day back to work after she returned from Rome brought in another horrible case, the murder of a little boy whose name she still doesn’t know. He has moved into her mind because he has nowhere else to go, and when she least expects it, she sees his delicate face, emaciated body, and curly brown hair. And then the rest of it. What he looked like when she was done. After all these years, after thousands of cases, a part of her hates the necessity of what she must do to the dead because of what someone did to them first.

“Yeah.” That’s all Marino has to say.

“Petulant, rude…” she mutters as she makes her way downstairs. “I’m so goddamn tired of this.” Blowing out in exasperation.

In the kitchen, her heels are sharp on the terra-cotta tile floor that she spent days on her hands and knees laying in a herringbone pattern when she moved into the carriage house. She repainted the walls plain white to capture light from the garden, and restored the cypress ceiling beams that are original to the house. The kitchen—the most important room—is precisely arranged with the stainless-steel appliances, copper pots and pans (always polished as bright as new pennies), cutting boards, and handcrafted German cutlery of a serious chef. Her niece, Lucy, should be here any minute, and it pleases Scarpetta very much, but she’s curious. Lucy rarely calls and invites herself for breakfast.

Scarpetta picks out what she needs for egg-white omelets stuffed with ricotta cheese and white cap mushrooms sautéed in sherry and unfiltered olive oil. No bread, not even her flat griddle bread grilled on the terra-cotta slab—or testo—she hand-carried from Bologna back in the days when airport security didn’t consider cookware a weapon. Lucy is on an unforgiving diet—in training, as she puts it. For what, Scarpetta always asks. For life, Lucy always says. Preoccupied by whipping egg whites with a whisk and ruminating about what she must deal with today, she’s startled by an ominous thud against an upstairs window.

“Please, no,” she exclaims in dismay, setting down the whisk and running to the door.

She disarms the alarm and hurries out to the garden patio where a yellow finch flutters helplessly on old brick. She gently picks it up, and its head lolls from side to side, eyes half shut. She talks soothingly to it, strokes its silky feathers as it tries to right itself and fly, and its head lolls from side to side. It’s just stunned, will suddenly recover, and it falls over and flutters and its head lolls from side to side. Maybe it won’t die. Foolish wishful thinking for someone who knows better, and she carries the bird inside. In the locked bottom drawer of the kitchen desk is a locked metal box, and inside that, the bottle of chloroform.

She sits on the back brick steps and doesn’t get up as she listens to the distinctive roar of Lucy’s Ferrari.

It turns off King Street and parks on the shared driveway in front of the house, and then Lucy appears on the patio, an envelope in hand.

“Breakfast isn’t ready, not even coffee,” she says. “You’re sitting out here and your eyes are red.”

“Allergies,” Scarpetta says.

“The last time you blamed allergies—which you don’t have, by the way—was when a bird flew into a window. And you had a dirty trowel on the table just like that.” Lucy points to an old marble table in the garden, a trowel on top of it. Nearby, beneath a pittosporum, is freshly dug earth covered by broken pieces of pottery.

“A finch,” Scarpetta says.

Lucy sits next to her and says, “So it appears Benton’s not coming for the weekend. When he is, you always have a long grocery list on the counter.”

“Can’t get away from the hospital.” The small, shallow pond in the middle of the garden has Chinese jasmine and camellia petals floating in it like confetti.

Lucy picks up a loquat leaf knocked down from a recent rain, twirls it by the stem. “I hope that’s the only reason. You come back from Rome with your big news and what’s different? Nothing that I can tell. He’s there, you’re here. No plans to change that, right?”

“Suddenly you’re the relationship expert?”

“An expert on ones that go wrong.”

“You’re making me sorry I told anyone,” Scarpetta says.

“I’ve been there. It’s what happened with Janet. We started talking about commitment, about getting married when it finally became legal for perverts to have more rights than a dog. Suddenly, she couldn’t deal with being gay. And it was over before it began. And not in a nice way.”

“Not nice? How about unforgivable?”

“I should be the unforgiving one, not you,” Lucy says. “You weren’t there. You don’t know what it’s like to be there. I don’t want to talk about it.”

A small statue of an angel that watches over the pond. What it protects, Scarpetta has yet to discover. Certainly not birds. Maybe not anything. She gets up and brushes off the back of her skirt.

“Is this why you wanted to talk to me,” she says, “or did it just happen to pop into your mind while I was sitting here feeling awful because I had to euthanize another bird?”

“It’s not why I called you last night and said I need to see you,” Lucy says, still playing with the leaf.

Her hair, cherrywood-red with highlights of rose-gold, is clean and shiny and tucked behind her ears. She wears a black T-shirt that shows off a beautiful body earned by punishing workouts and good genetics. She’s going somewhere, Scarpetta has a suspicion, but she’s not going to ask. She sits down again.

“Dr. Self.” Lucy stares at the garden, the way people stare when they aren’t looking at anything except what’s bothering them.

It’s not what Scarpetta expected her to say. “What about her?”

“I told you to keep her close, always keep your enemies close,” Lucy says. “You didn’t pay attention. Haven’t cared that she disparages you every chance she gets because of that court case. Says you’re a liar and a professional sham. Just Google yourself on the Internet. I track her, forwarded her bullshit to you, and you barely look at it.”

“How could you possibly know whether I barely look at something?”

“I’m your system administrator. Your faithful IT. I know damn well how long you keep a file open. You could defend yourself,” Lucy says.

“From what?”

“Accusations that you manipulated the jury.”

“What court’s about. Manipulating the jury.”

“That you talking? Or am I sitting with a stranger?”

“If you’re hog-tied, tortured, and can hear the screams of your loved ones being brutalized and killed in another room, and you take your own life to escape their fate? That’s not a goddamn suicide, Lucy. That’s murder.”

“What about legally?”

“I really don’t care.”

“You sort of used to.”

“I sort of didn’t. You don’t know what’s been in my mind when I’ve worked cases all these years and often found myself the only advocate for the victims. Dr. Self wrongly hid behind her shield of confidentiality and didn’t divulge information that could have prevented profound suffering and death. She deserves worse than she got. Why are we talking about this? Why are you getting me upset?”

Lucy meets her eyes. “What do they say? Revenge is best served cold? She’s in contact with Marino again.”

“Oh, God. As if this past week hasn’t been hell enough. Has he completely lost his mind?”

“When you came back from Rome and spread the word, did you think he was going to be happy about it? Do you live in outer space?”

“Clearly, I must.”

“How can you not see it? Suddenly he goes out and gets drunk every night, gets a new trashy girlfriend. He’s really picked one this time. Or don’t you know? Shandy Snook, as in Snook’s Flamin’ Chips?”

“Flamin’ what? Who?”

“Greasy, oversalted potato chips flavored with jalapeño and red pepper sauce. Made her father a fortune. She moved here about a year ago. Met Marino at the Kick ’N Horse this past Monday night, and it was love at first sight.”

“He tell you all this?”

“Jess told me.”

Scarpetta shakes her head, has no idea who Jess is.

“Owns the Kick ’N Horse. Marino’s biker hangout, and I know you’ve heard him talk about it. She called me because she’s worried about him and his latest trailer-park paramour, worried about how out of control he’s getting. Jess says she’s never seen him like this.”

“How would Dr. Self know Marino’s e-mail address unless he contacted her first?” Scarpetta asks.

“Her personal e-mail address hasn’t changed since he was her patient in Florida. His has. So I think we can figure out who wrote who first. I can find out for sure. Not that I have the password for the personal e-mail account on his home computer, although minor inconveniences like that have never stopped me. I’d have to…”

“I know what you’d have to do.”

“Have physical access.”

“I know what you’d have to do, and I don’t want you to. Let’s don’t make this any worse than it is.”

“At least some of the e-mails he’s gotten from her are now on his office desktop for all the world to see,” Lucy says.

“That makes no sense.”

“Of course it does. To make you angry and jealous. Payback.”

“And you noticed them on his desktop because?”

“Because of the little emergency last night. When he called me and said he’d been notified that an alarm was going off, indicating the fridge was malfunctioning, and he wasn’t anywhere near the office and could I check. He said if I need to call the alarm company, the number’s on the list taped to his wall.”

“An alarm?” she says, baffled. “No one notified me.”

“Because it didn’t happen. I get there and everything’s status quo. The fridge is fine. I go into his office to get the number of the alarm company so I can check to be sure everything really is okay, and guess what’s on his desktop.”

“This is ridiculous. He’s acting like a child.”

“He’s no child, Aunt Kay. And you’re going to have to fire him one of these days.”

“And manage how? I can barely manage now. I’m already short-staffed, without a single eligible person on the horizon to hire.”

“This is just the beginning. He’s going to get worse,” Lucy says. “He’s not the person you once knew.”

“I don’t believe that, and I could never fire him.”

“You’re right,” Lucy says. “You couldn’t. It would be a divorce. He’s your husband. God knows you’ve spent a hell of a lot more time with him than you have with Benton.”

“He most assuredly isn’t my husband. Don’t goad me, please.”

Lucy picks up the envelope from the steps and hands it to her. “Six of them, all from her. Coincidentally, starting on this past Monday, your first day back at work from Rome. The same day we saw your ring and, great sleuths that we are, figured out it wasn’t from Cracker Jacks.”

“Any e-mails from Marino to Dr. Self?”

“He must not want you to see whatever he wrote. I recommend you bite on a stick.” Indicating the envelope and what’s inside it. “How is he? She misses him. Thinks about him. You’re a tyrant, a has-been, and he must be miserable working for you, and what can she do to help him?”

“Will he never learn?” Mostly, it’s depressing.

“You should have kept the news from him. How could you not know what it would do to him?”

Scarpetta notices the purple Mexican petunias climbing the north garden wall. She notices the lavender lantana. They look a bit parched.

“Well, aren’t you going to read the damn things?” Lucy indicates the envelope again.

“I’m not going to give them that power right now,” Scarpetta says. “I have more important things to deal with. That’s why I’m dressed in a damn suit and going into the damn office on a damn Sunday when I could be working in my garden or even going for a damn walk.”

“I ran a background check on the guy you’re meeting with this afternoon. Recently, he was the victim of an assault. No suspect. And related to this, he was charged with a misdemeanor for possession of marijuana. The charge was dropped. Beyond that, not even a speeding ticket. But I don’t think you should be alone with him.”

“What about the brutalized little boy all alone in my morgue? Since you haven’t said anything, I assume your computer searches are still coming up empty-handed.”

“It’s like he didn’t exist.”

“Well, he did. And what was done to him is one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. Maybe it’s time we go out on a limb.”

“And do what?”

“I’ve been thinking about statistical genetics.”

“I still can’t believe no one’s doing it,” Lucy says. “The technology’s there. It’s been there. It’s all so stupid. Alleles are shared among relatives, and, as is true of any other database, it’s all a function of probability.”

“A father, mother, sibling would have a higher score. And we’d see it and focus on it. I think we should try it.”

“If we do, what happens if it turns out this little kid was killed by a relative? We use statistical genetics in a criminal case, and what happens in court?” Lucy says.

“If we figure out who he is, then we’ll worry about court.”

Belmont, Massachusetts. Dr. Marilyn Self sits before a window in her room with a view.

Sloping lawns, forests and fruit trees, and old brick buildings harken back to a genteel era when the wealthy and famous could disappear from their lives, briefly or for as long as needed, or in some hopeless cases, forever, and be treated with the respect and pampering they deserved. At McLean Hospital, it’s perfectly normal to spot famous actors, musicians, athletes, and politicians strolling the cottage-style campus, designed by the famous landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, whose other famous projects include New York’s Central Park, the grounds of the U.S. Capitol, the Biltmore Estate, and Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair.

It isn’t perfectly normal to spot Dr. Marilyn Self. But she doesn’t intend to be here much longer, and when the public eventually finds out the truth, her reasons will be clear. To be safe and sequestered, and then, as has always been the story of her life, a destiny. What she calls a meant-to-be. She’d forgotten Benton Wesley works here.

Shocking Secret Experiments: Frankenstein.

Let’s see. She continues to script her first show when she returns to the air. While in seclusion to guard my life, I unwittingly and unwillingly became an eyewitness—worse, a guinea pig—to clandestine experiments and abuse. In the name of science. It is as Kurtz said in Heart of Darkness—“The horror! The horror!” I was subjected to a modern form of what was done in asylums during the darkest days of the darkest times when people who didn’t have the proper tools were considered subhuman and treated like…Treated like…? The right analogy will come to her later.

Dr. Self smiles as she imagines Marino’s ecstasy when he discovered she had written back to him. He probably believes that she (the most famous psychiatrist in the world) was happy to hear from him. He still believes she cares! She’s never cared. Even when he was her patient in her less prominent Florida days, she didn’t care. He was little more than a therapeutic amusement, and yes (she admits it), a dash of spice, because his adoration of her was almost as pathetic as his besotted sexual obsession with Scarpetta.

Poor, pathetic Scarpetta. Amazing what a few well-placed calls can do.

Her mind races. Her thoughts are nonstop inside her room at the Pavilion, where meals are catered and a concierge is available, should one wish to go to the theater or a Red Sox game or a health spa. The privileged patient at the Pavilion gets rather much whatever he or she wants, which in Dr. Self’s case is her own e-mail account and a room that happened to be occupied by another patient named Karen when Dr. Self was admitted nine days ago.

The unacceptable room assignment was, of course, remedied easily enough without administrative intervention or delay on Dr. Self’s first day when she entered Karen’s room before dawn and awakened her by gently blowing on her eyes.

“Oh!” Karen exclaimed in relief when she realized it was Dr. Self, not a rapist, hovering over her. “I was having a strange dream.”

“Here. I brought you coffee. You were sleeping like the dead. Perhaps you stared too long at the crystal light fixture last night?” Dr. Self looked up at the shadowy shape of the Victorian crystal light fixture above the bed.

“What!” Karen exclaimed in alarm, setting down her coffee on the antique bedside table.

“One must be most careful about staring at anything crystal. It can have a hypnotic effect and put you into a trancelike state. What was your dream?”

“Dr. Self, it was so real! I felt someone’s breath in my face and I was scared.”

“Do you have any idea who? Perhaps someone in your family? A family friend?”

“My father used to rub his whiskers against my face when I was little. I could feel his breath. How funny! I’m just now remembering that! Or maybe I’m imagining it. Sometimes I have a problem knowing what’s real.” Disappointed.

“Repressed memories, my dear,” Dr. Self said. “Don’t doubt your inner Self [said slowly]. It’s what I tell all my followers. Don’t doubt your what, Karen?”

“Inner Self.”

“That’s right. Your inner Self [said very slowly] knows the truth. Your inner Self knows what’s real.”

“A truth about my father? Something real I don’t remember?”

“An unbearable truth, an unthinkable reality you couldn’t face back then. You see, my dear, everything really is about sex. I can help you.”

“Please help me!”

Patiently, Dr. Self led her back in time, back to when she was seven, and with some insightful guidance navigated her back to the scene of her original psychic crime. Karen finally, for the first time in her pointless, used-up life, recounted her father crawling into bed with her and rubbing his exposed erect penis against her buttocks, his boozy breath in her face, and then a warm, wet stickiness all over her pajama bottoms. Dr. Self went on to direct poor Karen to the traumatic realization that what happened wasn’t an isolated incident, because sexual abuse, with rare exception, is repeated, and her mother must have been aware, based on the condition of little Karen’s pajamas and the bedcovers, meaning her mother turned a blind eye to what her husband was doing to their younger daughter.

“I remember my father bringing me hot chocolate in bed once and I spilled it,” Karen finally said. “I remember the warm stickiness on my pajama bottoms. Maybe that’s what I’m remembering and not…”

“Because it was safe to think it was hot chocolate. And then what followed?” No answer. “If you spilled it? Whose fault was it?”

“I spilled it. It was my fault,” Karen says, tearfully.

“Perhaps why you’ve abused alcohol and drugs ever since? Because you feel what happened is your fault?”

“Not ever since. I didn’t start drinking or smoking pot until I was fourteen. Oh, I don’t know! I don’t want to go into another trance, Dr. Self! I can’t bear the memories! Or if it wasn’t real, now I think it is!”

“It’s just as Pitres wrote in his Leçons cliniques sur l’hystérie et l’hypnotisme in 1891,” Dr. Self said as the woods and lawn beautifully materialized in the dawn—a view that soon would be hers. She explained delirium and hysteria, and intermittently looked up at the crystal light fixture over Karen’s bed.

“I can’t stay in this room!” Karen cried. “Won’t you please trade rooms with me?” she begged.

Lucious Meddick snaps a rubber band on his right wrist as he parks his shiny black hearse in the alley behind Dr. Scarpetta’s house.

Intended for horses, not huge vehicles, what kind of nonsense is this? His heart is still pounding. He’s a nervous wreck. Damn lucky he didn’t scrape against trees or the high brick wall that separates the alley and old houses along it from a public garden. What kind of ordeal is this to put him through, and already his brand-new hearse is feeling out of alignment, was pulling to one side as it bumped over pavers, kicking up dust and dead leaves. He climbs out, leaving the engine rumbling, noticing some old lady staring out her upstairs window at him. Lucious smiles at her, can’t help but think it won’t be long before the old bag needs his services.

He presses the intercom button on a formidable iron gate and announces, “Meddicks’.”

After a long pause, which requires him to make the announcement again, a woman’s strong voice sounds through the speaker: “Who is this?”

“Meddicks’ Funeral Home. I have a delivery….”

“You brought a delivery here?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Stay inside your vehicle. I’ll be right there.”

The southern charm of General Patton, Lucious thinks, somewhat humiliated and irked as he climbs back into his hearse. He rolls up his window and thinks of the stories he’s heard. At one time Dr. Scarpetta was as famous as Quincy, but something happened when she was the chief medical examiner…. He can’t remember where. She got fired or couldn’t take the pressure. A breakdown. A scandal. Maybe more than one of each. Then that highly publicized case in Florida a couple years back, some naked lady strung up from a rafter, tortured and tormented until she couldn’t take it anymore and hung herself with her own rope.

A patient of that TV talk-show shrink. He tries to remember. Maybe it was more than one person tortured and killed. He’s quite sure Dr. Scarpetta testified and was key in convincing the jury to find Dr. Self guilty of something. And in a number of articles he’s read since, she has referred to Dr. Scarpetta as “incompetent and biased,” a “closet lesbian,” and a “has-been.” Probably true. Most powerful women are like men or at least wish they were men, and when she started out, there weren’t many women in her profession. Now there must be thousands of them. Supply and demand, nothing special about her anymore, no-sirree-bob, women all over the place—young ones—getting ideas from TV and doing the same thing she does. That and all the other stuff said about her sure as heck would explain why she moved to the Lowcountry and works out of a tiny carriage house—a former stable, let’s be honest—which certainly isn’t what Lucious works out of, not hardly.

He lives in the upstairs of the funeral home the Meddick family has owned in Beaufort County for more than a hundred years. The three-story mansion on a former plantation still has the original slave cabins, sure isn’t some itty-bitty carriage house on an old narrow alleyway. Shocking, downright shocking. It’s one thing to embalm bodies and prepare them for burial in a professionally outfitted room in a mansion, quite another to do autopsies in a carriage house, especially if you’re dealing with floaters—greenies, he calls them—and others who are hard as hell to make presentable to families, no matter how much D-12 deodorant powder you use so they don’t stink up the chapel.

A woman appears behind her two sets of gates, and he begins to indulge in his favorite preoccupation, voyeurism, scrutinizing her through the dark-tinted side window. Metal clanks as she opens and shuts the first black gate, then the outer one—tall with flat, twisted bars centered by two J-curves that look like a heart. As if she has a heart, and by now he’s sure she doesn’t. She’s dressed in a power suit, has blond hair, and he calculates she’s five-foot-five, wears a size-eight skirt, a size-ten blouse. Lucious is darn near infallible when it comes to his deductions about what people would look like naked on an embalming table, jokes around about having what he calls “x-ray eyes.”

Since she so rudely ordered him not to get out of his vehicle, he doesn’t. She knocks on his dark window, and he starts to get flustered. His fingers twitch in his lap, try to rise to his mouth as if they have a will of their own, and he tells them no. He snaps himself hard with the rubber band around his wrist and tells his hands to stop it. He snaps the rubber band again and grips the wood-grain steering wheel to keep his hands out of trouble.

She knocks again.

He sucks on a wint-o-green Life Saver and rolls down his window. “You sure got a strange location to be hanging out your shingle,” he says with a big practiced smile.

“You’re in the wrong place,” she tells him, not so much as a good morning or nice to meet you. “What in the world are you doing here?”

“Wrong place, wrong time. That’s what keeps people like you and me in business,” Lucious replies with his toothy smile.

“How did you get this address?” she says in the same unfriendly tone. She seems like she’s in a real big hurry. “This isn’t my office. This certainly isn’t the morgue. I’m sorry for your inconvenience, but you need to leave right now.”

“I’m Lucious Meddick from Meddicks’ Funeral Home in Beaufort, right outside of Hilton Head.” He doesn’t shake her hand, doesn’t shake anybody’s hand if he can avoid it. “I guess you could call us the resort of funeral homes. Family-run, three brothers, including me. The joke is when you call for a Meddick, it doesn’t mean the person’s still alive. Get it?” He jerks his thumb toward the back of the hearse, says, “Died at home, probably a heart attack. Oriental lady, old as dirt. I reckon you’ve got all the information on her already. Your neighbor up there some kind of spy or something?” He looks up at the window.

“I talked to the coroner about this case last night,” Scarpetta says in the same tone. “How did you get this address?”

“The coroner…”

“He gave you this address? He knows where my office is….”

“Now, hold on. First off, I’m new when it comes to deliveries. Was bored to death sitting at a desk and dealing with bereft families, decided it was time to hit the road again.”

“We can’t have this conversation here.”

Oh, yes, they will, and he says, “So I bought me this 1998 V-twelve Cadillac, dual carburetors, dual exhaust, cast aluminum wheels, flagstaffs, violet beacon, and canyon black bier. Couldn’t be more fully loaded unless the fat lady in the circus was in it.”

“Mr. Meddick, Investigator Marino’s on his way to the morgue. I just called him.”

“Second of all, I’ve never delivered a body to you. So I had no idea where your office is until I looked it up.”

“I thought you said the coroner told you.”

“That’s not what he told me.”

“You really need to leave. I can’t have a hearse behind my house.”

“See, this Oriental lady’s family wants us to handle the funeral, so I told the coroner it may as well be me for transport. Anyway, I looked up your address.”

“Looked it up? Looked it up where? And why didn’t you call my death investigator?”

“I did, and he never bothered to call me back so I had to look up your location, like I said.” Lucious snaps the rubber band. “On the Internet. Listed with the Chamber of Commerce.” He cracks the sliver of Life Saver between his back teeth.

“This is an unlisted address and has never been on the Internet, nor has it ever been confused with my office—the morgue—and I’ve been here two years. You’re the first person to do this.”

“Now, don’t get huffy with me. I can’t help what’s on the Internet.” He snaps the rubber band. “But then if I’d been called earlier in the week when that little boy was found, I would have delivered his body and now we wouldn’t have this problem. You walked right past me at the scene and ignored me, and had you and me worked that one together, sure as shooting you would have given me the right address.” He snaps the rubber band, pissed off she’s not more respectful.

“Why were you at that scene if the coroner didn’t ask you to transport the body?” She’s getting very demanding, staring at him now like he’s a troublemaker.

“My motto is ‘Just Show Up.’ You know, like Nike’s ‘Just Do It.’ Well, mine’s ‘Just Show Up.’ Get it? Sometimes when you’re the first one to show up, that’s all it takes.”

He snaps the rubber band, and she stares pointedly at him doing it, then looks at the police scanner inside his hearse. He runs his tongue over the transparent plastic retainer he wears on his teeth to stop him from biting his nails. Snaps the rubber band around his wrist. Snaps it hard, like a whip, and it hurts like hell.

“Head to the morgue now, please.” She looks up at the neighbor looking down at them. “I’ll make sure Investigator Marino meets you.” She steps away from the hearse, suddenly noticing something at the back of it. She stoops to take a closer look. “The day just gets better,” she says, shaking her head.

He climbs out and can’t believe it. “Shit!” he exclaims. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”

Chapter 4

Coastal Forensic Pathology Associates, on the fringes of the College of Charleston.

The two-story brick building antedates the Civil War, and it slants a little, having shifted on its foundation during the earthquake of 1886. Or this is what the Realtor told Scarpetta when she bought the place for reasons Pete Marino still doesn’t understand.

There were nicer buildings, brand-new ones she could have afforded. But for some reason, she, Lucy, and Rose decided on a place that demanded more work than Marino had in mind when he took the job here. For months, they stripped away layers of paint and varnish, knocked out walls, replaced windows and slate tiles on the roof. They scavenged for salvage, most of it from funeral homes, hospitals, and restaurants, eventually ending up with a more-than-adequate morgue that includes a special ventilation system, chemical hoods, a backup generator, a walk-in cooler and a walk-in freezer, a decomposition room, surgical carts, gurneys. The walls and floor are sealed with epoxy paint that can be hosed down, and Lucy installed a wireless security and computer system as mysterious to Marino as the da Vinci Code.

“I mean, who the hell would want to break into this joint?” he says to Shandy Snook as he punches in a code that deactivates the alarm for the door leading from the bay into the morgue.

“I bet a lot of people would,” she says. “Let’s roam around.”

“Nope. Not down here.” He steers her to another alarmed door.

“I want to see a dead body or two.”

“Nope.”

“What you afraid of? Amazing how scared you are of her,” Shandy says, one creaking step at a time. “It’s like you’re her slave.”

Shandy says that constantly, and each time it angers Marino more. “If I was afraid of her, I wouldn’t let you in here, now would I, no matter how much you’ve been driving me crazy about it. There’s cameras all the hell over the place, so why the hell would I do this if I’m scared of her?”

She looks up at a camera, smiles, and waves.

“Quit it,” he says.

“Like, who’s gonna see it? No one here but us chickens, and no reason for the Big Chief to look at the tapes, right? Otherwise, we wouldn’t be in here, right? You’re afraid of her as shit. It makes me sick, a big man like you. Only reason you let me in is because that numbnut funeral-home guy had a flat tire. And the Big Chief won’t be in for a while, and nobody’s ever going to look at the tapes.” She waves at a camera again. “You wouldn’t have the guts to give me a tour if anybody might find out and tell the Big Chief.” She smiles and waves at another camera. “I look good on camera. You ever been on TV? My daddy used to be on TV all the time, made his own commercials. I’ve been in some of them, could probably make a career of being on TV, but who wants people staring at them all the time?”

“Besides you?” He swats her ass.

The offices are on the first floor, Marino’s the classiest he’s ever had, with heart-of-pine floors, chair rails, and fancy molding. “See, back in the eighteen hundreds,” he tells Shandy as they walk in, “my office was probably the dining room.”

“Our dining room in Charlotte was ten times this big,” she says, looking around and chewing gum.

She’s never been in his office, never inside the building. Marino wouldn’t dare ask permission, and Scarpetta wouldn’t give it. But after a late decadent night with Shandy, she ripped into him again about being Scarpetta’s slave and his mood turned spiteful. Then Scarpetta called to tell him Lucious Meddick had a flat tire and would be late, and then Shandy had to rag on him about that, too, go on and on about Marino’s rushing around for nothing and he may as well give her a tour like she’s been asking him to do all week. After all, she’s his girlfriend and should at least see where he works. So he told her to follow him on her motorcycle north on Meeting Street.

“These are genuine antiques,” he brags. “From junk shops. The Doc refinished them herself. Something, huh? The first time in my life I ever sat at a desk older than me.”

Shandy settles in the leather chair behind his desk, starts opening the dovetailed drawers.

“Me and Rose have spent a lot of time wandering around, trying to figure out what’s what, and pretty much decided her office was once the master bedroom. And the biggest space, the Doc’s office, was what they called the sitting room.”

“Kinda stupid.” Shandy stares inside a desk drawer. “How can you find anything in here? Looks like you just cram shit in your drawers because you can’t be bothered filing.”

“I know exactly where everything is. Got my own filing system, stuff sorted according to drawers. Sort of like the Dewey decibel system.”

“Well, where’s your card catalogue then, big fella?”

“Up here.” He taps his shiny shaved head.

“Don’t you have any good murder cases in here? Maybe some pictures?”

“Nope.”

She gets up, readjusts her leather pants. “So the Big Chief’s got the sitting room. I want to see it.”

“Nope.”

“I got a right to see where she works, since she seems to own you.”

“She don’t own me, and we’re not going in there. Nothing for you to see in there anyway, except books and a microscope.”

“Bet she’s got some good murder cases in that sitting room of hers.”

“Nope. We keep sensitive cases locked up. In another words, ones you’d think was good.”

“Every room’s for sitting, isn’t it? So why was it called a sitting room?” She won’t shut up about it. “That’s stupid.”

“Back in the old days, it was called a sitting room to differentiate it from the parlor,” Marino explains, proudly looking a round his office, at his certificates on the paneled walls, at the big dictionary he never uses, at all the other untouched reference books Scarpetta has passed down to him when she gets the newest revised editions. And, of course, his bowling trophies—all neatly arranged and brassy-bright on built-in shelves. “The parlor was this real formal room right inside the front door, where you stuck people you didn’t want staying around very long, whereas the opposite is true of the sitting room, which is the same thing as a living room.”

“Sounds to me like you’re glad she got this place. No matter how much you complain about it.”

“Not half bad for an old joint. I’d rather have something new.”

“Your old joint’s not half bad, either.” She grabs him until he aches. “Fact, feels new to me. Show me her office. Show me where the Big Chief works.” She grabs him again. “You having a hard time because of her or me?”

“Shut up,” he says, moving her hand away, annoyed by her puns.

“Show me where she works.”

“I told you no.”

“Then show me the morgue.”

“No can do.”

“Why? Because you’re so fucking scared of her? What’s she gonna do? Call the morgue police? Show it to me,” she demands.

He glances up at a tiny camera in a corner of the hallway. No one will see the tapes. Shandy’s right. Who would bother? No reason. He gets that feeling again—a cocktail of spitefulness, aggression, and vengefulness that makes him want to do something awful.

Dr. Self’s fingers click-click on her laptop, new e-mails constantly landing (agents, lawyers, business managers, network executives, and special patients and very select fans).

But nothing new from him. The Sandman. She can scarcely stand it. He wants her to think he’s done the unthinkable, to torment her with anxiety, with terror, by making her think the unthinkable. When she opened his last e-mail on that fated Friday during her midmorning break at the studio, what he’d sent to her, the last thing he sent, was life-altering. At least temporarily.

Don’t let it be true.

How foolish and gullible she was to answer him when he sent the first e-mail to her personal address last fall, but she was intrigued. How was it possible he got her personal and very, very private e-mail address? She had to know. She wrote him back and asked. He wouldn’t tell her. They began a correspondence. He is unusual, special. Home from Iraq, where he had been profoundly traumatized. Bearing in mind that he would make a fabulous guest on one of her shows, she developed a therapeutic relationship with him online, having no idea he might be capable of the unthinkable.

Please don’t let it be true.

If only she could undo it. If only she’d never answered him. If only she hadn’t tried to help him. He’s insane, a word she rarely uses. Her claim to fame is that everyone is capable of change. Not him. Not if he did the unthinkable.

Please don’t let it be true.

If he did the unthinkable, he’s a hideous human being beyond repair. The Sandman. What does that mean, and why didn’t she demand he tell her, threaten that if he refused she’d have no further contact with him?

Because she’s a psychiatrist. Psychiatrists don’t threaten their patients.

Please don’t let the unthinkable be true.

Whoever he really is, he can’t be helped by her or anyone else on earth, and now he may have done what she never expected. He may have done the unthinkable! If he has, there’s only one way for Dr. Self to save her-SELF. She decided this at her studio on a day she’ll never forget when she saw the photograph he sent her and realized she could be in serious danger for a multitude of reasons, and this necessitated her telling her producers she had a family emergency she couldn’t divulge. She would be off the air, hopefully no longer than several weeks. They would have to fill in with her usual replacement (a mildly entertaining psychologist who is no competition but deludes himself into thinking he is). Which is why she can’t afford to be away longer than several weeks. Everyone wants to take her place. Dr. Self called Paulo Maroni (said it was another referral and was put straight through) and (in disguise) climbed into a limousine (couldn’t possibly use one of her own drivers) and (still disguised) boarded a private jet, and secretly checked herself into McLean, where she is safe, is hidden, and, she hopes, will find out soon enough that the unthinkable hasn’t happened.

It’s all a sick ruse. He didn’t do it. Crazy people make false confessions all the time.

(What if it’s not?)

She has to consider the worst-case scenario: People will blame her. They’ll say it’s because of her that the madman fixated on Drew Martin after she won the U.S. Open last fall and appeared on Dr. Self’s shows. Incredible shows and exclusive interviews. What remarkable hours she and Drew shared on the air, talking about positive thinking, about empowering oneself with the proper tools, about actually making a decision to win or lose and how this enabled Drew, at barely sixteen, to pull off one of the biggest upsets in tennis history. Dr. Self’s award-winning series When to Win was a phenomenal success.

Her pulse picks up as she returns to the other side of horror. She opens the Sandman’s e-mail again, as if looking at it again, as if looking at it enough, will somehow change it. There’s no text message, only an attachment, a horrifying high-resolution image of Drew naked and sitting in a gray mosaic tile tub sunk deep into a terra-cotta floor. The water level is up to her waist, and when Dr. Self enlarges the image, as she has so many times, she can make out the goose bumps on Drew’s arms, and her blue lips and fingernails, suggesting the water running out of an old brass spout is cold. Her hair is wet, the expression on her pretty face hard to describe. Stunned? Pitiful? In shock? She looks drugged.

The Sandman told Dr. Self in earlier e-mails that it was routine to dunk naked prisoners in Iraq. Beat them, humiliate them, force them to urinate on each other. You do what you got to do, he wrote. After a while it’s normal, and he didn’t mind taking pictures. He didn’t mind much until that one thing he did, and he has never told her what that one thing is, and she’s convinced it began his transformation into a monster. Assuming he’s done the unthinkable, if what he sent her isn’t a ruse.

(Even if it’s a ruse, he’s a monster for doing this to her!)

She studies the image for any sign of fakery, enlarging and reducing it, reorienting it, staring. No, no, no, she continues reassuring herself. Of course it’s not real.

(What if it is?)

Her mind chews on itself. If she’s held accountable, her career will be shot out of the air. At least temporarily. Her millions of followers will say it’s her fault because she should have seen it coming, should never have discussed Drew in e-mails with this anonymous patient who calls himself the Sandman and who claimed to watch Drew on TV and read about her and thought she seemed like a sweet girl but unbearably isolated, and was sure he would meet her and she would love him and have no more pain.

If the public finds out, it will be Florida all over again, only worse. Blamed. Unfairly. At least temporarily.

“I saw Drew on your show and could feel her unbearable suffering,” the Sandman wrote. “She will thank me.”

Dr. Self stares at the image on her screen. She’ll be castigated for not calling the police immediately when she got the e-mail exactly nine days ago, and no one will accept her reasoning, which is perfectly logical: If what the Sandman sent is real, it’s too late for her to do anything about it; if it’s all a sick ruse (something put together with one of those photo-enhancement software packages), what’s the point in divulging it and perhaps putting the idea in some other deranged person’s head?

Darkly, her thoughts turn to Marino. To Benton.

To Scarpetta.

And Scarpetta walks into her mind.

Black suit with wide pale blue pinstripes and a matching blue blouse that makes her eyes even bluer. Her blond hair short; she wears very little makeup. Striking and strong, sitting straight but at ease in the witness stand, facing the jurors. They were mesmerized by her as she answered questions and explained. She never looked at her notes.

“But isn’t it true almost all hangings are suicidal, therefore suggesting it’s possible she actually took her own life?” One of Dr. Self’s attorneys paced the Florida courtroom.

She’d finished testifying, had been released as a witness, and was unable to resist watching the proceedings. Watching her. Scarpetta. Waiting for her to misspeak or make a mistake.

“Statistically, in modern times, it’s true that most hangings—as far as we know—are suicides,” Scarpetta replies to the jurors, refusing to look at Dr. Self’s attorney, answering him as if he’s talking over an intercom from some other room.

“‘As far as we know’? Are you saying, Mrs. Scarpetta, that…”

“Dr. Scarpetta.” Smiling at the jurors.

They smile back, riveted, so obviously enamored. Smitten with her while she hammers away at Dr. Self’s credibility and decency without anybody realizing it’s all manipulation and untruths. Oh, yes, lies. A murder, not a suicide. Dr. Self indirectly is to blame for murder! It isn’t her fault. She couldn’t have known those people would be murdered. Just because they disappeared from their home didn’t mean anything bad had happened to them.

And when Scarpetta called her with questions after finding a prescription bottle with Dr. Self’s name on it as the prescribing physician, she was completely right to refuse to discuss any patient or former patient. How could she have known that anyone would end up dead? Dead in an unspeakable way. It wasn’t her fault. Had it been, there would have been a criminal case, not just a lawsuit filed by greedy relatives. It wasn’t her fault, and Scarpetta deliberately made the jury believe otherwise.

(The courtroom scene fills her head.)

“You mean, you can’t determine whether a hanging was a suicide or a homicide?” Dr. Self’s attorney gets louder.

Scarpetta says, “Not without witnesses or circumstances that make it clear what happened….”

“Which was?”

“That a person couldn’t possibly have done this to himself.”

“Such as?”

“Such as being found hanging from a tall light post in a parking lot, no ladder. Hands tightly bound behind the back,” she says.

“A real case, or are you just making this up as you go along?” Snidely.

“Nineteen sixty-two. A lynching in Birmingham, Alabama,” she says to the jurors, seven of whom are black.

Dr. Self returns from the other side of horror and closes the image on her screen. She reaches for the phone and calls Benton Wesley’s office, and her instincts immediately tell her that the unfamiliar woman who answers is young, overestimates her importance, has an entitlement attitude, and therefore is probably from a wealthy family and was hired by the hospital as a favor and is a thorn in Benton’s side.

“And your first name, Dr. Self?” the woman asks, as if she doesn’t know who Dr. Self is, when everyone at the hospital knows.

“I’m hoping Dr. Wesley has finally gotten in,” Dr. Self says. “He’s expecting my call.”

“He won’t be in until about eleven.” As if Dr. Self is no one special. “May I ask what you’re calling about?”

“That’s quite all right. And you are? I don’t believe we’ve met. Last time I called, it was someone else.”

“No longer here.”

“Your name?”

“Jackie Minor. His new research assistant.” Her tone turns grand. She probably hasn’t finished her Ph.D. yet, assuming she ever will.

Dr. Self charmingly says, “Well, thank you very much, Jackie. And I assume you took the job so you could assist in his research study, what is it they call it? Dorsolateral Activation in Maternal Nagging?”

“DAMN?” Jackie says in surprise. “Who calls it that?”

“Why, I believe you just did,” Dr. Self says. “The acronym hadn’t occurred to me. You’re the one who just said it. You’re quite witty. Who was the great poet…Let me see if I can quote it: ‘Wit is the genius to perceive and the metaphor to express.’ Or something like that. Alexander Pope, I believe. We’ll meet soon enough. Very soon, Jackie. As you probably know, I’m part of the study. The one you call DAMN.”

“I knew it was someone important. Which is why Dr. Wesley ended up staying here this weekend and asked me to come in. All they put is VIP on the schedule.”

“It must be quite demanding working for him.”

“Absolutely.”

“With his worldwide reputation.”

“That’s why I wanted to be his RA. I’m interning to be a forensic psychologist.”

“Brava! Very good. Perhaps I’ll have you on my show someday.”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Well, you should, Jackie. I’ve been thinking quite a lot about expanding my horizons into The Other Side of Horror. The other side of crime that people don’t see—the criminal mind.”

“That’s all anybody’s interested in anymore,” Jackie agrees. “Just turn on the TV. Every single show is about crime.”

“So, I’m just at the brink of thinking about production consultants.”

“I’d be happy to accommodate a conversation with you about that anytime.”

“Have you interviewed a violent offender yet? Or perhaps sat in on one of Dr. Wesley’s interviews?”

“Not yet. But I absolutely will.”

“We’ll meet again, Dr. Minor. It is Dr. Minor?”

“As soon as I take my quals and find time to really focus on my dissertation. We’re already planning my hooding ceremony.”

“Of course you are. One of the finest moments in our lives.”

In centuries past, the stucco computer lab behind the old brick morgue was a quarters for horses and grooms.

Fortunately, before there was an architectural review board that could put a stop to it, the building was converted into a garage/storage facility that is now, as Lucy calls it, her make-do computer lab. It’s brick. It’s small. It’s minimal. Construction is well in the works on a massive facility on the other side of the Cooper River, where land is plentiful and zoning laws are toothless, as Lucy puts it. Her new forensic labs, when completed, will have every instrument and scientific capability imaginable. So far they manage fairly well with fingerprint analysis, toxicology, firearms, some trace evidence, and DNA. The Feds haven’t seen anything yet. She will put them to shame.

Inside her lab of old brick walls and fir-wood flooring is her computer domain, which is secured from the outside world by bullet-and hurricane-proof windows, the shades always drawn. Lucy sits before a work station that is connected to a sixty-four-gigabyte server with a chassis built of six U mountable racks. The kernel—or operating system interfacing the software with the hardware—is of her own design, built with the lowest assembly language so she could talk to the motherboard herself when she was creating her cyberworld—or what she calls the Infinity of Inner Space (IIS), pronounced IS, the prototype of which she sold for a staggering sum that’s indecent to mention. Lucy doesn’t talk about money.

Along the top of the walls are flat video screens constantly displaying every angle and sound captured by a wireless system of cameras and embedded microphones, and what she’s witnessing is unbelievable.

“You stupid son of a bitch,” she says loudly to the flat screen in front of her.

Marino is giving Shandy Snook a tour of the morgue, different angles of them on the screens, their voices as clear as if Lucy is with them.

Boston, the fifth floor of a mid-nineteenth-century brownstone on Beacon Street. Benton Wesley sits at his desk gazing out his window at a hot-air balloon drifting above the common, above Scotch elms as old as America. The white balloon slowly rises like a huge moon against the downtown skyline.

His cell phone rings. He puts on his wireless earpiece, says, “Wesley,” and hopes like hell it’s not some emergency that has to do with Dr. Self, the current hospital scourge, perhaps the most dangerous one ever.

“It’s me,” Lucy says in his ear. “Log on now. I’m conferencing you.”

Benton doesn’t ask why. He logs on to Lucy’s wireless network, which transfers video, audio, and data in real time. Her face fills the video screen of the laptop on his desk. She looks fresh and dynamically pretty, as usual, but her eyes are sparking with fury.

“Trying something different,” she says. “Connecting you to security access so you can see what I’m seeing right now. Okay? Your screen should split into four quadrants to pick up four angles or locations. Depending on what I choose. That should be enough for you to see what our so-called friend Marino is doing.”

“Got it,” Benton says as his screen splits, allowing him to view, simultaneously, four areas of Scarpetta’s building scanned by cameras.

The buzzer in the morgue bay.

In the upper-left corner of the screen, Marino and some young, sexy but cheap-looking woman in motorcycle leather are in the upstairs hallway of Scarpetta’s office, and he’s saying to her, “You stay right here until she gets signed in.”

“Why can’t I go with you? I’m not afraid.” Her voice—husky, a heavy southern accent—is transmitted clearly through the speakers on Benton’s desk.

“What the hell?” Benton says to Lucy over the phone.

“Just watch,” she comes back. “His latest girl wonder.”

“Since when?”

“Oh, let’s see. I think they started sleeping together this past Monday night. The same night they met and got drunk together.”

Marino and Shandy board the elevator, and another camera picks them up as he says to her, “Okay. But if he tells the Doc, I’m cooked.”

“Hickory-dick-or-y-Doc, she’s got you by the cock,” she says in a mocking singsong.

“We’ll get a gown to hide all your leather, but keep your mouth shut and don’t do nothing. Don’t freak out or do nothing, and I mean it.”

“It’s not like I’ve never seen a dead body before,” she says.

The elevator doors open and they step out.

“My father choked on a piece of steak right in front of me and my family,” Shandy says.

“The locker room’s back there. The one on the left.” Marino points.

“Left? Like when I’m facing which way?”

“The first one when you go around the corner. Grab a gown and do it quick!”

Shandy runs. In one section of the screen, Benton can see her inside the locker room—Scarpetta’s locker room—grabbing a blue gown out of a locker—Scarpetta’s gown and locker—and hastily putting the gown on—backward. Marino waits down the hall. She runs back to him, the gown untied and flapping.

Another door. This leading into the bay where Marino’s and Shandy’s motorcycles are parked in a corner, barricaded by traffic cones. A hearse is inside, the engine’s rumbling echoing off old brick walls. A funeral home attendant climbs out, lanky and gawky in a suit and tie as black and shiny as his hearse. He unfolds his skinny self like a stretcher, as if he’s turning into what he does for a living. Benton notices something weird about his hands, the way they’re clenched like claws.

“I’m Lucious Meddick.” He opens the tailgate. “We met the other day when they fished that dead little boy out of the marsh.” He pulls on a pair of latex gloves, and Lucy zooms in on him. Benton notices a plastic orthodontic retainer on his teeth, and a rubber band around his right wrist.

“Closer on his hands,” Benton tells Lucy.

She zooms in more as Marino says, as if he can’t stand the man, “Yeah, I remember.”

Benton notices Lucious Meddick’s raw fingertips, says to Lucy, “Severe nail biting. A form of self-mutilation.”

“Anything new on that one?” Lucious is asking about the murdered little boy who Benton knows is still unidentified in the morgue.

“None of your business,” Marino says. “If it was for public semination, it would be in the news.”

“Jesus,” Lucy says in Benton’s ear. “He sounds like Tony Soprano.”

“Looks like you lost a hubcap.” Marino points to the back left tire of the hearse.

“It’s a spare.” Lucious is snippy about it.

“Kinda ruins the effect, don’t it,” Marino says. “Tricked out with all that shine, then a wheel with ugly lug nuts.”

Lucious huffily opens the tailgate and slides the stretcher over rollers in back of the hearse. Collapsible aluminum legs clack open and lock in place. Marino doesn’t offer assistance as Lucious rolls the stretcher and its black-pouched body up the ramp, bangs it against the door frame, cusses.

Marino winks at Shandy, who looks bizarre in her open surgical gown and black leather motorcycle boots. Lucious impatiently abandons the pouched body in the middle of the hall, snaps the rubber band on his wrist, and says in an irritable raised voice, “Got to take care of her paperwork.”

“Keep it down,” Marino says. “You might wake somebody up.”

“I don’t got time for your comedy club.” Lucious starts to walk off.

“You ain’t going nowhere until you help me transfer her from your stretcher to one of our state-of-the-art gurneys.”

“Showing off.” Lucy’s voice sounds in Benton’s earpiece. “Trying to impress his potato-chip tramp.”

Marino rolls a gurney out of the cooler, scratched up and rather bandy-legged, one of the wheels slightly cockeyed like a bedraggled grocery store buggy. He and an angry Lucious lift the pouched body from the stretcher, place it on the gurney.

“That lady boss of yours is a piece of work,” Lucious says. “The b-word comes to mind.”

“Nobody asked your opinion. You hear anybody ask his opinion?” To Shandy.

She stares at the pouch, as if she didn’t hear him.

“It’s not my fault she’s got her addresses mixed up on the Internet. She acted like it was my problem showing up, trying to do my job. Not that I can’t get along with anybody. You got a particular funeral home you recommend to your clients?”

“Get a fucking ad in the Yellow Pages.”

Lucious heads to the small morgue office, walking fast, hardly bending his knees, reminding Benton of a pair of scissors.

One quadrant of the screen shows Lucious inside the morgue office, fussing with paperwork, opening drawers, rummaging, finding a pen.

Another quadrant of the screen shows Marino saying to Shandy, “Didn’t anyone know the Hinelick maneuver?”

“I’ll learn anything, baby,” she says. “Any maneuver you want to show me.”

“Seriously. When your father was choking on—” Marino starts to explain.

“We thought he was having a heart attack or a stroke or a seizure,” she interrupts him. “It was so awful, grabbing himself, falling to the floor and cracking his head, his face turning blue. No one knew what to do, had no idea he was choking. Even if we had, we couldn’t have done anything except what we did, call nine-one-one.” She suddenly looks as if she might start crying.

“Sorry to tell you, but you could have done something,” Marino says. “I’m gonna show you. Here, turn around.”

Done with his paperwork, Lucious hurries out of the morgue office, walks right past Marino and Shandy. They pay him no mind as he enters the autopsy suite unattended. Marino wraps his huge arms around her waist, makes a fist, his thumb against her upper abdomen, just above her navel. He grasps his fist with his other hand and gives a gentle upward thrust, just enough to show her. He slides his hands up and fondles her.

“Good God,” Lucy says in Benton’s ear. “He’s got a hard-on in the fucking morgue.”

In the autopsy suite, the camera picks up Lucious walking to the large black log on a countertop, the Book of the Dead, as Rose politely calls it. He starts signing in the body with the pen he took from the morgue office desk.

“He’s not supposed to do that.” Lucy’s voice in Benton’s ear. “Only Aunt Kay is supposed to touch that log. It’s a legal document.”

Shandy says to Marino, “See, it’s not hard being in here. Well, maybe it is.” Reaching back, grabbing him. “You sure know how to cheer a girl up. And I do mean up. Whoa!”

Benton says to Lucy, “This is unbelievable.”

Shandy turns around in Marino’s arms and kisses him—kissing him on the mouth right there in the morgue—and for an instant, Benton thinks they might have sex in the hallway.

Then, “Here, you try it on me,” Marino says.

In another quadrant of his screen, Benton watches Lucious thumbing through the morgue log.

When Marino turns around, his arousal is apparent. Shandy can barely get her arms all the way around him, starts to laugh. He puts his huge hands over hers, helps her push, says, “No kidding. You ever see me choking, you push just like this. Hard!” He shows her. “Point is to force the air out so whatever’s caught in there flies out, too.” She slides her hands down and grabs him again, and he pushes her away and turns his back to Lucious as he emerges from the autopsy suite.

“She figured out anything about that dead little boy?” Lucious snaps the rubber band around his wrist. “Well, I guess not, since he’s entered in the Dead Log as ‘undetermined.’”

“He was undetermined when he was brought in. What you been doing, snooping through the book?” Marino looks ridiculous, his back to Lucious.

“Obviously, she can’t handle such a complicated case. Too bad I didn’t bring him in here. I could have been of assistance. I know more about the human body than any doctor.” Lucious moves to one side and stares down in the direction of Marino’s crotch. “Well, hello,” he says.

“You don’t know shit and can shut up about that dead boy,” Marino says nastily. “And you can shut up about the Doc. And you can get the hell out of here.”

“You mean that little boy from the other day?” Shandy says.

Lucious rattles off with his stretcher, leaving the body he just delivered on the gurney in the middle of the hall, in front of the stainless-steel cooler door. Marino opens it and pushes the uncooperative gurney inside, his arousal still obvious.

“Christ,” Benton says to Lucy.

“He on Viagra or something?” Her voice in his ear.

“Why the hell don’t you get a new cart or whatever you call that thing?” Shandy says.

“The Doc don’t waste money.”

“So she’s cheap, too. Bet she doesn’t pay you shit.”

“If we need something, she gets it, but she don’t waste money. Not like Lucy, who could buy China.”

“You always stick up for the Big Chief, don’t you? But not like you stick up for me, baby.” Shandy fondles him.

“I think I’m going to throw up.” Lucy’s voice.

And Shandy walks inside the cooler to get a good look at what’s inside. The cold air blowing is audible through Benton’s speakers.

And a camera in the bay picks up Lucious sliding behind the wheel of his hearse.

“She a murder?” Shandy asks about the latest delivery, then looks at another pouched body in a corner. “I want to know about the kid.”

Lucious rumbles away in his hearse, the bay door loudly clanking shut behind him, sounding like a car wreck.

“Natural causes,” Marino says. “Old Oriental woman. Eighty-five or something.”

“How come she got sent here if she died of natural causes?”

“Because the coroner wanted to send her in. Why? Hell if I know. The Doc just said for me to be here. Hell if I know. Sounds like a cut-and-dried heart attack to me. I’m getting a whiff of something.” He makes a face.

“Let’s look,” Shandy says. “Come on. Just a quick peek.”

Benton watches them on-screen, watches Marino unzip the pouch and Shandy recoil in disgust, jump back, cover her nose and mouth.

“What you deserve.” Lucy’s voice as she zooms in on the body: decomposing, bloated by gases, the abdomen turning green. Benton knows that odor all too well, a putrid stench unlike any other that clings to the air and the roof of your mouth.

“Shit,” Marino complains, zipping up the pouch. “She’s probably been lying around for days and the damn Beaufort County coroner didn’t want to fool with her. Got a noseful, did you?” He laughs at Shandy. “And you thought my job was a piece of cake.”

Shandy moves closer to the small black pouched body parked in a corner all by itself. She stands very still, staring down at it.

“Don’t do it.” Lucy sounds in Benton’s ear, but she’s talking to Marino’s image on the screen.

“Bet I knows what’s in this little bag,” Shandy says, and it’s hard to hear her.

Marino steps outside the cooler. “Out, Shandy. Now.”

“Whatcha gonna do? Lock me in here? Come on, Pete. Open up this little bag. I know it’s that dead boy you and that funeral creep were just talking about. I heard all about that boy on the news. So he’s still here. How come? Poor little thing all alone and cold in a refrigerator.”

“He’s lost it,” Benton says. “Completely lost it.”

“You don’t want to see that,” Marino says to her, walking back inside the cooler.

“Why not? That little boy found at Hilton Head. The one all over the news,” she repeats herself. “I knew it. Why’s he still here? They know who did it?” She holds her position by the little black pouch on its gurney.

“We don’t know a damn thing. That’s why he’s still here. Come on.” He motions to her, and it’s difficult to hear both of them.

“Let me see him.”

“Don’t do it.” Lucy’s voice, talking to Marino’s image on the screen. “Don’t fuck yourself, Marino.”

“You don’t want to,” he says to Shandy.

“I can handle it. I got a right to see him, because you’re not supposed to have secrets. That’s our rule. So prove right now you don’t keep secrets from me.” She can’t take her eyes off the pouch.

“Nope. With stuff like this, the secret rule don’t count.”

“Oh, yes it does. Better hurry, I’m turning as cold as a dead body in here.”

“Because if the Doc ever found out…”

“There you go again. Scared of her like she fucking owns you. What’s so bad you don’t think I can handle it?” Shandy says furiously, almost screaming as she holds herself because of the cold. “I bet he doesn’t stink as bad as that old lady.”

“He’s been skinned and his eyeballs are gone,” Marino tells her.

“Oh, no,” Benton says, rubbing his face.

Shandy exclaims, “Don’t mess with me! Don’t you dare joke with me! You let me see him right now! I’m sick and tired of you always turning into a damn wimp when she tells you something!”

“Nothing funny about it, you got that right. What goes on in this place ain’t no joke. I keep trying to tell you that. You got no idea what I deal with.”

“Well, isn’t that something. To think your Big Chief would do something like that. Skinning a little kid and cutting out his eyes. You always said she treats the dead real nice.” Hatefully. “Sounds like a Nazi to me. They used to skin people and make lampshades.”

“Sometimes the only way you can tell if darkish or reddish areas are really bruises is to look at the underside of the skin so you can make sure what you’re looking at is broken blood vessels—in other words, bruises or what we call contusions—instead of it being from livor mortis,” Marino pontificates.

“This is unreal.” Lucy sounds in Benton’s ear. “So now he’s the chief medical examiner.”

“Not unreal,” Benton says. “Massively insecure. Threatened. Resentful. Overcompensating and decompensating. I don’t know what’s going on with him.”

“You and Aunt Kay are what’s going on with him.”

“From what?” Shandy stares at the little black pouch.

“From when your circulation stops, and the blood settles and can make your skin look red in places. Can look a whole lot like fresh bruises. And there can be other reasons for things that look like injuries, what we call postmortem artifacts. It’s complicated,” Marino says with self-importance. “So to make sure, you peel back the skin, you know, with a scalpel”—he makes swift cutting motions in the air—“to see the underside of it, and in this case, they were bruises, all right. The little guy’s covered with them from head to toe.”

“But why would you take out his eyeballs?”

“Further study, looking for more hemorrhages like you find in shaking baby syndrome, things like that. Same with his brain. It’s fixed in formalin in a bucket, not here but at a medical school where they do special studies.”

“Oh my God. His brain’s in a bucket?”

“It’s just what we do. Fixing it in this chemical so it don’t decompose and can be looked at better. Sort of like embalming.”

“You sure know a lot. You should be the doctor around here, not her. Let me look.”

All this inside the cooler, the door wide open.

“I’ve been doing this practically longer than you’re old,” Marino says. “Sure, I could’ve been a doctor, but who the hell wants to go to school that long? Who’d want to be her, either? She’s got no life. Nobody but dead people.”

“I want to see him,” Shandy demands.

“Damn, don’t know what it is,” Marino says. “Can’t be inside a damn cooler without dying for a cigarette.”

She digs in a pocket of the leather vest under her gown, pulls out a pack, a lighter. “I can’t believe someone would do that to a little kid. I have to see him. I’m here, so show me.” She lights up two cigarettes and they smoke.

“Manipulative, borderline,” Benton says. “He’s picked real trouble this time.”

Marino rolls out the tray, rolls it out of the cooler.

Unzipping the pouch. Plastic rustling. Lucy zooms in tight on Shandy blowing out smoke, staring wide-eyed at the dead little boy.

An emaciated little body sliced in neat straight lines from chin to genitals, from shoulders to hands, from hips to toes, his chest open like a hollowed-out watermelon. His organs are gone. His skin is reflected back from his body and spread out in flaps that reveal scores of dark purple hemorrhages of varying ages and severity, and tears and fractures to cartilage and bone. His eyes are empty holes, and through them is the inside of his skull.

Shandy screams, “I hate that woman! I hate her! How could she do this to him! Gutted and skinned like a shot deer! How can you work for that psycho bitch!”

“Calm down. Quit yelling.” Marino zips up the pouch and rolls it back inside the cooler. He shuts the door. “I warned you. There’s some things people don’t need to see. They can get a post-trauma stress condition from stuff like this.”

“Now I’ll see him forever in my head, looking just like that. Sicko bitch. Damn Nazi.”

“You keep your mouth shut about this, you hear me?” Marino says.

“How can you work for someone like that?”

“Shut up. I mean it,” Marino says. “I helped with the autopsy, and I’m sure as hell no Nazi. That’s what happens. People get fucked over twice when they get murdered.” He takes Shandy’s surgical gown, hastily folds it. “That little kid was probably murdered the day he was born. No one giving a rat’s ass about him, and this is the result.”

“What do you know about life? You people think you know everything about everyone when all you see is what’s left when you cut them up like a butcher.”

“You’re the one who wanted to come in here.” Marino is getting angry. “So shut up about it, and don’t call me a butcher.”

He leaves Shandy in the hallway, returns the gown to Scarpetta’s locker. He sets the alarm. The camera in the bay captures them, the huge bay door screeching and clanking up.

Lucy’s voice. Benton will have to be the one to inform Scarpetta about Marino’s tour, about a betrayal that could destroy her if the media ever found out. Lucy’s headed to the airport, won’t be back until late tomorrow. Benton doesn’t ask. He’s pretty sure she already knows, even if she hasn’t told him. Then she tells him about Dr. Self, about her e-mails to Marino.

Benton doesn’t comment. He can’t. On his video screen, Marino and Shandy Snook ride off on their motorcycles.

Chapter 5

The clatter of metal wheels on tile.

The walk-in freezer door opens with a reluctant suck. Scarpetta is impervious to the frigid air, the stench of frozen death as she rolls in the steel cart bearing the small black body bag. Attached to the zipper pull is a toe tag, and written on it in black ink: Unknown, with the date, 4/30/07, and the signature of the funeral home attendant who transported the body. In the morgue log Scarpetta entered Unknown as a male, five to ten years old, a homicide from Hilton Head Island, a two-hour drive from Charleston. His race is mixed: thirty-four percent sub-Saharan African and sixty-six percent European.

Entries into the log are always made by her, and she is outraged by what she discovered when she arrived hours earlier and found this morning’s case had already been entered, presumably by Lucious Meddick. Unbelievably, he took it upon himself to decide the elderly woman he transported is a natural death caused by cardiac and respiratory arrest. The presumptuous moron. Everybody dies of cardiac or respiratory arrest. Whether shot or hit by a car or a baseball bat, death occurs when the heart and lungs quit. He had no right or reason to conclude the death is natural. She hasn’t done the autopsy yet, and it isn’t his responsibility or legal jurisdiction to determine a goddamn thing. He’s not a forensic pathologist. He should never have touched the morgue log. She can’t fathom why Marino would have allowed him to enter the autopsy suite and then left him unattended.

Her breath fogs out as she removes a clipboard from a cart and fills in Unknown’s information and the time and date. Her frustration is as palpable as the cold. Despite her obsessive efforts, she doesn’t know where the little boy died, although she suspects it isn’t far from where he was found. She doesn’t know his exact age. She doesn’t know how his killer transported the body but hypothesizes it was by boat. No witnesses have come forward, and the only trace evidence she recovered is white cotton fibers assumed to be from the sheet the Beaufort County coroner wrapped him in before zipping him inside a pouch.

The sand and salt and bits of shells and plant debris in the boy’s orifices and on his skin are indigenous to the marshland where his nude decomposing body was facedown in pluff mud and saw grass. After days of using every procedure she can conjure up to make his body talk to her, he has offered but a few painful revelations. His tubular stomach and emaciation say he was starved for weeks, possibly months. Mildly deformed nails indicate new growth of different ages and suggest repeated blunt-force trauma or some other type of torture to his tiny fingers and toes. Subtle reddish patterns all over his body tattle to her that he was brutally beaten, most recently with a wide belt that had a large square buckle. Incisions, a reflecting back of skin, and microscopic analysis revealed hemorrhaging into soft tissue from the crown of his head to the soles of his little feet. He died of internal exsanguination—bled to death without externally shedding a drop—a metaphor, it seems, for his invisible and miserable life.

She has preserved sections of his organs and injuries in jars of formalin and sent off his brain and eyes for special examination. She’s taken hundreds of photographs, and notified Interpol in the event he’s been reported missing in another country. His fingerprints and footprints have been entered into the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) and his DNA profile into the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS)—all of his information entered into the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children database. Of course, now Lucy is searching the Deep Web. So far, there are no leads, no matches, suggesting he wasn’t abducted, wasn’t lost, didn’t run away and end up in the hands of a sadistic stranger. Most likely he was beaten to death by a parent or some other relative, guardian, or so-called caregiver who left his body in a remote area to hide his or her crime. It happens all the time.

Scarpetta can do nothing more for him medically or scientifically, but she won’t give him up. There will be no defleshing and packing his bones in a box—no pauper’s grave. Until he’s identified, he will stay with her, transferred from the cooler to a time capsule of sorts, a polyurethane insulated freezer chilled to minus-sixty-five degrees centigrade. If need be, he can stay with her for years. She shuts the freezer’s heavy steel door and walks out into the bright deodorized hallway, untying her blue surgical gown and pulling off her gloves. Her disposable shoe covers make a quick, quiet whish on the spotless tile floor.

From her room with a view, Dr. Self talks to Jackie Minor again, since Benton has yet to bother returning her call and it is now almost two p.m.

“He’s well aware we need to take care of this. Why do you think he’s here this weekend and asked you to come in? Do you get overtime, by the way?” Dr. Self doesn’t show her ire.

“I knew there was a VIP all of a sudden. That’s all any of us are usually told when it’s somebody famous. We get a lot of famous people here. How did you find out about the study?” Jackie inquires. “I’m supposed to ask because I’m supposed to keep track so we can figure out what’s the most effective form of advertising. You know, newspaper and radio ads, posting notices, word of mouth.”

“The recruitment notice in the admissions building. I saw it first thing when I checked in what now seems a very long time ago. And it occurred to me, why not? I’ve decided to leave soon, very soon. It’s a pity your weekend is ruined,” Dr. Self says.

“Truth be told, it’s a good thing. It’s hard finding volunteers who meet the criteria, especially the normals. Such a waste. At least two out of three turn out not to be normal. But think about it. If you were normal, why would you want to come here and…”

“Be part of a science project.” Dr. Self finishes Jackie’s lamebrain thought. “I don’t believe you can sign up as a normal.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean to say you’re not…”

“I’m always open to learning something new, and I have an unusual reason for being here,” Dr. Self says. “You’re aware of how confidential this is.”

“I heard you’re sort of hiding here for security reasons.”

“Did Dr. Wesley tell you that?”

“A rumor. And confidentiality is a given, according to HIPAA, which we have to abide by. It must be safe for you to leave, if you are.”

“One can only hope.”

“Are you aware of the details of the study?”

“What I vaguely recall from the recruitment notice,” Dr. Self says.

“Dr. Wesley hasn’t gone over it with you?”

“He was just notified Friday when I informed Dr. Maroni, who’s in Italy, that I wanted to volunteer for the study, but it would have to be taken care of immediately because I’ve decided to check out. I’m sure Dr. Wesley intends to brief me thoroughly. I don’t know why he hasn’t called. Perhaps he hasn’t gotten your message yet.”

“I told him, but he’s a very busy, important person. I know he has to tape the VIP’s mother today, meaning your mother. So I’m assuming he plans to do that first. Then I’m sure he’ll talk to you.”

“It must be so hard on his personal life. These studies and whatnot that keep him here on weekends. I suppose he must have a lover. A handsome, accomplished man like him certainly wouldn’t be alone.”

“He has someone down south. In fact, her niece was here about a month ago.”

“How interesting,” Dr. Self says.

“She came here for a scan. Lucy. Some secret agent type, or tries to look like one anyway. I know she’s a computer entrepreneur, is friends with Josh.”

“Involved in law enforcement,” Dr. Self ponders. “Some type of secret operative, highly technically trained. And independently wealthy, I presume. Fascinating.”

“She didn’t even speak to me other than to introduce herself as Lucy and shake my hand and say hi and chat. She hung out with Josh, then was in Dr. Wesley’s office for quite a while. With the door shut.”

“What did you think of her?”

“She’s really stuck on herself. Of course, I didn’t spend time with her. She was hanging out with Dr. Wesley. With the door shut.” She makes that point again.

Jealous. How perfect. “How nice,” Dr. Self says. “They must be very close. She sounds very unusual. Is she pretty?”

“I thought she was rather masculine, if you get my drift. Dressed all in black and kind of muscular. A firm handshake like a guy. And she looked right into my eyes with this intense gaze. Like her eyes were these green laser beams. It made me very uncomfortable. I didn’t want to be alone with her, now that I think about it. Women like that…”

“I hear you saying she was attracted to you and wanted sex with you before she flew back on, what? A private jet, let me guess,” Dr. Self says. “Where did you say she lives?”

“Charleston. Like her aunt. I think she did want sex with me. My God. How could I not have realized that at the time, when she shook my hand and looked into my eyes. And oh, yes. She asked me if I had long hours, as if maybe she wanted to know what time I got off work. She asked me where I’m from. She got personal. I just didn’t see it at the time.”

“Perhaps because you were afraid to see it, Jackie. She does sound very appealing and charismatic, the sort who almost hypnotically lures a straight woman into bed, and after an extremely erotic experience…?” A pause. “You do understand why two women having sex, even if one of them is straight or both are, isn’t at all uncommon.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Do you read Freud?”

“I’ve never felt an attraction to another woman. Not even my roommate in college. And we lived together. If there was that latent predisposition, a lot more would have happened.”

“Everything is about sex, Jackie. Sexual desire goes all the way back to infancy. What is it that both male and female infants get, that later is denied the female?”

“I don’t know.”

“The nurturing at mother’s breast.”

“I don’t want that kind of nurturing and don’t remember anything about it and only care about boobs because men like them. They’re important for that reason, and I only notice them for that reason. I think I was bottle-fed, anyway.”

“I do agree with you, though,” Dr. Self says. “Rather odd she came all the way up here for a scan. I certainly hope there’s nothing wrong with her.”

“I just know she comes in a couple times a year.”

“A couple times a year?”

“That’s what one of the techs said.”

“How tragic if there’s something wrong with her. You and I both know it isn’t routine for someone to have brain scans several times a year. If at all. What else do I need to know about my scan?”

“Has anyone bothered to ask if you have a problem going into the magnet?” Jackie asks with the seriousness of an expert.

“A problem?”

“You know. If it might cause you a problem.”

“Not unless after it’s over I can no longer tell north from south. Another very astute point you’re making, though. I do have to wonder what it does to people. I’m not sure that’s really been determined. MRI hasn’t been commonly used all that long, now has it.”

“The study uses fMRI. Functional MRI, so we can watch your brain working while you listen to the tape.”

“Yes, the tape. My mother will so enjoy making that tape. Now, what else do I have to look forward to?”

“The protocol is to start with the SCID. Let me explain, the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-Three-R.”

“I’m quite familiar. Especially with DSM-Four. The latest revision.”

“Sometimes Dr. Wesley lets me do the SCID. We can’t scan you until we get that out of the way, and it can be a lengthy process going through all those questions.”

“I’ll discuss that when I see him today. And if it’s appropriate, inquire about Lucy. No, I suppose I shouldn’t. But I do hope nothing’s wrong with her. Especially since it seems she’s very special to him.”

“He’s booked up with other patients, but I could probably find time to SCID you.”

“Thank you, Jackie. I’ll talk to him about it the minute he calls me. And have there been averse reactions to his fascinating study? And who funded the grant? I believe you said your father?”

“We’ve had a few people who were claustrophobic. So we couldn’t scan them after all that work. Imagine,” Jackie says, “I go to all the trouble to SCID them and tape their mothers…”

“Tape them over the phone, I presume. You’ve done quite a lot in one short week.”

“Much cheaper and more efficient. No need to see these people in person. It’s just a standard format, what you need them to talk about on tape. I’m not allowed to discuss grant funding, but my father’s into philanthropy.”

“The new show I’m developing. Did I mention I’m just on the brink of thinking about production consultants? You indicated Lucy is somehow involved with law enforcement? Or a special agent? She might be another one to consider. Unless there’s something wrong with her. And she’s had her brain scanned here how many times?”

“I’m sorry to say I’ve not watched your show much. Because of my schedule, I can only watch TV at night.”

“My shows are aired repeatedly. Morning, noon, and night.”

“Scientifically exploring the criminal mind and its behavior versus interviewing people who wear guns and just go around arresting them is really the right idea. Your audience would love it,” Jackie says. “Love it a lot more than most of what’s on these talk shows. I think getting an expert to interview one of these sexually violent psychopathic killers on your show would make your ratings go up.”

“From which I am to infer that a psychopath who rapes or sexually abuses and kills might not necessarily be violent. That is an extraordinarily original concept, Jackie, which next makes me wonder if, for example, only sociopathic sexual murderers are also violent. And following that hypothesis, we next have to ask what?”

“Well…”

“Well, we have to ask where compulsive sexual homicide fits. Or is it all about vernacular? I say potato, you say spud.”

“Well…”

“How much Freud have you read, and do you pay attention to your dreams? You should write them down, keep a journal by your bed.”

“Of course, in classes, well, not the journal and dreams. I didn’t do that in classes,” Jackie says. “In real life, nobody’s into Freud anymore.”

Eight-thirty p.m., Rome time. Seagulls swoop and cry in the night. They look like large white bats.

In other cities near the coast, the gulls are a nuisance during the day but vanish after dark. Certainly this is true in America, where Captain Poma has spent considerable time. As a young boy, he frequented foreign lands with his family. He was to become a man of the world who spoke other languages fluently and had impeccable manners and an excellent education. He was to amount to something, his parents said. He watches two fat, snowy gulls on a windowsill near his table, eyeing him. Maybe it’s the beluga caviar they want.

“I ask you where she is,” he says in Italian. “And your answer is to inform me of a man I should know about? But you won’t give me details? Now I’m extremely frustrated.”

“What I said was the following,” replies Dr. Paulo Maroni, who has known the captain for years. “Dr. Self had Drew Martin on her show, as you know. Weeks later, Dr. Self began getting e-mails from someone very disturbed. I know this, because she referred him to me.”

“Paulo, please. I need details about this disturbed person.”

“I was hoping you had them.”

“I’m not the one who introduced the subject.”

“You’re the one working the case,” Dr. Maroni says. “It appears I have more information than you do. That’s depressing. So there’s nothing.”

“I wouldn’t want to admit it publicly. We’re no further along. That’s why it’s vital you tell me about this disturbed person. And I feel you are toying with me in a very strange way.”

“For more details, you must talk to her. He isn’t her patient, and she can talk about him freely. Assuming she’s cooperative.” He reaches for the silver plate of blini. “And that’s a big assumption.”

“Then help me find her,” Captain Poma says. “Because I have a feeling you know where she is. That’s why you suddenly called me and invited yourself to a very expensive dinner.”

Dr. Maroni laughs. He could afford a roomful of the very best Russian caviar. That’s not why he’s having dinner with the captain. He knows something and has complex reasons, a scheme. This is typical of him. He’s gifted in his understanding of human proclivities and motivations, possibly the most brilliant man the captain knows. But he’s an enigma, and his definition of truth is his own.

“I can’t tell you where she is,” Dr. Maroni says.

“Which doesn’t mean you don’t know. You’re playing your word games with me, Paulo. It’s not that I’m lazy. It’s not that I haven’t tried very hard to find her. Ever since I learned she was acquainted with Drew, I’ve talked to people who work for her and am always told the same story that’s been on the news. She had a mysterious family emergency. No one knows where she is.”

“Logic would tell you it’s impossible no one knows where she is.”

“Yes, logic does tell me that,” the captain says, spreading caviar on a blini and handing it to him. “I have a feeling you’ll help me find her. Because as I say, you know, which is why you called me and now we’re playing word games.”

“Her staff has forwarded your e-mails requesting a meeting or at least a telephone conversation?” Dr. Maroni asks.

“So they say.” The gulls fly away, interested in another table. “I won’t reach her through the normal channels. She has no intention of acknowledging me, because the last thing she would want is to become a factor in the investigation. People might assign responsibility to her.”

“As they probably should. She’s irresponsible,” Dr. Maroni says.

The wine steward appears to refill their glasses. The Hotel Hassler’s rooftop restaurant is one of Captain Poma’s favorites. The view is beautiful and he never tires of it, and he thinks about Kay Scarpetta and wonders if she and Benton Wesley ever ate here. Probably not. They were too busy. They strike him as too busy for what matters in life.

“You see? The more she’s avoided me, the more I think she has a reason,” the captain adds. “Maybe it’s this disturbed man she referred to you. Please tell me where to find her, because I think you know.”

Dr. Maroni says, “Did I mention we have regulations and standards in the United States, and lawsuits are the national sport?”

“Her staff’s not going to tell me if she’s a patient at your hospital.”

“I would never tell you, either.”

“Of course not.” The captain smiles. Now he knows. He has no doubt.

“I’m so glad not to be there at the moment,” Dr. Maroni then says. “We have a very difficult VIP at the Pavilion. I hope Benton Wesley can adequately handle her.”

“I must talk to her. How can I make her think I found out from a source other than you?”

“You didn’t find out anything from me.”

“I found out from somebody. She’ll demand I tell her.”

“You found out nothing from me. In fact, you’re the one who said it. And I haven’t verified it.”

“May we discuss it hypothetically?”

Dr. Maroni drinks his wine. “I prefer the Barbaresco we had last time.”

“You would. It was three hundred euros.”

“Full-bodied but very fresh.”

“The wine? Or the woman you were with last night?”

For a man his age who eats and drinks whatever he pleases, Dr. Maroni looks good and is never without a woman. They offer themselves to him as if he is the god Priapus, and he’s faithful to no one. Usually, he leaves his wife in Massachusetts when he comes to Rome. She doesn’t seem to mind. She’s well taken care of, and he isn’t demanding about his sexual desires because she no longer meets them and he no longer is in love with her. This is a destiny the captain refuses to accept. He’s romantic, and he wonders about Scarpetta again. She doesn’t need to be taken care of and wouldn’t permit it. Her presence in his thoughts is like the light of the candles on the tables and the lights of the city beyond the window. He is moved by her.

“I can contact her at the hospital. But she’ll demand to know how I found out about her being there,” the captain says.

“The VIP, you mean.” Dr. Maroni dips a mother-of-pearl spoon into the caviar, scoops out enough for two blini. He spreads the caviar over one and eats it. “You mustn’t contact anyone at the hospital.”

“What if Benton Wesley’s my source? He was just here and is involved in the investigation. And now she’s his patient. It irritates me we talked about Dr. Self the other night and he didn’t divulge she’s his patient.”

“You mean the VIP. Benton isn’t a psychiatrist, and the VIP technically isn’t his patient. Technically, the VIP is my patient.”

The captain pauses as the waiter appears with the primi piatti. Risotto with mushrooms and Parmesan. Basil-flavored minestrone with quad-rucci pasta.

“Anyway, Benton would never divulge a confidence like that. You may as well ask a stone,” Dr. Maroni says when the waiter is gone. “My guess is the VIP will be gone soon. Where she goes will be the important question for you. Where she’s been is important only because of motive.”

“Dr. Self’s show is filmed in New York.”

“VIPs can go where they please. If you find out where she is and why, you might discover where she would go next. A more likely source would be Lucy Farinelli.”

“Lucy Farinelli?” The captain is baffled.

“Dr. Scarpetta’s niece. As it happens, I’m doing her a favor, and she comes to the hospital fairly often. So she could hear rumors from the staff.”

“And what? She told Kay, who next told me?”

“Kay?” Dr. Maroni eats. “Then you are on friendly terms with her?”

“I hope so. Not so friendly with him. I don’t think he likes me.”

“Most men don’t like you, Otto. Only homosexuals. But you see my point. Hypothetically. If the information comes from an outsider—Lucy, who tells Dr. Scarpetta, who tells you”—Dr. Maroni eats the risotto with enthusiasm—“then there are no ethical or legal concerns. You can begin to follow the trail.”

“And the VIP knows Kay’s working with me on the case, since she was just here in Rome and it’s been in the news. So this VIP will believe Kay indirectly is the source, and then there’s no trouble. That’s very good. Perfect.”

“The risotto ai funghi is almost perfect. What about the minestrone? I’ve had it before,” Dr. Maroni says.

“Excellent. This VIP. Without compromising confidentiality, can you tell me why she’s a patient at McLean?”

“Her reason or mine? Personal safety is her reason. Mine is so she could take advantage of me. She has both axis one and axis two pathology. Rapid-cycling bipolar and refuses to acknowledge it, much less take a mood stabilizer. Which personality disorder would you like me to discuss? She has so many. I regret to say that people with personality disorders rarely change.”

“So something caused a breakdown. Is this the VIP’s first hospitalization for psychiatric reasons? I’ve been doing research. She’s against medication and thinks all of the problems in the world can be managed by following her advice. What she calls tools.”

“The VIP has no known history of hospitalization prior to this. Now you’re asking the important questions. Not where she is. But why. I can’t tell you where she is. I can tell you where the VIP is.”

“Something was traumatic to your VIP?”

“This VIP received an e-mail from a madman. Coincidentally, the same madman Dr. Self told me about last fall.”

“I must talk to her.”

“Talk to who?”

“All right. May we discuss Dr. Self?”

“We’ll change our conversation from the VIP to Dr. Self.”

“Tell me more about this madman.”

“As I said, someone I saw several times at my office here.”

“I won’t ask the name of this patient.”

“Good, because I don’t know it. He paid cash. And he lied.”

“You have no idea about his real name?”

“Unlike you, I don’t get to do a background check on a patient or demand proof of his true identity,” Dr. Maroni says.

“Then what was his false name?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Why did Dr. Self contact you about this man? And when?”

“Early October. She said he was sending e-mails to her and she thought it best to refer him elsewhere. As I’ve said.”

“Then she’s at least somewhat responsible, if she acknowledged a situation was beyond her capabilities,” Captain Poma says.

“This is where, perhaps, you don’t understand her. She would never begin to think anything is beyond her capabilities. She couldn’t be bothered with him, and it appealed to her maniacal ego to refer him to a Nobel Prize–winning psychiatrist who is on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. It was gratifying to inconvenience me, as she’s done many times before. She has her reasons. If nothing else, she probably knew I would fail. He isn’t treatable.” Dr. Maroni studies his wine as if there is an answer in it.

“Tell me this,” Captain Poma says. “If he’s untreatable, then don’t you agree this also justifies what I’m thinking? He’s a very abnormal man who may be doing very abnormal things. He’s sent her e-mails. He may have sent her the e-mail she mentioned to you when she was admitted at McLean.”

“You mean the VIP. I never said Dr. Self is at McLean. But if she were, you certainly should find out exactly why. It seems that’s what matters. I’m repeating myself like a broken record.”

“He might have sent the VIP the e-mail that disturbed her enough to make her hide at your hospital. We must locate him and at least be sure he isn’t a murderer.”

“I have no idea how to do that. As I said, I couldn’t begin to tell you who he is. Only that he’s an American and served in Iraq.”

“What did he say was his purpose in coming to see you here in Rome? That’s a long way for an appointment.”

“He was suffering from PTSD. He seems to have connections in Italy. He told a very unsettling story about a young woman he spent a day with last summer. A body discovered near Bari. You remember the case.”

“The Canadian tourist?” the captain says, surprised. “Shit.”

“That’s the one. Only she was unidentified at first.”

“She was nude, badly mutilated.”

“Not like Drew Martin, from what you’ve told me. The same thing wasn’t done to the eyes.”

“She was also missing large areas of flesh.”

“Yes. At first it was assumed she was a prostitute who’d been thrown from a moving car or was hit by one, thus explaining these wounds,” Dr. Maroni says. “The autopsy showed otherwise, was done very competently, even if it was performed in very primitive conditions. You know how these things go in remote areas that have no money.”

“Especially if it’s a prostitute. She was autopsied in a cemetery. Had the Canadian tourist not been reported missing about this same time, she may have been buried in the cemetery, unidentified,” Captain Poma recalls.

“It was determined the flesh had been removed by some type of knife or saw.”

“And you aren’t going to tell me everything you know about this patient who paid cash and lied about his name?” the captain protests. “You must have notes you could share with me?”

“Impossible. What he told me is no proof.”

“What if he’s this killer, Paulo?”

“If I had more evidence, I’d tell you. I have only his twisted tales and the uneasy feeling I got when I was contacted about the murdered prostitute who turned out to be the missing Canadian.”

“You were contacted? What? For your opinion? That’s news to me.”

“It was worked by the state police. Not the Carabinieri. I give my free advice to many people. In summary, this patient never came to see me again, and I couldn’t tell you where he is,” Dr. Maroni says.

“Couldn’t or won’t.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Don’t you see how it’s possible he’s Drew Martin’s killer? He was referred to you by Dr. Self, and suddenly she hides at your hospital because of an e-mail from a madman.”

“Now you’re perseverating and back to the VIP. I’ve never said Dr. Self is a patient at the hospital. But motivation for hiding is more important than the hiding place itself.”

“If only I could dig with a shovel inside your head, Paulo. No telling what I’d find.”

“Risotto and wine.”

“If you know details that could help this investigation, I don’t agree with your secrecy,” the captain says, and then he says nothing because the waiter is heading toward them.

Dr. Maroni asks to see the menu again, even though he has tried everything on it by now because he dines here often. The captain, who doesn’t want a menu, recommends the grilled Mediterranean spiny lobster, followed by salad and Italian cheeses. The male seagull returns alone. He stares through the window, ruffling his bright white feathers. Beyond are the lights of the city. The gold dome of Saint Peter’s looks like a crown.

“Otto, if I violate confidentiality with so little evidence and am mistaken, my career is finished,” Dr. Maroni finally says. “I don’t have a legitimate reason to expose further details about him to the police. It would be most unwise of me.”

“So you introduce the subject of who may be the killer and then close the door?” Captain Poma leans into the table and says in despair.

“I didn’t open that door,” Dr. Maroni says. “All I did was point it out to you.”

Lost in her work, Scarpetta is startled when the alarm on her wristwatch goes off at quarter of three.

She finishes suturing the Y incision of the decomposing elderly woman whose autopsy was unnecessary. Atherosclerotic plaque. Cause of death, as expected, arteriosclerotic coronary vascular disease. She pulls off her gloves and drops them in a bright red biohazard trash can, then calls Rose.

“I’ll be up in a minute,” Scarpetta tells her. “If you could contact Meddicks’, let them know she’s ready for pickup.”

“I was just coming down to find you,” Rose says. “Worried you might have accidentally locked yourself in the fridge.” An old joke. “Benton’s trying to reach you. Says for you to check your e-mail when, and I quote, you are alone and composed.”

“You sound worse than you did yesterday. More congested.”

“I might have a bit of a cold.”

“I heard Marino’s motorcycle a little while ago. And someone’s been smoking down here. In the fridge. Even my surgical gown reeks of it.”

“That’s odd.”

“Where is he? Be nice if he could have found time to help me out down here.”

“In the kitchen,” Rose says.

Fresh gloves, and Scarpetta pulls the elderly woman’s body from the autopsy table into a sheet-lined sturdy vinyl bag on top of a gurney, which she rolls into the cooler. She hoses off her work station, places tubes of vitreous fluid, urine, bile, and blood, and a carton of sectioned organs into a refrigerator for later toxicological testing and histology. Bloodstained cards go under a hood to dry—samples for DNA testing that are included in each case file. After mopping the floor and cleaning surgical instruments and sinks and gathering paperwork for later dictation, she’s ready to attend to her own hygiene.

At the back of the autopsy suite are drying cabinets with HEPA and carbon filters for bloody, soiled clothing before it is packaged as evidence and sent to the labs. Next is a storage area, then a laundry room, and finally the locker room, divided by a glass-block wall. One side for men, the other for women. At this early stage of her practice in Charleston, it’s just Marino assisting her in the morgue. He has his side of the locker room and she has the other, and it always feels awkward to her when both of them are showering at the same time and she can hear him and see changes in light through the thick green translucent glass as he moves about.

She enters her side of the locker room, shuts and locks the door. She removes her disposable shoe covers, apron, cap, and face mask, and drops them in a biohazard trash can, then tosses her surgical gown in a hamper. She showers, scrubbing herself with antibacterial soap, then blow-dries her hair and changes back into her suit and pumps. Returning to the corridor, she walks the length of it to a door. On the other side is the steep flight of worn oak stairs that lead directly up to the kitchen where Marino is popping open a can of Diet Pepsi.

He looks her up and down. “Aren’t we dressed fancy,” he says. “You forget it’s Sunday and think you got court? So much for my ride to Myrtle Beach.” A long night of carousing shows on his flushed, stubbly face.

“Count it as a gift. Another day of being alive.” She hates motorcycles. “Besides, the weather is bad and supposed to get worse.”

“Eventually I’m gonna get you on the back of my Indian Chief Roadmaster and you’ll be hooked, be begging for more.”

The idea of straddling his big motorcycle, her arms around him, her body pressed against him, is a complete turnoff, and he knows it. She’s his boss, and in many ways always has been for the better part of twenty years, and that no longer seems all right with him. Certainly both of them have changed. Certainly they’ve had their good times and bad. But over recent years and especially of late, his regard for her and his job has become increasingly unrecognizable, and now this. She thinks of Dr. Self’s e-mails, wonders if he assumes she’s seen them. She thinks of whatever game Dr. Self is engaging him in—a game he won’t understand and is destined to lose.

“I could hear you come in. Obviously, you parked your motorcycle in the bay again,” she says. “If it gets hit by a hearse or a van,” she reminds him, “the liability’s yours and I won’t feel sorry for you.”

“It gets hit, there’ll be an extra dead body wheeled in, whatever dumb-shit funeral home creepy-crawler didn’t look where he was going.”

Marino’s motorcycle, with its sound barrier–breaking pipes, has become yet one more point of contention. He rides it to crime scenes, to court, to emergency rooms, to law offices, to witnesses’ homes. At the office, he refuses to leave it in the parking lot and tucks it in the bay, which is for body deliveries, not personal vehicles.

“Has Mr. Grant gotten here yet?” Scarpetta says.

“Drove up in a piece-of-shit pickup truck with his piece-of-shit fishing boat, shrimp nets, buckets, other crap in back. One big son of a bitch, pitch-black. I’ve never seen black people as black as they are around here. Not a drop of cream in the coffee. Not like our ole stomping grounds in Virginia where Thomas Jefferson slept with the help.”

She’s in no mood to engage in his provocations. “Is he in my office, because I don’t want to make him wait.”

“I don’t get why you dressed up for him like you’re meeting with a lawyer or a judge or going to church,” Marino says, and she wonders if what he really hopes is that she dressed up for him, perhaps because she read Dr. Self’s e-mails and is jealous.

“Meeting with him is as important as meeting with anyone else,” she says. “We always show respect, remember?”

Marino smells like cigarettes and booze, and when “his chemistry’s off,” as Scarpetta understates it all too often these days, his deep-seated insecurities shift his bad behavior into high gear, a problem made quite threatening by his physical formidability. In his mid-fifties, he shaves off what is left of his hair, typically wears black motorcycle clothing and big boots, and, as of the past few days, a gaudy necklace with a silver dollar dangling from it. He is fanatical about lifting weights, his chest so broad he’s known to brag that it takes two x-rays to capture his lungs on film. In a much earlier phase of his life, based on old photographs she’s seen, he was handsome in a virile, tough way, and might still be attractive were it not for his crassness, slovenliness, and hard living that at this point in his life can’t be blamed on his difficult upbringing in a rough part of New Jersey.

“I don’t know why you still entertain the fantasy that you’ll fool me,” Scarpetta says, shifting the conversation away from the ridiculous subject of how she is dressed and why. “Last night. And clearly in the morgue.”

“Fool you about what?” Another gulp from the can.

“When you splash on that much cologne to disguise cigarette smoke, all you do is give me a headache.”

“Huh?” He quietly belches.

“Let me guess, you spent the night at the Kick ’N Horse.”

“The joint’s full of cigarette smoke.” He shrugs his massive shoulders.

“And I’m sure you didn’t add to it. You were smoking in the morgue. In the fridge. Even the surgical gown I put on smelled like cigarette smoke. Were you smoking in my locker room?”

“Probably drifted in from my side. The smoke, I mean. I might have carried my cigarette in there, in my side. I can’t remember.”

“I know you don’t want lung cancer.”

He averts his eyes the way he does when a certain topic of conversation is uncomfortable, and he chooses to abort it. “Find anything new? And I don’t mean the old lady, who shouldn’t have been sent here just because the coroner didn’t want to deal with a stinky decomp. But the kid.”

“I’ve put him in the freezer. There’s nothing more we can do right now.”

“I can’t stand it when it’s kids. I figure out who did that little kid down there, I’ll kill him, tear him to pieces with my bare hands.”

“Let’s don’t threaten to kill people, please.” Rose is in the doorway, an odd expression on her face. Scarpetta isn’t sure how long she’s been standing there.

“It ain’t no threat,” Marino says.

“That’s exactly why I mentioned it.” Rose steps into the kitchen, dressed as neat as a pin—her old-fashioned expression—in a blue suit, her white hair tucked back in a French twist. She looks exhausted, and her pupils are contracted.

“You lecturing me again?” Marino says to her with a wink.

“You need a good lecture or two. Or three or four,” she says, pouring herself a cup of strong black coffee, a “bad” habit she quit about a year ago and now, apparently, has resumed. “And in case you’ve forgotten”—she eyes him above the rim of her coffee mug—“you have killed people before. So you shouldn’t make threats.” She leans against the countertop and takes a deep breath.

“I told you. It ain’t no threat.”

“You sure you’re all right?” Scarpetta asks Rose. “Maybe you’re getting more than a little cold. You shouldn’t have come in.”

“I had a little chat with Lucy,” Rose says. To Marino, “I don’t want Dr. Scarpetta alone with Mr. Grant. Not even for a second.”

“Did she mention he passed his background check?” Scarpetta says.

“You hear me, Marino? Not for one second do you leave Dr. Scarpetta alone with that man. I don’t give a hoot about his background check. He’s bigger than you are,” says the ever-protective Rose, probably upon the ever-protective Lucy’s instructions.

Rose has been Scarpetta’s secretary for almost twenty years, following her from pillar to post, in Rose’s words, and through thick and thin. At seventy-three, she’s an attractive, imposing figure, erect and keen, daily drifting in and out of the morgue armed with phone messages, reports that must be signed right this minute, any matter of business she decides can’t wait, or simply a reminder—no, an order—that Scarpetta hasn’t eaten all day and take-out food—healthy, of course—awaits her upstairs and she will go eat it now and she won’t have another cup of coffee because she drinks too much coffee.

“He’s been in what appears to be a knife fight.” Rose continues to worry.

“It’s in his background check. He was the victim,” Scarpetta says.

“He looks very violent and dangerous, and is the size of a freighter. It concerns me greatly that he wanted to come here on a Sunday afternoon, perhaps hoping he’d find you alone,” she says to Scarpetta. “How do you know he isn’t the one who killed that child?”

“Let’s just hear what he has to say.”

“In the old days, we wouldn’t do it like this. There would be a police presence,” Rose insists.

“This isn’t the old days,” Scarpetta replies, trying not to lecture. “This is a private practice, and we have more flexibility in some ways and less in others. But in fact, part of our job has always been to meet with anyone who might have useful information, police presence or not.”

“Just be careful,” Rose says to Marino. “Whoever did this to that poor little boy knows darn well his body’s here and Dr. Scarpetta’s working on it, and usually when she works on something, she figures it out. He could be stalking her, for all we know.”

Usually Rose doesn’t get this overwrought.

“You’ve been smoking,” Rose then says to Marino.

He takes another big gulp of Diet Pepsi. “Should’ve seen me last night. Had ten cigarettes in my mouth and two in my ass while I was playing the harmonica and getting it on with my new woman.”

“Another edifying evening at that biker bar with some woman whose IQ is the same as my refrigerator. Sub-Zero. Please don’t smoke. I don’t want you to die.” Rose looks troubled as she walks over to the coffeemaker and starts filling the pot with water to make a fresh pot. “Mr. Grant would like coffee,” she says. “And no, Dr. Scarpetta, you can’t have any.”

Chapter 6

Bulrush Ulysses S. Grant has always been called Bull. Without any prompting, he begins the conversation by explaining the origin of his name.

“I ’spect you’re wondering about the S part of my name. That’s it. Just an S and a period,” he says from a chair near Scarpetta’s shut office door. “My mama knows the S in General Grant’s name is for Simpson. But she was afraid if she stuck Simpson in there, it would be a lot for me to write out. So she left it at S. Explaining it takes longer than writing it out, you ask me.”

He’s neat and clean in freshly pressed gray work clothes, and his sneakers look as if they just came out of the washing machine. A frayed yellow baseball cap with a fish on it is in his lap, his big hands politely folded on top of it. The rest of his appearance is frightening, his face, neck, and scalp savagely slashed with a crisscross of long, pink gashes. If he ever saw a plastic surgeon, it wasn’t a good one. He will be badly disfigured for life, a patchwork of keloid scars that make Scarpetta think of Queequeg in Moby-Dick.

“I know you just moved here not all that long ago,” Bull says, to her surprise. “In that old carriage house that backs up to the alley between Meeting and King.”

“How the hell do you know where she supposedly lives, and what business is it of yours?” Marino aggressively interrupts him.

“I used to work for one of your neighbors.” Bull directs this to Scarpetta. “She passed on a long time back. I guess it would be more accurate to say I worked for her maybe fifteen years, then ’bout four years ago her husband passed. After that, she got rid of most of her help, I think had money anxiousness, and I had to find me something else. Then she passed, too. What I’m telling you is I know the area where you live like the back of my hand.”

She looks at the pink scars on the backs of his hands.

“I know your house….” he adds.

“Like I said…” Marino starts in again.

“Let him finish,” Scarpetta says.

“I know your garden real good ’cause I dug the pond and poured the cement, and took care of the angel statue looking over it, kept her nice and clean. I built the white fence with finials on one side. But not the brick columns and wrought iron on the other. That was before my time and probably so overgrowed with wax myrtle and bamboo when you bought the place, you didn’t know it was there. I planted roses, Europa, California poppies, and Chinese jasmine, and I fixed things around the house.”

Scarpetta is stunned.

“Anyhow,” Bull says, “I been doing things for half the people up and down your alleyway and on King Street, Meeting Street, Church Street, all over. Since I was a boy. You wouldn’t know it because I keep to my own business. That’s a good thing if you don’t want folks around here to take offense to you.”

She says, “Like they do to me?”

Marino shoots her a disdainful look. She’s being too friendly.

“Yes, ma’am. They sure can be like that around here,” Bull says. “Then you put all them spiderweb decals on all the windows, and that don’t help, ’specially because of what you do for a living. One of your neighbors, if I’m honest, calls you Dr. Halloween.”

“Let me guess. That would be Mrs. Grimball.”

“I wouldn’t take no seriousness to it,” Bull says. “She calls me Olé. ’Cause of me being called Bull.”

“The decals are so birds don’t fly into the glass.”

“Uh-huh. Never have figured out how we know exactly what birds see. Like do they see what’s s’posed to be a spiderweb and head the other way even though I never have seen a bird caught up in a spiderweb like it’s a bug or something. It’s like saying dogs is color-blind or got no sense of time. How do we know?”

“What business is it of yours to be anywhere near her house?” Marino says.

“Looking for work. When I was a boy, I helped out Mrs. Whaley, too,” Bull says to Scarpetta. “Now, I’m sure you’ve heard of Mrs. Whaley’s garden, the most famous one here in Charleston, down there on Church Street.” He smiles proudly, pointing in the general direction, wounds on his hand flashing pink.

He has them on his palms, too. Defensive injuries, Scarpetta thinks.

“That was a real privilege working for Mrs. Whaley. She was real good to me. She wrote a book, you know. They keep copies of it right there in the window of that bookstore at the Charleston Hotel. She signed a copy for me once. I still got it.”

“What the shit’s going on here?” Marino says. “You come to the morgue to talk to us about that dead little boy, or is this a damn job interview and stroll through memory lane?”

“Sometimes things fit together in mysterious ways,” Bull says. “My mama always says that. Maybe something good come out of the bad. Maybe something good could come out of what happened. And what happened is bad, all right. Like a movie in my head playing all the time, seeing that little boy dead in the mud. Crabs and flies crawling on him.” Bull touches a scarred index finger to his scarred, furrowed brow. “Up there, I see it when I shut my eyes. The police in Beaufort County says you’re still getting established down here.” He scans Scarpetta’s office, slowly taking in all her books and framed degrees. “You look pretty established to me, but I probably could’ve done you better.” His attention drifts to recently installed cabinets, where she locks up sensitive cases and ones that haven’t gone to court yet. “Like that black walnut door ain’t flush with the one beside it. Not hung straight. I could fix it easy enough. You see any doors hung crooked in your carriage house? No, ma’am, you don’t. Not ones I hung back then when I helped out over there. Can do ’bout anything, and if I don’t know, I’m sure willing to learn. So I said to myself, maybe I should just ask. No harm in asking.”

“So maybe I should just ask,” Marino says. “You kill that little boy? Kind of a coincidence you found him, right?”

“No, sir.” Bull looks at him, looks him straight in the eye, his jaw muscles flexing. “I go all over these parts cutting sweetgrass, fishing, shrimping, digging clams, and picking oysters. Let me ask you”—he holds Marino’s stare—“if I killed that boy, why would I be the one to find him and call for the police?”

“You tell me. Why would you?”

“I sure wouldn’t.”

“That reminds me. How’d you call anyone?” Marino says, leaning farther forward in his chair, hands the size of bear paws on his knees. “You got yourself a cell phone?” As if a poor black man wouldn’t have a cell phone.

“I called nine-one-one. And like I said, why would I if I was the one who killed that boy?”

He wouldn’t. Furthermore, although Scarpetta isn’t going to say it to him, the victim is a child-abuse homicide with old healed fractures, scarring, and obvious food deprivation. So unless Bulrush Ulysses S. Grant was the boy’s caretaker or foster parent, or kidnapped him and kept him alive for months or years, he certainly isn’t the one who killed him.

Marino says to Bull, “You called here saying you want to tell us what happened this past Monday morning, almost a week ago to the day. But first. Where do you live? Because as I understand it, you don’t live in Hilton Head.”

“Oh, no, sir, I sure don’t.” Bull laughs. “Believe that’s a little beyond my means. Me and my family got us a little place northwest of here off five twenty-six. I do a lot of fishing and other things in these parts. Haul my boat in the back of my truck, drive it places, and put it in the water. Like I say, shrimping, fishing, oysters, depending on the season. I got me one of these flat-bottom boats don’t weigh more than a feather and can make it up the creeks, long as I know the tides and don’t get stuck high and dry out there with all them skeeters and no-see-ums. Cottonmouths and rattlers. Gators, too, but that’s mostly in the canals and creeks where there’s woods and the water’s brackish.”

“The boat you’re talking about is the one in the back of that truck you parked in the lot?” Marino asks.

“That’s right.”

“Aluminum with what? Five-horsepower engine?”

“That’s right.”

“I’d like to take a look at it before you drive off. You got any objections to my looking inside your boat and truck? I’m assuming the police already did.”

“No, sir, they didn’t. When they got there and I told them what I knew, they said I could go. So I headed back to the put-in where my truck was. By then all kinds of people was there. But you go on and help yourself. I got nothing to hide.”

“Thank you, but it’s not necessary.” Scarpetta gives Marino a look. He knows damn well they don’t have jurisdiction to search Mr. Grant’s truck or boat or anything else. That’s for the police to do, and they didn’t think it necessary.

“Where did you put your boat in the water six days ago?” Marino says to Bull.

“Old House Creek. There’s a boat landing and little store where if I’ve had me a good day, I sell some of what I catch. Especially if I get lucky with shrimps and oysters.”

“You see anybody suspicious in the area when you parked your truck this past Monday morning?”

“Can’t say I did, but don’t know why I would. By then the little boy was already where I found him and had been for days.”

“Who said days?” Scarpetta asks.

“The funeral home man in the parking lot.”

“The one who drove the body here?”

“No, ma’am. The other one. He was there with his big hearse. Don’t know what he was doing there. Except talking.”

“Lucious Meddick?” Scarpetta asks.

“Meddicks’ Funeral Home. Yes, ma’am. According to his thinking, that little boy was dead for two, three days by the time I found him.”

That damn Lucious Meddick. Presumptuous as hell, and wrong. April 29 and 30, the temperatures ranged between seventy-five and eighty degrees. Had the body been in the marsh for even one full day, it would have begun to decompose and suffer substantial damage from predatory animals and fish. Flies are quiet at night but would have laid eggs in daylight, and he would have been infested with maggots. As it was, by the time the body arrived at the morgue, rigor mortis was well developed but not complete, although that particular postmortem change would have been somewhat lessened and slowed due to malnourishment and subsequent poor muscle development. Livor mortis was indistinct, not yet fixed. There was no discoloration due to putrefaction. Crabs, shrimp, and the like were just getting started on the ears, nose, and lips. In her estimation, the boy had been dead less than twenty-four hours. Maybe much less than that.

“Go on,” Marino says. “Tell us exactly how you found the body.”

“I anchored my boat and got out in my boots and gloves, carrying my basket and a hammer…”

“A hammer?”

“For breaking up coons.”

“Coons?” Marino says with a smirk.

“Coon oysters are stuck together in clusters, so you break them apart and knock loose any dead shells. Coons is mostly what you get, hard to find select ones.” He pauses, says, “Don’t seem you folks know much about oystering. So let me explain. A select oyster is a single one like you get on the half-shell in a restaurant. That’s the kind you want but are hard to find. Anyhow, I started picking about noon. The tide was fairly low. And that’s when I caught me a glance of something in the grass that looked like muddy hair, got closer, and there he was.”

“Did you touch him or move him?” Scarpetta asks.

“No, ma’am.” Shaking his head. “Once I saw what it was, I got right back in my boat and called nine-one-one.”

“Low tide started around one in the morning,” she says.

“That’s so. And by seven it was high again—as high as it was going to get. And by the time I was out there, it was pretty low again.”

“If it was you,” Marino says, “and you wanted to get rid of a body using your boat, would you do it at low tide or high tide?”

“Whoever done it probably put him there when the tide was fairly low, put him in the mud and grass on the side of that little creek. Otherwise, the body would have been carried on out by the current if the tide was real high. But you put him in a place like the one I found him in, he’s most likely gonna stay right there unless it’s a spring tide at a full moon when the water can get up to ten feet. In that case, he might have been carried out, could have ended up anywhere.”

Scarpetta has looked it up. The night before the body was found, the moon was no more than a third full, the skies partly cloudy.

“A smart place to dump a body. In a week, he wouldn’t have been much more than scattered bones,” Marino says. “It’s a miracle he was found, don’t you think?”

“It wouldn’t take long out there to be nothing but bones, and it was a good chance no one would ever find him, that’s true,” Bull says.

“Thing is, when I mentioned high versus low tide, I didn’t ask you to speculate about what someone else would have done. I asked what you would have done,” Marino says.

“Low tide in a small boat that doesn’t have much draw, so you could get into places no more’an a foot deep. That’s what I would’ve done. But I didn’t.” He stares Marino in the eye again. “I didn’t do nothing to that little boy except find him.”

Scarpetta gives Marino another pointed glance, has had enough of his interrogating and intimidating. She says to Bull, “Is there anything else you can remember? Anybody you saw in the area? Anybody you may have seen in the area who got your attention?”

“I keep thinking about that, and the only thing that comes to mind is about a week ago I was at this same landing, Old House Creek, in the market there selling shrimps, and when I was leaving I noticed this person tying up a boat. A bass boat. What got my attention is he didn’t have nothing in it you might use for shrimping, oystering, fishing, so I just figured he liked being out in his boat. Didn’t care about fishing or nothing, just liked being on the water, you know. I admit I didn’t like the way he stared at me. Gave me a funny feeling. Like he’d seen me somewhere.”

“You get a description?” Marino asks. “See what he was driving? A truck, I assume, for hauling his boat?”

“He had a hat pulled low, sunglasses. Don’t seem he was real big, but I couldn’t tell you. And I had no reason to look hard and didn’t want him thinking I was looking at him. That’s how things get started, you know. My recollection is he had on boots. Long pants and a long-sleeve T-shirt, for sure, and I remember wondering about that because it was a warm, sunny day. I never did see what he was driving because I left before he did and there was a number of trucks and cars in the lot. A busy time. Folks coming in, buying and selling fresh-caught seafood.”

“In your opinion, would someone have to know that area to dispose of a body there?” Scarpetta asks.

“After dark? Lord. I don’t know anybody who goes in creeks like that after dark. I wouldn’t. But that don’t mean it didn’t happen. Whoever did it isn’t like regular people anyhow. Couldn’t be, to do something like that to a little child.”

“Did you notice any disturbance in the grass, the mud, the oyster bed when you found him?” Scarpetta asks.

“No, ma’am. But if somebody put the body there the night before during low tide, then during high tide the water would have smoothed out the mud just like when a wave goes over the sand. He would have been underwater for a while, but stayed put because of all that tall grass he was in. And the oyster bed, you wouldn’t want to step on that anyhow. Would step over it or go around it as best you can. Nothing much hurts worse than a cut from an oyster shell. You step in the middle of them and lose your balance, you can get mighty cut up.”

“Maybe that’s what cut you up,” Marino says. “You fell in the oyster bed.”

Scarpetta knows cutting injuries made by a blade when she sees them, and says, “Mr. Grant, there are houses set back from the marshland, and long piers, one not far from where you found him. Possible he could have been transported by car, then carried over a pier, let’s say, and ended up where he was found?”

“I can’t imagine anybody climbing down the ladder of one of them old piers, especially after dark, while carrying a body and a flashlight. And you sure would have to have a powerful flashlight. A man can sink up to his hips in that mud, suck the shoes right off your feet. Would think there would have been muddy footprints on the pier, assuming he climbed back up and left that way after he done it.”

“How do you know there weren’t any muddy footprints on the pier?” Marino asks him.

“The man from the funeral home told me so. I was waiting in the parking lot until they brought in the body, and he was there talking to the police.”

“This would be Lucious Meddick again,” Scarpetta says.

Bull nods. “He spent a lot of time talking to me, too, wanting to know what I had to say. I didn’t tell him much.”

A knock on the door and Rose walks in, sets a mug of coffee on the table next to Bull, her hands shaking. “Cream and sugar,” she says. “Sorry it took so long. The first pot overflowed, grounds everywhere.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“Anybody else need anything?” Rose looks around, takes a deep breath, looks more exhausted and paler than she did earlier.

Scarpetta says. “Why don’t you go home? Get some rest.”

“I’ll be in my office.”

The door shuts and Bull says, “I’d like to explain my situation, if you don’t mind.”

“Go ahead,” Scarpetta says.

“I had me a real job until three weeks ago.” He stares down at his thumbs, slowly twiddles them in his lap. “I’m not gonna lie to you. I got in trouble. You can look at me and tell that much. And I didn’t fall in no oyster bed.” He meets Marino’s eyes again.

“In trouble for what?” Scarpetta asks.

“Smoking weed and fighting. I never really smoked the weed, but I was going to.”

“Now, ain’t that nice,” Marino says. “It just so happens one of the requirements we got in this joint is anybody wants to work here has to smoke weed and be violent and find at least one dead body of somebody murdered. Same requirements for gardeners and handymen at our personal residences.”

Bull says to him, “I know how it sounds. But it’s not like that. I was working at the port.”

“Doing what?” Marino asks.

“Called a heavy-lift mechanic helper. That was my job title. Mainly, I did whatever my supervisor told me. Helped take care of equipment, lifting and carrying. Had to be able to talk on the radio and fix things, do whatever. Well, when I was signed off the clock one night, I decided to slip off near some of these old containers you find in the shipyard. The ones I’m talking about aren’t used anymore, sort of banged up and off to the side. You drive by on Concord Street and you can see what I mean, right there on the other side of the chain-link fence. It’d been a long day, and to tell you the truth, me and my wife had words that morning so I was in a mood, so I decided to smoke me some weed. It wasn’t something I made a habit of, can’t even remember the last time I did it. I hadn’t lit up yet when all a sudden this man come out of nowhere from near the railroad tracks. He cut me up bad, real bad.”

He pushes up his sleeves, holds out his muscular arms and hands, turning them, displaying more long slashes, pale pink against his dark black skin.

“Did they catch who did it?” Scarpetta asks.

“Don’t think they tried real hard. The police accused me of fighting, said I’d probably got into it with the man who sold me the weed. I never said who that was, and I know it wasn’t him who cut me. He don’t even work at the port. After I got out of the emergency room, I spent a few nights in jail until I went before the judge, and the case got dismissed because there was no suspect and no weed was found, either.”

“Really. So why did they accuse you of possessing marijuana if none was found?” Marino says.

“Because I told the police I was getting ready to smoke weed when it happened. I had rolled me one and was about to light it when the man came after me. Maybe the police just never found it. I don’t think they was all that interested, truth is. Or maybe the man who cut me took it, I don’t know. I don’t go near weed no more. Don’t touch a drop of liquor, either. Promised my wife I wouldn’t.”

“The port fired you,” Scarpetta assumes.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What is it you think you could help us with around here, exactly?” she asks.

“Whatever you need. Nothing I’m above doing. The morgue don’t scare me. I got no trouble with dead people.”

“Maybe you can leave me your cell phone number or whatever is the best way to get hold of you,” she says.

He pulls a folded piece of paper out of a back pocket, gets up and politely places it on her desk. “Got it all right here, ma’am. Call me anytime.”

“Investigator Marino will show you out. Thank you so much for your help, Mr. Grant.” Scarpetta gets up from her desk and carefully shakes his hand, mindful of his injuries.

Seventy miles southwest on the resort island of Hilton Head, it is overcast, and a warm wind gusts in from the sea.

Will Rambo walks the dark, empty beach, headed to a destination. He carries a green tackle box and shines a Surefire tactical light wherever he likes, not really needing it to find his way. The light is powerful enough to blind someone, at least for seconds, and that’s enough, assuming a situation requires it. Blasts of sand sting his face and click against his tinted glasses. Sand swirls like gauzy dancing girls.

And the sandstorm roared into Al Asad like a tsunami and swallowed the Humvee and him, swallowed the sky, the sun, swallowed everything. Blood spilled through Roger’s fingers, and his fingers looked as if they had been painted bright red, and the sand blasted and stuck to his bloody fingers as he tried to tuck his intestines back in. His face was panicky and shocked like nothing Will had ever seen, and he could do nothing about it except to promise his friend he would be all right and help him tuck his intestines back in.

Will hears Roger’s shrieks in the gulls wheeling over the beach. Screams of panic and pain.

“Will! Will! Will!”

The screams, piercing screams, and the roar of sand.

“Will! Will! Please help me, Will!”

It was some time after that, after Germany. Will returned stateside to the Air Force base in Charleston, and then to Italy, different parts of Italy where he grew up. He wandered in and out of blackouts. He went to Rome to face his father because it was time to face his father, and it seemed like a dream to sit amid the stenciled palmette design and trompe l’oeil moldings of the dining room of Will’s boyhood summer home at the Piazza Navona. He drank red wine with his father, wine as red as blood, and was irritated by the noise of tourists below the open windows, silly tourists no smarter than pigeons, throwing coins into Bernini’s Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi and taking photographs, water constantly splashing.

“Making wishes that never come true. Or if they do, too bad for you,” he commented to his father, who didn’t understand but kept looking at him as if he were a mutant.

At the table beneath the chandelier, Will could see his face in the Venetian mirror on the far wall. It wasn’t true. He looked like Will, not like a mutant, and he watched his mouth move in the mirror as he recounted to his father that Roger wished to be a hero when he returned from Iraq. His wish came true, Will’s mouth said. Roger returned home a hero in a cheap coffin in the belly of a C5 cargo plane.

“We didn’t have goggles or protective gear or body armor or anything,” Will told his father in Rome, hoping he would understand but knowing he wouldn’t.

“Why did you go if all you do is complain?”

“I had to write you to send batteries for our flashlights. I had to write you for tools because every screwdriver broke. The cheap shit they gave us,” Will’s mouth said in the mirror. “We had nothing unless it was cheap shit because of goddamn lies, the goddamn lies politicians tell.”

“Then why did you go?”

“I was fucking told to, you foolish man.”

“Don’t you dare talk like that! Not in this house, where you will treat me with respect. I didn’t choose that fascist war, you did. All you do is complain like a baby. Did you pray over there?”

When the wall of sand slammed into them and Will couldn’t see his hand in front of his face, he prayed. When the explosion from the roadside bomb flipped the Humvee on its side and he couldn’t see and the wind screamed as if he were inside the engine of a C17, he prayed. When he held Roger, he prayed, and when he could no longer endure Roger’s pain, he prayed, and that was the last time he prayed.

“When we pray we are really asking ourselves—not God—for help. We’re asking for our own divine intervention,” Will’s mouth in the mirror told his father in Rome. “So I don’t need to pray to some god on a throne. I’m God’s Will because I’m my own Will. I don’t need you or God because I’m God’s Will.”

“When you lost your toes, did you also lose your mind?” his father said to him in Rome, and it was an ironic thing to say in the dining room where on a gilded console below the mirror was a stone foot of antiquity with all of its toes. But then, Will had seen dismembered feet over there after suicide bombers drove into crowded places, so he supposed to be missing a few toes was better than to be a whole foot missing everything else.

“That’s healed now. But what do you know?” he said to his father in Rome. “You never came to see me all those months in Germany or Charleston or the years before. You’ve never been to Charleston. I’ve been here in Rome countless times, but never for you, even if you thought otherwise. Except this time, because of what I have to do, a mission, you see. I was allowed to live so I can relieve others of their suffering. Something you would never understand because you’re selfish and useless and don’t care about anyone except yourself. Look at you. Rich and uncaring and cold.”

Will’s body got up from the table, and he watched himself walk to the mirror, to the gilded console beneath it. He picked up the stone foot of antiquity as the fountain below the window splashed and the tourists were noisy.

He carries the tackle box, a camera slung over his shoulder as he walks the beach in Hilton Head to carry out his mission. He sits and opens the tackle box, and takes out a freezer bag full of special sand, then small vials of pale violet glue. With the flashlight, he illuminates what he’s doing as he squeezes the glue over the palmar surfaces of his hands. He plunges them one at a time into his bag of sand. He holds up his hands in the wind and the glue dries quickly and he has sandpaper hands. More vials, and he does the same thing with the bottoms of his bare feet, careful to completely cover the pads of his seven toes. He drops the empty vials and what’s left of the sand back into his tackle box.

His tinted glasses look around and he turns off the flashlight.

His destination is the No Trespassing sign planted in the beach at the end of the long wooden boardwalk that leads to the fenced-in backyard of the villa.

Chapter 7

The parking lot behind Scarpetta’s office.

It was the cause of much contention when she started her practice, and neighbors filed formal objections to almost every request she made. She got her way with the security fence by obscuring it with evergreens and Cherokee roses, but she lost out on the lighting. At night the parking lot is much too dark.

“So far I see no reason not to give him a try. We really could use somebody,” Scarpetta says.

Palmettos flutter and the plants bordering her fence stir as she and Rose walk to their cars.

“I have no one to help me in my garden, for that matter. I can’t distrust everybody on the planet,” she adds.

“Don’t let Marino push you into something you might regret,” Rose says.

“I do distrust him.”

“You need to sit down with him. I don’t mean at the office. Have him over. Cook for him. He doesn’t mean to hurt you.”

They have reached Rose’s Volvo.

“Your cough is worse,” Scarpetta says. “Why don’t you stay home tomorrow.”

“I wish you’d never told him. I’m surprised you told any of us.”

“I believe it was my ring that said something.”

“You shouldn’t have explained it,” Rose says.

“It’s time Marino faces what he’s avoided for as long as I’ve known him.”

Rose leans against her car as if she is too tired to stand on her own, or maybe her knees are hurting. “Then you should have told him a long time ago. But you didn’t, and he held out hope. The fantasy festered. You don’t confront people about their feelings, and all it does is make things…” She coughs so hard she can’t finish her sentence.

“I think you’re getting the flu.” Scarpetta presses the back of her hand against Rose’s cheek. “You feel warm.”

Rose pulls a tissue out of her bag, dabs her eyes, and sighs. “That man. I can’t believe you’d even consider him.” She’s back to Bull.

“The practice is growing. I must get a morgue assistant, and I’ve given up hoping for somebody already trained.”

“I don’t think you’ve tried very hard or have an open mind.” The Volvo is so old, Rose has to unlock the door with the key. The interior light goes on, and her face looks drawn and tired as she slides into the seat and primly arranges her skirt to cover her thighs.

“The most qualified morgue assistants come from funeral homes or hospital morgues,” Scarpetta replies, her hand on top of the window frame. “Since the biggest funeral home business in the area happens to be owned by Henry Hollings, who also happens to use the Medical University of South Carolina for autopsies that are his jurisdiction or sub-contracted to him, what luck do you think I might have if I called him for a recommendation? The last damn thing our local coroner wants is to help me succeed.”

“You’ve been saying that for two years. And it’s based on nothing.”

“He shuns me.”

“Exactly what I was saying about communicating your feelings. Maybe you should talk to him,” Rose says.

“How do I know he’s not the one responsible for my office and home addresses suddenly getting mixed up on the Internet?”

“Why would he wait until now to do that? Assuming he did.”

“Timing. My office has been in the news because of this child abuse case. And Beaufort County asked me to take care of it instead of calling Hollings. I’m involved in the Drew Martin investigation and just came back from Rome. Interesting timing for someone to deliberately call the Chamber of Commerce and register my practice, listing my home address as the office address. Even pay the membership fee.”

“Obviously, you had them remove the listing. And there should be a record of who paid the fee.”

“A cashier’s check,” Scarpetta says. “All anyone could tell me is the caller was a woman. They removed the listing, thank God, before it ended up all over the Internet.”

“The coroner isn’t a woman.”

“That doesn’t mean a damn thing. He wouldn’t do his dirty work himself.”

“Call him. Ask him point-blank if he’s trying to run you out of town. Run all of us out of town, I should say. It seems you have a number of people to talk to. Starting with Marino.” She coughs, and as if on command, the Volvo’s interior light goes out.

“He shouldn’t have moved here.” Scarpetta stares at the back of her old brick building, small, with one floor and a basement she converted into a morgue. “He loved Florida,” she says, and that reminds her of Dr. Self again.

Rose adjusts the air-conditioning, turns the vents to blow cold air on her face, and takes another deep breath.

“Are you sure you’re all right? Let me follow you home,” Scarpetta says.

“Absolutely not.”

“How about we spend some time together tomorrow? I’ll cook dinner. Prosciutto and figs and your favorite drunk pork roast. A nice Tuscan wine. I know how much you like my ricotta and coffee crème.”

“Thank you, but I have plans,” Rose says, her voice touched by sadness.

The dark shape of a water tower on the southern tip of the island, or the toe, as it is called.

Hilton Head is shaped like a shoe, like the shoes Will saw in public places in Iraq. The white stucco villa that belongs to the No Trespassing sign is worth at least fifteen million dollars. The electronic blinds are down, and she is probably on the couch in the great room watching another movie on the retractable screen that covers an expanse of glass facing the sea. From Will’s perspective, outside looking in, the movie plays backward. He scans the beach, scans the nearby empty houses. The dark, overcast sky hangs low and thick as the wind gusts in fierce fits and starts.

He steps up on the boardwalk and follows it toward the gate that separates the outside world from the backyard as images on the big movie screen flash backward. A man and woman fucking. His pulse quickens as he walks, his sandy footsteps quiet on the weathered boards, actors flashing backward on the movie screen. Fucking inside an elevator. The volume is low. He can barely hear the thudding and moans, those sounds that sound so violent as characters fuck in Hollywood, and then there is the wooden gate, and it is locked. He climbs over it and goes to his usual place at the side of the house.

Through a space between the window and the shade he has watched her on and off for months, watched her pace and cry and pull out her hair. She never sleeps at night, is afraid of the night, afraid of storms. She watches movies all night and into the morning. She watches movies when it rains, and if there’s thunder, she turns the volume up very loud, and when the sun is bright, she hides from it. Usually she sleeps on the black leather wraparound couch where she’s now stretched out, propped up by leather pillows, a blanket over her. She points the remote control and backs up the DVD, returning to the scene where Glenn Close and Michael Douglas are fucking in the elevator.

The houses on either side are obscured by tall borders of bamboo and trees, nobody home. Empty because the rich owners don’t rent them out and aren’t here and haven’t been here. Families often don’t start using their expensive beach homes until after their children are out of school for the year. She wouldn’t want other people here, and no neighbors have been here all winter. She wants to be alone and is terrified of being alone. She dreads thunder and rain, dreads clear skies and sunlight, doesn’t want to be anywhere anymore under any conditions whatsoever.

That’s why I have come.

She backs up the DVD again. He’s familiar with her rituals, lying there in the same soiled pink sweatsuit, backing up movies, replaying certain scenes, usually people fucking. Now and then she goes out by the pool for a smoke and to let her pitiful dog out of his crate. She never picks up after him, the grass full of dried shit, and the Mexican yardman who comes every other week doesn’t pick up the shit, either. She smokes and stares at the pool while the dog wanders about the yard, sometimes baying his deep, throaty howl, and she calls out to him.

“Good dog,” or more often “Bad dog,” and “Come. Come here right now!” Clapping her hands.

She doesn’t pet him, can scarcely bear to look at him. Were it not for the dog, her life would be unbearable. The dog understands none of it. It’s unlikely he remembers what happened or understood it at the time. What he knows is the crate in the laundry room where he sleeps and sits up and bays. She thinks nothing of it when he bays as she drinks vodka and takes pills and pulls out her hair, the routine the same day after day after day.

Soon I’ll hold you in my arms and carry you back through the inner darkness to the higher realm, and you’ll be separated from the physical dimension that’s now your hell. You will thank me.

Will keeps up his scan, making sure no one sees him. He watches her get up from the couch and walk drunkenly to the slider to go out for a smoke and, as usual, she forgets the alarm is set. She jumps and swears when it wails and hammers, and she stumbles to the panel to shut it off. The phone rings, and she rakes her fingers through her thinning dark hair, saying something, then she yells and slams down the receiver. Will gets low to the ground behind shrubbery, doesn’t move. In minutes the police come, two officers in a Beaufort County sheriff’s cruiser. Will watches invisibly as the officers stand on the porch, not bothering to go inside because they know her. She forgot her password again, and the alarm company dispatched the police again.

“Ma’am, it’s not a good idea to use your dog’s name, anyway.” One of the officers tells her the same thing she’s been told before. “You should use something else for your password. A pet’s name is one of the first things an intruder tries.”

She slurs. “If I can’t remember the damn dog’s name, how can I remember something else? All I know is the password’s the dog’s name. Oh, hell. Buttermilk. There, now I remember it.”

“Yes, ma’am. But I still think you should change it. Like I said, it’s not good to use a pet’s name, and you never remember it anyway. There must be something you’ll remember. We have a fair number of burglaries around here, especially this time of year, when so many of the houses are empty.”

“I can’t remember a new one.” She can barely talk. “When it goes off, I can’t think.”

“You sure you’re all right being alone? Is there anyone we can call?”

“I have no one anymore.”

Eventually, the cops drive off. Will emerges from his safe place and, through a window, watches her reset the alarm. One, two, three, four. The same code, the only one she can remember. He watches her sit back down on the couch, crying again. She pours herself another vodka. The moment is no longer right. He follows the boardwalk back to the beach.

Chapter 8

The next morning, eight o’clock, Pacific Daylight Time. Lucy eases to a stop in front of the Stanford Cancer Center.

Whenever she flies her Citation X jet to San Francisco and rents a Ferrari for the hour’s drive to see her neuroendocrinologist, she feels powerful, the way she feels at home. Her tight jeans and tight T-shirt show off her athletic body and make her feel vital, the way she feels at home. Her black crocodile boots and titanium Breitling Emergency watch with its bright orange dial make her feel she’s still Lucy, fearless and accomplished, the way she feels when she’s not thinking about what’s wrong with her.

She rolls down the window of the red F430 Spider. “Can you park this thing?” she asks the valet in gray who tentatively approaches her at the entrance of the modern brick-and-glass complex. She doesn’t recognize him. He must be new. “It’s Formula One shift, these paddles on the steering wheel. Right for shifting up, left for down, both at the same time for neutral, this button for reverse.” She notes the anxiety in his eyes. “Well, okay, I admit it’s kind of complicated,” she says, because she doesn’t want to belittle him.

He’s an older man, probably retired and bored, so he’s parking cars at the hospital. Or maybe someone in his family has cancer or did. But it’s obvious he’s never driven a Ferrari and may never have seen one up close. He eyes it as if it just landed from outer space. He wants no part of it, and that’s a good thing when one doesn’t know how to drive a car that costs more than some houses.

“I don’t think so,” the valet says, transfixed by the saddle leather interior and red “start” button on the carbon-fiber steering wheel. He steps around the back of the car and looks at the engine under glass and shakes his head. “Now, that’s something. A convertible, I guess. Must blow you around a lot when you got the top down, as fast as it must go, I guess,” he says. “I got to admit that’s something. Why don’t you just pull it right over there.” He shows her. “Best spot in the house. That really is something.” Shaking his head.

Lucy parks, grabs her briefcase and two large envelopes containing magnetic resonance films that reveal the most devastating secret of her life. She pockets the Ferrari key, slips the valet a hundred-dollar bill, says very seriously but winks at him, “Guard it with your life.”

The cancer center is the most beautiful medical complex, with expansive windows and miles of polished wooden floors, everything open and full of light. The people who work here, many of them volunteers, are unfailingly polite. Last time she had an appointment, a harpist was perched in the corridor gracefully plucking and strumming “Time After Time.” This afternoon the same lady is playing “What a Wonderful World.” What a joke, and as Lucy walks fast, looking at no one, a baseball cap pulled low over her eyes, she realizes there’s no music anyone could play that wouldn’t make her feel cynical or depressed right now.

The clinics are open areas, perfectly appointed in earth tones, no art on the walls, just flat-screen TVs that show soothing nature scenes: meadows and mountains, leaves in the fall, snowy woods, giant redwood trees, the red rocks of Sedona, accompanied by the gentle sounds of flowing streams and pattering rain and birds and breezes. Live potted orchids are on tables, the lighting soft, the waiting areas never crowded. The only patient in Clinic D when Lucy reaches the check-in desk is a woman wearing a wig and reading Glamour magazine.

Lucy quietly tells the man behind the counter she’s here to see Dr. Nathan Day, or Nate, as she calls him.

“Your name?” With a smile.

Lucy quietly tells him the alias she uses. He types something on his computer, smiles again and reaches for the phone. In less than a minute, Nate opens the door and motions for Lucy to come inside. He hugs her, always does. “It’s great to see you. Looking fantastic.” He talks as they walk to his office.

It’s small, not at all what one might expect of a Harvard-trained neuroendocrinologist considered one of the most outstanding in his field. He has a cluttered desk, a computer with a large video screen, an overflowing bookcase, multiple light boxes mounted on walls where in most offices there might be windows. There’s a couch and one chair. Lucy hands over the records she brought with her.

“Lab work,” she says. “And the scan you looked at last time, and the most recent one.”

He settles behind his desk, and she sits on the couch. “When?” As he opens the envelopes, then reads her chart, not a word of it stored electronically, the paper file kept in his personal safe, identified by code, her name not listed anywhere.

“Blood work was two weeks ago. Most recent scan a month ago. My aunt’s looked, says I look good, but then considering what she looks at most of the time,” Lucy says.

“She’s saying you don’t look dead. That’s a relief. And how’s Kay?”

“She likes Charleston, but I’m not sure it likes her. I like it okay…. Well, I’m always motivated by places that are a bad fit.”

“Which is most places.”

“I know. Lucy the freako. I trust we’re still undercover. Seems like it, since I gave my alias to that same what’s-his-name at the desk and he didn’t question it. Democratic majority notwithstanding, privacy’s a joke.”

“Don’t get me started.” He peruses her lab report. “You know how many patients I have who would self-pay if they could afford it just to keep their information out of databases?”

“Good thing. If I wanted to hack into your database, I could probably do it in five minutes. The Feds might take an hour, but they’ve probably already been in your database. And I haven’t. Because I don’t believe in violating a person’s civil rights unless it’s for a good cause.”

“That’s what they say.”

“They lie and are stupid. Especially the FBI.”

“Still topping your Most Wanted List, I see.”

“They fired me for no good cause.”

“And to think you could be abusing the Patriot Act and getting paid for it. Well, not much. What computer stuff are you selling for multimillions these days?”

“Data modeling. Neural networks that take input data and basically perform intelligent tasks the way our brains do. And I’m fooling around with a DNA project that could prove interesting.”

“TSH excellent,” he says. “Free T-four fine, so your metabolism’s working. I can tell that without a lab report. You’ve lost a little weight since I saw you last.”

“Maybe five pounds.”

“Looks like you’ve gained muscle mass. So you’ve probably lost a good ten pounds of fat and water weight from bloating.”

“Eloquently put.”

“How much are you working out?”

“The same.”

“I’ll note that as obligatory, although it’s probably obsessive. Liver panel’s fine. And your prolactin level’s great, down to two-point-four. What about your periods?”

“Normal.”

“No white, clear, or milky discharge from your nipples? Not that I expect lactation with a prolactin level this low.”

“Nope. And don’t get your hopes up. I’m not letting you check.”

He smiles, makes more notes in her record.

“Sad part is, my breasts aren’t as big.”

“There are women who’d pay a lot of money for what you’ve got. And do,” he says matter-of-factly.

“They’re not for sale. In fact, I can’t even give them away these days.”

“That I know isn’t true.”

Lucy is no longer embarrassed, can talk about anything with him. In the beginning, it was a different story, a horror and humiliation that a benign pituitary macroadenoma—a brain tumor—was causing an overproduction of the hormone prolactin that fooled her body into thinking she was pregnant. Her periods stopped. She gained weight. She didn’t have galactorrhea, or begin to produce milk, but had she not discovered what was wrong when she did, that would have been next.

“Sounds like you’re not seeing anyone.” He slides her MR films out of their envelopes, reaches up, and attaches them to light boxes.

“Nope.”

“How’s your libido?” He dims the lights in the office and flips on the light boxes, illuminating films of Lucy’s brain. “Dostinex is sometimes called the sex drug, you know. Well, if you can get it.”

She moves close to him and looks at her films. “I’m not having surgery, Nate.”

She stares dismally at the somewhat rectangular-shaped region of hypointensity at the base of the hypothalamus. Every time she looks at one of her scans, she feels there must be a mistake. That can’t be her brain. A young brain, as Nate calls it. Anatomically, a great brain, he says, except for one little glitch, a tumor about half the size of a penny.

“I don’t care what the journal articles say. No one’s cutting on me. How do I look? Please tell me okay,” she says.

Nate compares the earlier film to the new one, studies them side by side. “Not dramatically different. Still seven to eight millimeters. Nothing in the suprasellar cistern. A little shift left to right from the infundibulum of the pituitary stalk.” He points with a pen. “Optic chiasm is clear.” Points again. “Which is great.” He puts down the pen and holds up two fingers, starts with them together, then moves them apart to check her peripheral vision. “Great,” he says again. “So almost identical. The lesion isn’t growing.”

“It isn’t shrinking.”

“Have a seat.”

She sits on the edge of the couch. “Bottom line,” she says, “it’s not gone. It hasn’t burned out from the drug and become necrotic, and it never will, right?”

“But it’s not growing,” he repeats himself. “The medication did shrink it some and is containing it. All right. Options. But what do you want to do? Let me say that just because Dostinex and its generic have been linked to heart valve damage, I’m not sure you need to worry. The studies are dealing with people who take it for Parkinson’s. At your low dose? You’ll probably be fine. The bigger problem? I can write you a dozen prescriptions, but I don’t think you’ll find a single pill in this country.”

“It’s manufactured in Italy. I can get it over there. Dr. Maroni said he will.”

“Fine. But I want you to get an echocardiogram every six months.”

The phone rings. Nate punches in a button, listens briefly, and says to whoever it is, “Thanks. Call security if it seems to get out of hand. Make sure nobody touches it.” He hangs up and says to Lucy, “Apparently, someone drove up in a red Ferrari that’s attracting quite a lot of attention.”

“Kind of ironic.” She gets up from the couch. “It’s all a matter of perspective, isn’t it.”

“I’ll drive it if you don’t want it.”

“It’s not that I don’t want it. It’s just nothing feels the same anymore. And that’s not entirely bad. Just different.”

“That’s the thing about what you’ve got. It’s something you don’t want. But it’s something more than what you had, because maybe it’s changed the way you look at things.” He walks her out. “I see it every day around here.”

“Sure.”

“You’re doing well.” He stops by the door that leads out to the waiting area and there’s no one to hear them, just the man behind the desk, who smiles a lot and is on the phone again. “I’d put you in the top ten percent of my patients in terms of how well you’re doing.”

“Top ten percent. I believe that’s a B-plus. I think I started out with an A.”

“No, you didn’t. You’ve probably had this thing forever and just didn’t know it until it became symptomatic. Are you talking to Rose?”

“She won’t face it. I’m trying not to resent her for it, but it’s hard. Really, really hard. It’s not fair. Especially to my aunt.”

“Don’t let Rose run you off, because that’s probably what she’s trying to do for the very reason you just said. She can’t face it.” He slips his hands into his lab coat pockets. “She needs you. She’s certainly not going to talk about it with anyone else.”

Outside the Cancer Center, a thin woman with a scarf wrapped around her bald head and two little boys are walking around the Ferrari. The valet rushes over to Lucy.

“They haven’t got too close. I’ve been watching. Nobody has,” he says in a low, urgent voice.

She looks at the two little boys and their sick mother, and walks over to the car, remotely unlocking it. The boys and their mother step back, and fear shows on their faces. The mother looks old but probably isn’t more than thirty-five.

“I’m sorry,” she says to Lucy. “But they’re smitten. They haven’t touched it.”

“How fast can it go?” the older boy asks, a redhead, maybe twelve.

“Let’s see, four-ninety horsepower, six speed, a four-point-three-liter V-eight, eighty-five hundred rpm and carbon-fiber rear diffuser panel.

Zero to sixty in less than four seconds. Around two hundred miles an hour.”

“No way!”

“You ever driven one of these things?” Lucy says to the older boy.

“I’ve never seen one in person.”

“What about you?” Lucy asks his redheaded brother, who is maybe eight or nine.

“No, ma’am.” Shyly.

Lucy opens the driver’s door and the two redheads crane to get a peek and suck in their breath at the same time.

“What’s your name?” she asks the older boy.

“Fred.”

“Sit in the driver’s seat, Fred, and I’m going to show you how to start this thing.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Mom says to her, and she looks as if she’s about to cry. “Honey, don’t you hurt anything.”

“I’m Johnny,” the other boy says.

“You’re next,” Lucy says. “Get over here next to me and pay attention.”

Lucy turns on the battery, makes sure the Ferrari’s in neutral. She takes Fred’s finger and places it on the steering wheel’s red start button. She lets go of his hand. “Hold it in for a few seconds and fire her up.” The Ferrari roars awake.

Lucy gives each boy a ride around the parking lot while their mother stands all alone in the middle of it and smiles and waves and wipes her eyes.

Benton records Gladys Self from his office phone inside McLean’s Neuroimaging Lab. As is true of her famous daughter, the name Self suits her.

“If you’re wondering why that rich daughter of mine doesn’t put me in some nice mansion in Boca,” Mrs. Self says, “well, sir, I don’t want to be in Boca or Palm Beach or anywhere but right here in Hollywood, Florida. In my run-down little oceanfront apartment on the boardwalk.”

“Why might that be?”

“To pay her back. Think how that will look when they find me dead in a dump like this someday. Let’s see what that does to her popularity.” She chortles.

“Sounds like you might have a hard time saying anything nice about her,” Benton says. “And I do need several minutes of your praising her, Mrs. Self. Just as I’m going to need a few minutes of your being neutral and then critical.”

“Why’s she doing this, anyway?”

“I explained it at the beginning of our conversation. She volunteered for a scientific research project I’m conducting.”

“That daughter of mine doesn’t volunteer for shineola unless there’s something she wants out of it. Never known her to do anything for the pure reason of helping others. Hogwash. Ha! A family emergency. She’s lucky I didn’t get on CNN and tell the world she’s lying. Let’s see. Wonder what the truth might be. Let me follow the clues. You’re one of these police psychologists at what’s the name of your hospital? McLean? Oh, that’s right. Where all the rich and famous go. Just the sort of place she’d go to if she had to go somewhere, and I know a good reason why. Would knock you out if you knew. Bingo! She’s a patient, that’s what this is all about!”

“As I’ve said, she’s part of a project I’m conducting.” Dammit. He warned Dr. Self about this. If he called her mother to make the recording, she might suspect that Dr. Self is a patient. “I’m not allowed to discuss anything about her situation—where she is or what she’s doing or why. I can’t divulge information about any subjects in our studies.”

“I sure could divulge a thing or two to you. I knew it! She’s worth studying, all right. What normal person would get on TV and do what she does, twisting people’s minds, their lives, like that tennis player who just got murdered. Bet you dollars to donuts Marilyn’s somehow to blame for that, had her on her TV show, getting into all this personal information from her for all the world to see. It was embarrassing, can’t believe that little girl’s family allowed it.”

Benton’s seen a copy of it. Mrs. Self is right. It was too much exposure and made Drew vulnerable and accessible. Those are the ingredients for being stalked, if she was. It isn’t the purpose of his call, but he can’t resist probing. “I’m wondering how your daughter happened to get Drew Martin on her show. Did they know each other?”

“Marilyn can get anybody she wants. When she calls me on special occasions, mostly she brags about this celebrity and that. Only the way she says it, they’re all lucky to meet her, not the other way around.”

“I have a feeling you don’t see her very often.”

“Do you really think she’d go to the trouble to see her own mother?”

“Now, she’s not completely devoid of feelings, is she?”

“As a little girl she could be sweet, I know that’s hard to believe. But something went haywire when she turned sixteen. She ran off with some playboy and had her heart broken, came back home and we had quite a time of it. Did she tell you about that?”

“No, she didn’t.”

“That figures. She’ll go on and on about her father killing himself and how horrible I am and all the rest. But her own failures don’t exist. That includes people. You’d be surprised if you knew the people she’s managed to excommunicate from her life for no good reason except they’re inconvenient. Or maybe someone shows a side of her the world’s not supposed to see. That’s a killable offense.”

“I assume you don’t mean that literally.”

“Depends on your definition.”

“Let’s start with what’s positive about her.”

“She tell you she makes everybody sign a confidentiality agreement?”

“Even you?”

“Do you want to know the real reason I live like this? Because I can’t afford her so-called generosity. I live off Social Security and what retirement I got from working all my life. Marilyn never did a damn thing for me and then had the nerve to tell me I had to sign one of these confidentiality agreements, you see. She said if I didn’t, I was on my own no matter how old and sick I got. I didn’t sign it. And I don’t talk about her anyway. But I could. I sure could.”

“You’re talking to me.”

“Well, now, she told me to, didn’t she? She gave you my phone number because it suits whatever little selfish purpose she has this time. And I’m her weakness. She can’t resist. Just itching to hear what I’ll say. Validates her beliefs about herself.”

“What I need you to try,” Benton says, “is to imagine you’re telling her what you like about her. There must be something. For example, ‘I’ve always admired how bright you are’ or ‘I’m so proud of your success,’ et cetera.”

“Even if I don’t mean it?”

“If you can’t say something positive, I’m afraid we can’t do this.” Which would be fine with him.

“Don’t worry. I can lie as well as she can.”

“Then the negative. Such as, I wish you were more generous or less arrogant, or whatever comes to mind.”

“Easy as pie.”

“Finally, neutral comments. The weather, shopping, what you’ve been doing, things like that.”

“Don’t trust her. She’ll fake it and ruin your study.”

“The brain can’t fake it,” Benton says. “Not even hers.”

An hour later. Dr. Self, in a shimmering red silk pants suit and no shoes, is propped up with pillows on her bed.

“I understand your feeling this is unnecessary,” Benton says, turning pages in the pale blue Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis 1 Disorders patient edition.

“Do you need a script, Benton?”

“To keep things consistent in this study, we SCID with the book. Each time for each subject. I’m not going to ask you things that are obvious and irrelevant, such as your professional status.”

“Let me help you out,” she says. “I’ve never been a patient in a psychiatric hospital. I don’t take any medications. I don’t drink too much. I usually sleep five hours a night. How many hours does Kay sleep?”

“Have you lost or gained much weight recently?”

“I maintain my weight perfectly. What does Kay weigh these days? Does she eat a lot when she’s lonely or depressed? All that fried food down there.”

Benton flips pages. “What about strange sensations in your body or on your skin?”

“Depends on who I’m with.”

“Do you ever smell or taste things other people can’t smell or taste?”

“I do a lot of things other people can’t.”

Benton looks up at her. “I don’t think the study is a good idea, Dr. Self. This isn’t constructive.”

“That’s not for you to judge.”

“Do you think this is constructive?”

“You haven’t gotten to the mood chronology. Aren’t you going to ask me about panic attacks?”

“Have you ever had them?”

“Sweating, trembling, dizzy, racing heart. Fear I might die?” She gazes thoughtfully at him, as if he’s the patient. “What did my mother say on the tape?”

“What about when you first got here?” he says. “You seemed rather much in a panic over an e-mail. The one you mentioned to Dr. Maroni when you first got here and haven’t mentioned since.”

“Imagine your little assistant thinking she was going to SCID me.” She smiles. “I’m a psychiatrist. It would be like a beginner playing Drew Martin in tennis.”

“How are you feeling about what happened to her?” he asks. “It’s been on the news that you had her on your show. Some people have suggested the killer may have fixed on her because of…”

“As if my show was the only time she was on TV. I have so many people on my show.”

“I was going to say because of her visibility. Not her appearance on your show, specifically.”

“I’ll probably win another Emmy because of that series. Unless what happened…”

“Unless what happened?”

“That would be grossly unfair,” Dr. Self says. “If the Academy were prejudiced because of what happened to her. As if that has anything to do with the quality of my work. What did my mother say?”

“It’s important you don’t hear what she says until you’re in the scanner.”

“I’d like to talk about my father. He died when I was very young.”

“All right,” says Benton, who sits as far away from her as he possibly can, his back to the desk and the laptop computer on top of it. On a table between them, the recorder runs. “Let’s talk about your father.”

“I was two when he died. Not quite two.”

“And you remember him well enough to feel rejected by him?”

“As you know from studies I presume you’ve read, infants who aren’t breast-fed are more likely to have increased stress and distress in life. Women in prison who can’t breast-feed suffer significant compromises in their capacity to nurture and protect.”

“I don’t understand the connection. Are you implying your mother was in prison at some point?”

“She never held me to her breast, never suckled me, never soothed me with her heartbeat, never had eye contact with me when she fed me with a bottle, with a spoon, a shovel, a backhoe. Did she admit all this when you taped her? Did you ask her about our history?”

“When we tape a subject’s mother, we don’t need to know the history of their relationship.”

“Her refusal to bond with me compounded my feelings of rejection, my resentment, made me more prone to blame her for my father’s leaving me.”

“You mean his dying.”

“Interesting, don’t you think? Kay and I both lost our fathers at an early age, and both of us became doctors. But I heal the minds of the living while she cuts up the bodies of the dead. I’ve always wondered what she’s like in bed. Considering her occupation.”

“You blame your mother for your father’s death.”

“I was jealous. Several times I walked in on them while they were having sex. I saw it. From the doorway. My mother giving her body to him. Why him and not me? Why her and not me? I wanted what they gave to each other, not realizing what that meant, because certainly I didn’t want oral or genital sex with my parents and didn’t understand that part of it, what they did as things progressed. I probably thought they were in pain.”

“At not quite two, you walked in on them more than once and remember it?” He has placed the diagnostic manual under his chair, is taking notes now.

She readjusts her position on the bed, makes herself more comfortable and provocative, making sure Benton is aware of her body’s every contour. “I saw my parents alive, so vital, and then in the blink of an eye he was gone. Kay, on the other hand, witnessed her father’s long, lingering death from cancer. I lived with loss and she lived with dying and there’s a difference. So you see, Benton, as a psychiatrist, my purpose is to understand my patient’s life, while Kay’s is to understand her patient’s death. That must have some effect on you.”

“We’re not here to talk about me.”

“Isn’t it wonderful that the Pavilion doesn’t adhere to rigid institutional rules? Here we are. Despite what happened when I was admitted. Has Dr. Maroni told you about coming into my room, not this one, the first one? Shutting the door, loosening my gown? Touching me? Was he a gynecologist in a former career? You seem uncomfortable, Benton.”

“Are you feeling hypersexual?”

“So now I’m having a manic episode.” She smiles. “Let’s see how many diagnoses we can conjure up this afternoon. That’s not why I’m here. We know why I’m here.”

“You said it was because of the e-mail you discovered while you were taking a break at the studio. Friday before last.”

“I told Dr. Maroni about the e-mail.”

“From what I understand, all you told him is you’d gotten one,” Benton says.

“If it were possible, I might suspect all of you hypnotically lured me here because of that e-mail. But that would be something out of a movie or a psychosis, wouldn’t it?”

“You told Dr. Maroni you were terribly upset and feared for your life.”

“And then I was given drugs against my will. Then he fled to Italy.”

“He has a practice there. Is always in and out, especially this time of year.”

“The Dipartimento di Scienze Psichiatriche at the University of Rome. He has a villa in Rome. He has an apartment in Venice. He’s from a very wealthy Italian family. He’s also the clinical director of the Pavilion, and everyone does as he says, including you. Before he left the country, we should have sorted through what happened after I checked in.”

“‘Checked in’? You seem to refer to McLean as if it’s a hotel.”

“Now it’s too late.”

“Do you really believe that Dr. Maroni touched you inappropriately?”

“I believe I’ve made that patently clear.”

“So you do believe it.”

“Everybody here would deny it.”

“We absolutely wouldn’t. If it were true.”

“Everybody would deny it.”

“When the limousine brought you to admissions, you were quite lucid but agitated. Do you remember that? Do you remember talking to Dr. Maroni in the admissions building and telling him you needed a safe refuge because of an e-mail and would explain later?” Benton asks. “Do you remember becoming provocative with him both verbally and physically?”

“You have quite the bedside manner. Perhaps you should go back to the FBI and use rubber hoses and whatnot. Perhaps break into my e-mail and my homes and my bank accounts.”

“It’s important you remember what you were like when you first got here. I’m trying to help you do that,” he says.

“I remember him coming into my room here at the Pavilion.”

“That was later on—in the evening—when you suddenly became hysterical and incoherent.”

“Brought on by drugs. I’m very sensitive to drugs of any sort. I never take them or believe in them.”

“When Dr. Maroni came into your room, a female neuropsychologist and a female nurse were already there with you. You continued to say that something wasn’t your fault.”

“Were you there?”

“I wasn’t.”

“I see. Because you act as if you were.”

“I’ve read your chart.”

“My chart. I suppose you fantasize about selling it to the highest bidder.”

“Dr. Maroni asked you questions while the nurse checked your vitals, and it became necessary to sedate you by intramuscular injection.”

“Five milligrams Haldol, two milligrams Ativan, one milligram Cogentin. The infamous five-two-one chemical restraint used on violent inmates in forensic units. Imagine. My being treated like a violent prisoner. I remember nothing after that.”

“Can you tell me what wasn’t your fault, Dr. Self? Did it have to do with the e-mail?”

“What Dr. Maroni did wasn’t my fault.”

“So your distress had nothing to do with the e-mail that you said was your reason for coming to McLean?”

“This is a conspiracy. All of you are in on it. That’s why your comrade Pete Marino contacted me, isn’t it? Or maybe he wants out. He wants me to rescue him. Just like I did in Florida. What are you people doing to him?”

“There’s no conspiracy.”

“Do I see the investigator peeking out?”

“You’ve been here for ten days. And told no one the nature of this e-mail.”

“Because it’s really about the person who has sent me a number of e-mails. To say ‘an e-mail’ is misleading. It’s about a person.”

“Who?”

“A person Dr. Maroni could have helped. A very disturbed individual. No matter what he’s done or hasn’t done, he needs help. And if something happens to me, or to someone else, it’s Dr. Maroni’s fault. Not mine.”

“What might be your fault?”

“I just said nothing would be.”

“And there’s no e-mail you can show me that might help us understand who this person is and perhaps protect you from him?” he says.

“It’s interesting, but I’d forgotten you work here. I was reminded when I saw the ad for your research study posted in admissions. Then, of course, Marino said something when he e-mailed me. And that’s not the e-mail. So don’t get excited. He’s so bored and sexually frustrated working for Kay.”

“I’d like to talk to you about any e-mails you’ve received. Or sent.”

“Envy. That’s how it starts.” She looks at him. “Kay envies me because her own existence is so small. So desperately envious she had to lie about me in court.”

“And you’re referring to…?”

“Mainly her.” Hatred coils. “I’m perfectly objective about what happened in that gross example of litigious exploitation and never took it personally that you and Kay—mainly Kay—were witnesses, making the two of you—mainly her—champions of that gross example of litigious exploitation.” Hatred coils coldly. “I wonder how she’d feel if she knew you’re in my room with the door shut.”

“When you said you needed to talk to me alone in the privacy of your room, we made an agreement. I would record our sessions in addition to taking notes.”

“Record me. Take your notes. You’ll find them useful someday. There’s much you can learn from me. Let’s discuss your experiment.”

“Research study. The one you volunteered for, got special permission for, and I advise against. We don’t use the word experiment.”

“I’m curious why would you wish to exclude me from your experiment unless you have something to hide.”

“Frankly, Dr. Self, I’m not convinced you meet the criteria.”

“Frankly, Benton, it’s the last thing you want, now, isn’t it? But you have no choice because your hospital is far too shrewd to discriminate against me.”

“Have you ever been diagnosed as bipolar?”

“I’ve never been diagnosed as anything but gifted.”

“Has anybody in your family ever been diagnosed as bipolar?”

“What all this will prove in the end, well, that’s your business. That during various mood states the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of the brain is going to light up, given appropriate external stimuli. So what. PET and fMRI have clearly demonstrated there is an abnormal blood flow in the prefrontal regions and decreased activity in the DLPFC in people who are depressed. So now you throw violence into the mix, and what will you prove, and why does it matter? I know your little experiment wasn’t approved by the Harvard University Committee on Use of Human Subjects.”

“We don’t conduct studies that aren’t approved.”

“These healthy control subjects. Are they still healthy when you’re done? What happens to the not-so-healthy subject? The poor wretch with a history of depression, schizophrenia, bipolar or other disorder, who also has a history of hurting themselves or others or trying to, or obsessively fantasizing about it.”

“I take it Jackie briefed you,” he says.

“Not quite. She wouldn’t know the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex from a small cod. Studies of how the brain responds to maternal criticism and praise have been done before. So now you throw violence into the mix, and what will you prove, and why does it matter? You show what’s different about the brains of violent versus nonviolent individuals and what does it prove, and what does it matter? Would it have stopped the Sandman?”

“The Sandman?”

“If you looked at his brain, you’d see Iraq. And then what? Would you magically extract Iraq and he’d be fine?”

“Is the e-mail from him?”

“I don’t know who he is.”

“Might he be the disturbed person you referred to Dr. Maroni?”

“I don’t understand what you see in Kay,” she says. “Does she smell like the morgue when she comes home? But then, you’re not there when she comes home.”

“Based on what you’ve said, you got the e-mail several days after Drew’s body was found. A coincidence? If you have information about her murder, you need to tell me,” Benton says. “I’m asking you to tell me. This is very serious.”

She stretches her legs and with her bare foot touches the table between them. “If I kicked this recorder off the table and it broke, what then?”

“Whoever killed Drew will kill again,” he says.

“If I kicked this recorder”—she touches it with her bare toe and moves it a little—“what might we say and what might we do?”

Benton gets up from his chair. “Do you want someone else murdered, Dr. Self?” He picks up the recorder but doesn’t turn it off. “Haven’t you been through this before?”

“And there it is,” she says from the bed. “That’s the conspiracy. Kay will lie about me again. Just like before.”

Benton opens the door. “No,” he says. “It will be much worse this time.”

Chapter 9

Eight p.m. in Venice. Maroni refills his wineglass and smells the unpleasant canal smell below his open window as daylight wanes. Clouds are piled halfway up the sky in a thick, frothy layer, and along the horizon is the first touch of gold.

“Manic as hell.” Benton Wesley’s voice is clear, as if he is here instead of in Massachusetts. “I can’t be clinical or appropriate. I can’t sit there and listen to her manipulations and lies. Get someone else. I’m done with her. I’m handling it badly, Paulo. Like a cop, not a clinician.”

Dr. Maroni sits before his apartment window, drinking a very nice Barolo that is being spoiled by this conversation. He can’t get away from Marilyn Self. She has invaded his hospital. She has invaded Rome. Now she has followed him to Venice.

“What I’m asking is if I can remove her from the research study. I don’t want to scan her,” Benton says.

“Certainly I won’t tell you what to do,” Dr. Maroni replies. “It’s your study. But if you want my recommendation? Don’t piss her off. Go ahead and scan her. Make it a pleasant experience and just assume the data is no good. Then she’s gone.”

“What do you mean ‘gone’?”

“I see you haven’t been informed. She’s been discharged and is leaving after the scan,” Dr. Maroni says, and through his open shutters, the canal is the color of green olives and as smooth as glass. “Have you talked with Otto?”

“Otto?” Benton says.

“Captain Poma.”

“I know who he is. Why would I talk to him about this?”

“I had dinner with him last night in Rome. I’m surprised he hasn’t contacted you. He’s on his way to the U.S. In the air as we speak.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“He wants to talk to Dr. Self about Drew Martin. You see, he feels sure she has information and isn’t coming forward with it.”

“Please tell me you didn’t.”

“I didn’t. He knows anyway.”

“I don’t see how that’s possible,” Benton says. “Do you realize what she’ll do if she thinks we told anybody she’s a patient here?”

A water taxi slowly rumbles past, and water laps against Dr. Maroni’s apartment.

“I assumed he got the information from you,” he says. “Or Kay. Since both of you are members of the IIR and are investigating Drew Martin’s murder.”

“He certainly didn’t.”

“What about Lucy?”

“Neither Kay nor Lucy knows Dr. Self is here,” Benton says.

“Lucy is good friends with Josh.”

“Jesus Christ. She sees him when she’s scanned. They talk about computers. Why would he tell her?”

Across the canal, a seagull on a rooftop cries like a cat, and a tourist tosses bread to it, and the bird cries more.

“What I’m saying is hypothetical, of course,” Dr. Maroni says. “I suppose it entered my mind because he calls her often when the computer’s down or there’s some other problem he can’t fix. You see, it’s too much for Josh to be an MRI tech and the IT.”

“What?”

“The question is where she’ll go and what further trouble she’ll cause.”

“New York, I assume,” Benton says.

“You’ll tell me when you know.” Dr. Maroni drinks. “This is all hypothetical. I mean about Lucy.”

“Even if Josh told her, are you making the leap that she then told Captain Poma, who she doesn’t even know?”

“We need to monitor Dr. Self when she leaves,” Dr. Maroni says. “She’s going to cause trouble.”

“What is all this cryptic talk? I don’t understand,” Benton says.

“I can see that. It’s a shame. Well, no great matter. She’ll be gone. You’ll tell me where she goes.”

“No great matter? If she finds out someone told Captain Poma she’s a patient at McLean or was a patient here, it’s a HIPAA violation. She’ll cause trouble, all right, which is exactly what she wants.”

“I have no control over what he tells her or when. The Carabinieri’s in charge of the investigation.”

“I don’t understand what’s going on here, Paulo. When I did the SCID, she told me about the patient she referred to you,” Benton says, frustration in his voice. “I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me.”

Along the canal, apartment facades are muted pastel shades, and brick is exposed where the plaster is worn away. A polished teak boat passes beneath an arched brick bridge, and the captain stands, and the bridge is very low, and his head almost touches it. He works the throttle with his thumb.

“Yes, she did refer a patient to me. Otto has asked me about it,” Dr. Maroni says. “Last night I told him what I know. At least, what I’m at liberty to say.”

“It would have been nice if you’d told me.”

“Now I’m telling you. If you hadn’t brought it up, I still would be telling you. I saw him several times in the space of several weeks. Last November,” Dr. Maroni says.

“He calls himself the Sandman. According to Dr. Self. Does that sound familiar?”

“I know nothing about the name Sandman.”

“She says that’s how he signs his e-mails,” Benton says.

“When she called my office last October and asked me to see this man in Rome, she didn’t supply me with any e-mails. She never said anything about him calling himself the Sandman. He never mentioned the name when he saw me in my office. Twice, I believe. In Rome, as I’ve said. I have no information that would lead me to conclude he’s killed anyone, and I told Otto the same thing. So I can’t give you access to his file or my evaluation of him, and I know you understand this, Benton.”

Dr. Maroni reaches for the decanter and refills his glass as the sun settles into the canal. Air blowing through the open shutters is cooler, and the canal smell isn’t as strong.

“Can you give me any information about him at all?” Benton asks. “Any personal history? A physical description? I know he was in Iraq. That’s all I know.”

“I couldn’t if I wanted to, Benton. I don’t have my notes.”

“Meaning there could be important information in them.”

“Hypothetically,” Dr. Maroni says.

“Don’t you think you should check?”

“I don’t have them,” Dr. Maroni says.

“You don’t have them?”

“Not in Rome, is what I mean,” he says from his sinking city.

Hours later, the Kick ’N Horse Saloon, twenty miles north of Charleston.

Marino sits across the table from Shandy Snook, both of them eating chicken-fried steak with biscuits, gravy, and grits. His cell phone rings. He looks at the number on the display.

“Who is it?” she says, sipping a bloody Mary through a straw.

“Why can’t people leave me alone?”

“Better not be what I think it is,” she says. “It’s seven-damn-o’clock, and we’re eating dinner.”

“I ain’t here.” Marino pushes a button to silence the phone, acts like it doesn’t bother him.

“Yeah.” She loudly slurps up the last of her drink, reminding him of Drano unclogging a sink. “Nobody home.”

Inside the saloon’s Feed Troff, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s booming through the speakers, the Budweiser neon signs are lit up, ceiling fans slowly turn. Saddles and autographs fill the walls, and models of motorcycles and rodeo horses and ceramic snakes decorate windowsills. The wooden tables are packed with bikers. More bikers are outside on the porch, everybody eating and drinking and getting ready for the Hed Shop Boys concert.

“Son of a bitch,” Marino mumbles, staring at the cell phone on the table, at the wireless Bluetooth earpiece next to it. Ignoring the call is impossible. It’s her. Even though the display says Restricted, he knows it’s her. By now she’s bound to have seen what’s on the desktop of his computer. He’s surprised and irritated it’s taken this long. At the same time, he feels the thrill of vindication. He imagines Dr. Self wanting him like Shandy does. Wearing him out like Shandy does. For a solid week, he’s gotten no sleep.

“Like I always say, the person’s not going to get any deader, right?” Shandy reminds him. “Let the Big Chief take care of it for once.”

It’s her. Shandy doesn’t know it. Assumes it’s some funeral home. Marino reaches for his bourbon and ginger, keeps glancing at his cell phone.

“Let her take care of it for once,” Shandy rants on. “Fuck her.”

Marino doesn’t answer, his tension growing as he swirls what’s left of his drink. Not answering Scarpetta’s calls or returning them makes his chest tight with anxiety. He thinks about what Dr. Self said and feels deceived and abused. His face heats up. For the better part of twenty years, Scarpetta has made him feel he’s not good enough, when maybe the problem is her. That’s right. It’s probably her. She doesn’t like men. Hell, no. And all these years she’s made him feel the problem is him.

“Let the Big Chief take care of whoever the latest stiff is. She’s got nothing better to do,” Shandy says.

“You don’t know a thing about her or what she’s doing, either.”

“You’d be surprised what I know about her. Better watch it.” Shandy motions for another drink.

“Better watch what?”

“You sticking up for her. Because it sure is getting on my nerves. Like maybe you keep forgetting who I am in your life.”

“After a whole week.”

“Just remember, baby. It’s not on call. But at her beck and call,” she says. “Why should you? Why should you always jump when she says it? Jump! Jump!” She snaps her fingers and laughs.

“Shut the fuck up.”

“Jump! Jump!” She leans forward so he can see what’s inside her silk vest.

Marino reaches for his phone, reaches for his earpiece.

“Truth is?” She’s not wearing a bra. “She treats you like you’re nothing more than an answering service, a flunky, a nobody. I’m not the first person who’s said it.”

“I don’t let anybody treat me like that,” he says. “We’ll see who the nobody is.” He thinks of Dr. Self and imagines himself on international TV.

Shandy reaches under the table, and he can see down her vest, see as much as he wants. She rubs him.

“Don’t,” he says, waiting and getting anxious and angry.

Pretty soon, other bikers will find excuses to walk past so they can take in the sight of her leaning against the table just right. He watches her do it, and her breasts swell and her cleavage deepens. She knows how to lean into a conversation so anybody interested can imagine a mouthful of her. A big guy with a big gut and a chain attached to his wallet slowly gets up from the bar. He takes his time walking to the men’s room, taking in the view, and Marino feels violent.

“You don’t like it?” Shandy rubs him. “’Cause it sure feels to me like you do. Remember last night, baby? Like a damn teenager.”

“Don’t,” he says.

“Why? Am I giving you a hard time?” says Shandy, who prides herself on her way with words.

He moves her hand. “Not now.”

He returns Scarpetta’s call. “Marino here,” he says curtly, as if he’s talking to a stranger, so Shandy won’t know who it is.

“I need to see you,” Scarpetta says to him.

“Yeah. What time?” Marino acts like he doesn’t know her, and he’s aroused and jealous as bikers wander past the table, looking at his dark, exotic girlfriend exposing herself.

“As soon as you can get here. To my house,” Scarpetta’s voice says in his earpiece, and her tone is one he’s not accustomed to, and he senses her fury like an approaching storm. She’s seen the e-mails, he’s sure of it.

Shandy gives him a who are you talking to? look.

“Yeah, I guess so.” Marino feigns irritation, glancing at his watch. “Be there in a half-hour.” He hangs up, says to Shandy, “A body coming in.”

She looks at him as if trying to read the truth in his eyes, as if for some reason she knows he’s lying. “Which funeral home?” She leans back in her chair.

“Meddicks’. Again. What a squirrel. Must do nothing but drive that damn hearse morning, noon, and night. What we call an ambulance chaser.”

“Oh,” she says. “That sucks.” Her attention wanders to a man in a flame-pattern do-rag, his boots low in the heel. He pays no attention to them as he walks past their table to the ATM.

Marino noticed him when they got here earlier, has never seen him before. He watches him get a pitiful five bucks out of the ATM while his mutt of a dog sleeps curled up in a chair at the bar. The man hasn’t petted him once or even asked the bartender for a treat for him—not so much as a bowl of water.

“I don’t know why it’s got to be you,” Shandy starts in again, but her voice is different. Quieter, colder, the way she gets with the first frost of spite. “When you think of all you know and all you’ve done. The big-shot homicide detective. You ought to be the boss, not her. Not her dyke niece, either.” She drags the last of a biscuit through white gravy smeared on her paper plate. “The Big Chief’s kind of turned you into the Invisible Man.”

“I told you. Don’t talk about Lucy like that. You don’t know shit.”

“Truth is truth. I don’t need you to tell me. Everyone in this bar knows what kind of saddle she rides.”

“You can shut up about her.” Marino angrily finishes his drink. “You keep your mouth shut about Lucy. Me and her go back to when she was a kid. I taught her how to drive, taught her how to shoot, and I don’t want to hear another word. You got it?” He wants another drink, knows he shouldn’t, has already had three bourbons, strong ones. He lights two cigarettes, one for Shandy, one for him. “We’ll see who’s invisible.”

“Truth is truth. You had a real career before the Big Chief started dragging you around everywhere. And why’d you tag along as usual? I know why.” She gives him one of her accusatory looks, blows out a stream of smoke. “You thought she might want you.”

“Maybe we should move,” Marino says. “Go to a big city.”

“Me move with you?” She blows out more smoke.

“What about New York?”

“We can’t ride our bikes in New Damn York. No way I’m moving to a place swarming like a beehive with all those stuck-up damn Yankees.”

He gives her his sexiest look and reaches under the table. He rubs her thigh because he’s terrified of losing her. Every man in this bar wants her, and he’s the one she’s picked. He rubs her thigh and thinks about Scarpetta and what she’ll say. She’s read Dr. Self’s e-mails. Maybe she’s realizing who he is and what other women think of him.

“Let’s go to your place,” Shandy says.

“How come we never go to your place? You afraid to be seen with me or something? Like maybe you live around rich people and I’m not good enough?”

“I have to decide whether I’m going to keep you. See, I don’t like slavery,” she says. “She’s gonna work you to death like a slave, and I know all about slaves. My great-grandfather was a slave, but not my daddy. Nobody told him what the hell to do.”

Marino holds up his empty plastic cup, smiles at Jess, who’s looking mighty fine this evening in tight jeans and a tube top. She appears with another Maker’s Mark and ginger, sets it in front of him. She says, “You riding home?”

“Not a problem.” He winks at her.

“Maybe you should stay in the campground. I got an empty camper back there.” She has several in the woods behind the bar, in case patrons aren’t safe to ride.

“I couldn’t be better.”

“Bring me another.” Shandy has a bad habit of barking orders at people who don’t have her status in life.

“I’m still waiting on you to win the bike build-off, Pete.” Jess ignores Shandy, talks mechanically, slowly, her eyes on Marino’s lips.

It took a while for him to get used to it. He’s learned to look at Jess when he talks, is never too loud, never exaggerates his speech. He’s hardly aware of her deafness anymore and feels a special closeness to her, maybe because they can’t communicate without looking at each other.

“One hundred and twenty five thousand dollars cash for first place.” Jess draws out the staggering amount.

“I’m betting River Rats is going to get it this year,” Marino says to Jess, knowing she’s just messing with him, maybe flirting a little. He’s never built a bike or entered any contest, and never will.

“And I’m betting on Thunder Cycle.” Shandy inserts herself in that snotty way Marino hates. “Eddie Trotta’s so damn hot. He can trotta into my bed anytime he wants.”

“Tell you what,” Marino says to Jess, putting his arm around her waist, looking up at her so she can see him talking. “One of these days, I’ll have big bucks. I won’t need to win a bike build-off or work a shit job.”

“He ought to quit his shit job, doesn’t earn enough to make it worth his while—or worth my while,” Shandy says. “He’s nothing but a squaw to the Big Chief. Besides, he doesn’t need to work. He’s got me.”

“Oh, yeah?” Marino knows he shouldn’t say it, but he’s drunk and hateful. “What if I told you I got an offer to go on TV in New York?”

“As what? A commercial for Rogaine?” Shandy laughs as Jess tries to read what’s being said.

“As a consultant for Dr. Self. She’s been asking me.” He can’t stop himself, should change the subject.

Shandy looks genuinely startled, blurts, “You’re lying. Why would she care a shit about you?”

“We got a history. She wants me to go to work for her. I’ve been thinking about it, maybe would have accepted right away, but that would mean moving to New York and leaving you, babe.” He puts his arm around her.

She pulls away. “Well, looks like her show’s on its way to being a comedy.”

“Put our guest over there on my tab,” Marino says with loud largesse, nodding and pointing at the man in the flame do-rag sitting next to his dog at the bar. “He’s having a rough night. Got five lousy bucks to his name.”

The man turns around and Marino gets a good look at a face pitted with acne scars. He has the snake eyes that Marino associates with people who have done time.

“I can pay for my own damn beer,” the man in the flame do-rag says.

Shandy continues complaining to Jess, not bothering to look at her face, so she may as well be talking to herself.

“Don’t appear to me like you can pay for much of anything, and I apologize for my southern hospitality,” Marino says, loud enough for everyone in the bar to hear.

“I don’t think you should go anywhere.” Jess looks at Marino, at his drink.

“There’s room for only one woman in his life, and one of these days he’s gonna figure that out,” Shandy says to Jess and anybody else listening. “Without me, what’s he got, anyway? Who do you think gave him that fancy necklace he’s wearing?”

“Fuck you,” the man in the do-rag says to Marino. “Fuck your mother.”

Jess walks over to the bar, crosses her arms. She says to the man in the do-rag, “We talk polite in here. I think you better leave.”

“What?” he says loudly, cupping a hand behind his ear, mocking her.

Marino’s chair scrapes back and in three long strides he is between them. “You say you’re sorry, asshole,” Marino says to him.

The man’s eyes touch his like needles. He crumples the five-dollar bill he got out of the ATM, drops it on the floor, crushes it beneath his boot as if he’s putting out a cigarette. He smacks the dog’s butt, heads to the door as he says to Marino, “Why don’t you come out here like a man? I got something to say to you.”

Marino follows him and his dog across the dirt parking lot to an old chopper, probably put together in the seventies, a four-speed with a kick start, flame paint job, something funny-looking about the license tag.

“Cardboard,” Marino realizes out loud. “Homemade. Now, ain’t that sweet. Tell me what you got to say.”

“Reason I’m here tonight? Got a message for you,” the man in the dorag says. “Sit!” he yells at the dog, and it cowers, flattens on its belly.

“Next time send a letter.” Marino grabs him by the front of his dirty denim jacket. “It’s cheaper than a funeral.”

“You don’t let go of me, I’ll get you later in a way you won’t like. There’s a reason I’m here and you better listen.”

Marino takes his hands off him, aware that everyone in the saloon has moved out on the porch, watching. The dog remains flat on his belly, cowering.

“That bitch you work for ain’t welcome in these parts and would be smart to go back where she come from,” the man in the do-rag says. “Just passing along a word of advice from someone who can do something about it.”

“What’d you call her?”

“Say this much, that bitch’s got some set of tits.” He cups his hands and licks the air. “If she don’t leave town, I’ll find out just how nice.”

Marino kicks the chopper hard and it thuds to the dirt. He grabs his forty-caliber Glock out of the back of his jeans and points it between the man’s eyes.

“Don’t be stupid,” the man says, as bikers start yelling from the porch. “You shoot me, your worthless life’s over and you know it.”

“Hey! Hey! Hey!”

“Whoa, now!”

“Pete!”

Marino feels as if the top of his head is floating off as he stares at the spot between the man’s eyes. He racks back the slide, chambering a round.

“You kill me, you may as well be dead, too,” the man in the do-rag says, but he’s scared.

Bikers are on their feet, shouting. Marino is vaguely aware of people venturing into the parking lot.

“Pick up your piece-of-shit bike,” Marino says, lowering the gun. “Leave the dog.”

“I ain’t leaving my damn dog!”

“You’re leaving him. You treat him like shit. Now get out of here before I give you a third eye.”

As the chopper roars away, Marino clears the chamber, tucks the pistol back into his waistband, unsure what just came over him and terrified by it. He pets the dog and it stays flat on its belly and licks his hand.

“We’ll find someone nice to take care of you,” Marino says to him as fingers dig into his arm. He looks up at Jess.

“I think it’s time you deal with this,” she says.

“What are you talking about?”

“You know what. That woman. I warned you. She’s beating you down, making you feel like a nothing, and look what’s happening. In one short week you’ve turned into a wild man.”

His hands are shaking badly. He looks at her so she can read his lips. “That was stupid, wasn’t it, Jess. Now what?” He pets the dog.

“He’ll be the saloon dog, and if that man comes back, it won’t be good for him. But you better be careful now. You’ve started something.”

“You ever seen him before?”

She shakes her head.

Marino notices Shandy on the porch, by the railing. He wonders why she hasn’t left the porch. He almost killed someone and she’s still on the porch.

Chapter 10

Somewhere a dog barks in the near dark, and the barking becomes more insistent.

Scarpetta detects the distant carbureted potato-potato-potato rhythm of Marino’s Roadmaster. She can hear the damn thing blocks away on Meeting Street, heading south. Moments later it roars through the narrow alleyway behind her house. He’s been drinking. She could hear it in his voice when she talked to him on the phone. He’s being obnoxious.

She needs him sober if they’re going to have a productive conversation—perhaps the most important one they’ve ever had. She begins making a pot of coffee as he turns left on King Street, then another left into the narrow driveway she shares with her unpleasant neighbor, Mrs. Grimball. Marino rolls the throttle a few times to announce himself and kills the engine.

“You got something to drink in there?” he says as Scarpetta opens the front door. “A little bourbon would be nice. Wouldn’t it, Mrs. Grimball!” he shouts up at the yellow frame house, and a curtain moves. He locks the bike’s front fork, slips the key in his pocket.

“Inside, now,” Scarpetta says, realizing he’s far more intoxicated than she thought. “For God’s sake, why did you find it necessary to ride down the alley and yell at my neighbor?” she says as he follows her to the kitchen, his booted footsteps loud, his head almost touching the top of each door frame they pass through.

“Security check. I like to make sure nothing’s going on back there, no lost hearses, no homeless people hanging out.”

He pulls out a chair, sits, slumped back. The odor of booze is powerful, his face bright red, his eyes bloodshot. He says, “I can’t stay long. Got to get back to my woman. She thinks I’m at the morgue.”

Scarpetta hands him a coffee, black. “You’re going to stay long enough to sober up, otherwise you’re not going anywhere near your motorcycle. I can’t believe you got on it in your condition. That’s not like you. What’s wrong with you?”

“So I had a few. Big deal. I’m fine.”

“It is a big deal, and you’re not fine. I don’t care how well you supposedly handle alcohol. Every drunk driver thinks he’s fine right before he ends up dead or maimed or in jail.”

“I didn’t come here to be lectured to.”

“I didn’t invite you over to have you show up drunk.”

“Why did you invite me? To rag on me? To find something else wrong with me? Something else not up to your high-horse standards?”

“It’s not like you to talk this way.”

“Maybe you’ve just never listened,” he says.

“I asked you to come over in hopes we could have an open and honest conversation, but it doesn’t appear this is a good time. I have a guest room. Maybe you should go to sleep and we’ll talk in the morning.”

“Seems as good a time as any.” He yawns and stretches, doesn’t touch his coffee. “Talk away. Either that or I’m out of here.”

“Let’s go into the living room and sit in front of the fire.” She gets up from the kitchen table.

“It’s seventy-five friggin’ degrees outside.” He gets up, too.

“Then I’ll make it nice and chilly in here.” She goes to a thermostat and turns on the air-conditioning. “I’ve always found it easier to talk in front of a fire.”

He follows her into her favorite room, a small sitting area with a brick fireplace, heart-of-pine floors, exposed beams, and plaster walls. She places a chemical log on the grate and lights it, and pulls two chairs close and switches off the lamps.

He watches flames burn the paper wrapping off the log and says, “I can’t believe you use those things. Original this, original that, and then you use fake logs.”

Lucious Meddick drives around the block and his resentment festers.

He saw them go inside after that asshole investigator thundered up on his motorcycle drunk and disturbed the neighbors. Daily double, Lucious thinks. He’s blessed because he’s been wronged and God is making it up to him. Setting out to teach her a lesson, Lucious has caught both of them, and he slowly noses his hearse into the unlighted alleyway, worrying about another flat tire, and getting angrier. He snaps the rubber band hard as his frustration spikes. Voices of dispatchers on his police scanner are a distant static he can decipher in his sleep.

They didn’t call him. He drifted past a fatal car crash on William Hilton Highway, saw the body being loaded into a competitor’s hearse—an old one—and again Lucious was ignored. Beaufort County is her turf now, and nobody calls him. She’s blackballed him because he made a mistake about her address. If she thought that was a violation of her privacy, she doesn’t know the meaning.

Filming women through a window at night is nothing new. Surprising how easy it is and how many of them don’t bother with curtains or blinds, or leave them open just a tiny inch or two, thinking Who’s going to look? Who’s going to get down behind the shrubbery or climb up in a tree to see? Lucious, that’s who. See how the snotty lady doctor likes watching herself in a home movie that people can gawk at for nothing and never know who took it. Better still, he’ll get both of them in the act. Lucious thinks of the hearse—nowhere near as nice as his—and the car wreck, and the unfairness of it is unendurable.

Who was called? Not him. Not Lucious, even after he radioed the dispatcher and said he was in the area, and she came back and told him in her snippy, terse tone that she hadn’t called him and what unit was he? He said he wasn’t a unit and she told him in so many words to stay off the cop channels and, for that matter, off the air. He snaps the rubber band until it stings like a whip. He bumps over pavers, past the iron gate behind the lady doctor’s carriage garden, and spots a white Cadillac blocking his way. It’s dark back here. He snaps the rubber band and swears. He recognizes the oval bumper sticker on the Cadillac’s rear bumper.

HH for Hilton Head.

He’ll just leave his damn hearse right here. Nobody drives through this damn alley anyway, and he has a mind to call in the Cadillac and laugh while the police give the driver a ticket. He gleefully thinks about You Tube and the trouble he’s about to cause. That damn investigator is in that damn bitch’s pants. He saw them walk into the house, sneaking and cheating. He has a girl, that sexy thing he was with in the morgue, and Lucious saw them carrying on when they weren’t paying attention. From what he hears, Dr. Scarpetta has a man up north. Isn’t that something. Lucious makes a fool of himself, promoting his business, telling the rude investigator that he—Lucious Meddick—would appreciate referrals from him and his boss, and their response? To disrespect him. To discriminate. Now they have to pay.

He turns off the engine and the lights and gets out as he glares at the Cadillac. He opens the back of the hearse and an empty stretcher is clamped to the floor, a stack of neatly folded white sheets and white body pouches on top of it. He finds the camcorder, and extra batteries in a utility box he keeps in back, and shuts the tailgate and stares at the Cadillac, walks past it, considering the best way to get close to her house.

Someone moves behind the glass of the driver’s door, just the faintest hint of something dark inside the dark car, shifting. Lucious is happy as he turns on the camcorder to see how much memory is left, and the darkness inside the Cadillac shifts again, and Lucious walks around the back of it and films the license plate.

Probably some couple making out, and he gets excited thinking about it. Then he’s offended. They saw his headlights and didn’t get out of the way. Disrespect. They saw him park his hearse in the dark because he couldn’t get past, and they couldn’t have been more inconsiderate. They’ll be sorry. He raps his knuckles against the glass, about to scare them but good.

“I got your plate number.” He raises his voice. “And I’m calling the damn police.”

The burning log crackles. An English bracket clock on the mantle tick-tocks.

“What’s really going on with you?” Scarpetta says, watching him. “What’s wrong?”

“You’re the one who asked me here. So I assume something’s wrong with you.”

“Something’s wrong with us. How about that? You seem miserable. You’re making me miserable. This past week has been out of control. Do you want to tell me what you’ve done and why?” she says. “Or do you want me to tell you?”

The fire crackles.

“Please, Marino. Talk to me.”

He stares at the fire. For a while, neither of them talk.

“I know about the e-mails,” she says. “But then, you probably already know that, since you asked Lucy to check out the alleged false alarm the other night.”

“So you have her snoop around my computer. So much for trust.”

“Oh, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to say anything about trust.”

“I’ll say what I want.”

“The tour you gave your girlfriend. All of it was caught on camera. I’ve seen it. Every minute of it.”

Marino’s face twitches. Of course he knew the cameras and microphones were there, but she can tell it didn’t occur to him that he and Shandy were being watched. Certainly, he would have known their every action and word was being captured, but most likely he assumed that Lucy would have no reason to review the recordings. He was right about that. She wouldn’t have had a reason. He was confident he would get away with it, and that makes what he did even worse.

“There are cameras everywhere,” she says. “Did you really think no one would find out what you did?”

He doesn’t answer.

“I thought you cared. I thought you cared about that murdered little boy. Yet you unzipped his pouch and played show-and-tell with your girlfriend. How could you do such a thing?”

He won’t look at her or respond.

“Marino. How could you do such a thing?” she asks him again.

“It was her idea. The tape should have showed you that,” he says.

“A tour without my permission is bad enough. But how could you let her look at bodies? Especially his.”

“You saw the tape from when Lucy was spying on me.” He glowers at her. “Shandy wouldn’t take no for an answer. She wouldn’t get out of the cooler. I tried.”

“There’s no excuse.”

“Spying. I’m sick of it.”

“Betrayal and disrespect. I’m sick of it,” Scarpetta says.

“I’ve been thinking of quitting anyway,” he goes on in a nasty tone. “If you stuck your nose in my e-mails from Dr. Self, you ought to know I got better opportunities than hanging out here with you for the rest of my life.”

“Quit? Or are you hoping I’ll fire you? Because that’s what you deserve after what you did. We don’t give tours of the morgue and make a spectacle of the poor people who end up there.”

“Jesus, I hate the way women overreact to everything. Get so damn emotional and irrational. Go ahead. Fire me,” he says thickly, over-enunciating, the way people do when they try too hard to sound sober.

“This is exactly what Dr. Self wants to happen.”

“You’re just jealous because she’s a hell of a lot more important than you.”

“This isn’t the Pete Marino I know.”

“You ain’t the Dr. Scarpetta I know. Did you read what else she said about you?”

“She said quite a lot about me.”

“The lie you live. Why don’t you finally admit to it? Maybe that’s where Lucy got it. From you.”

“My sexual preference? Is that what you’re so desperate to know?”

“You’re afraid to admit it.”

“If what Dr. Self implied were true, I certainly wouldn’t be afraid of it. It’s people like her, people like you, who seem to be afraid of it.”

He leans back in his chair, and for an instant, he seems near tears. Then his face turns hard again as he stares at the fire.

“What you did yesterday,” she says, “isn’t the Marino I’ve known all these years.”

“Maybe it is and you just never wanted to see it.”

“I know it isn’t. What’s happened to you?”

“I don’t know how I got here,” he says. “I look back on it and see this guy who did good as a boxer for a while, but I didn’t want to have mush for a brain. Got sick of being a uniform cop in New York. Married Doris, who got sick of me, had a sicko son who’s dead, and I’m still chasing sicko assholes. I’m not sure why. Never have been able to figure out why you do what you do, either. You probably won’t tell me.” Sullenly.

“Maybe because I grew up in a house where nobody talked to me in a way that conveyed anything I needed to hear or made me feel understood or important. Maybe because I watched my father die. Every day, that’s all any of us watched. Maybe I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to understand the thing that defeated me as a child. Death. I don’t think there are simple or even logical reasons for why we’re who we are and do what we do.” She looks over at him, but he doesn’t look at her. “Maybe there’s no simple or even logical answer that explains your behavior. But I wish there were.”

“In the old days, I didn’t work for you. That’s what’s changed.” He gets up. “I’m having a bourbon.”

“More bourbon isn’t what you need,” she says, dismayed.

He isn’t listening, and he knows his way to the bar. She hears him open a cabinet and get out a glass, then another cabinet and a bottle. He walks back into the room with a tumbler of liquor in one hand, the bottle in the other. An uneasiness starts in the pit of her stomach, and she wants him to leave but can’t send him out in the middle of the night drunk.

He sets the bottle on the coffee table and says, “We got along pretty good all those years in Richmond when I was the top detective and you was the chief.” He lifts his glass. Marino doesn’t sip. He takes big swallows. “Then you got fired and I quit. Since then, nothing’s turned out the way I thought. I liked the hell out of Florida. We had a kick-ass training facility. Me in charge of investigations, good pay, even had my own celebrity shrink. Not that I need a shrink, but I lost weight, was in great shape. Was doing really good until I stopped seeing her.”

“Had you continued to see Dr. Self, she would have decimated your life. And I can’t believe you don’t realize that her communicating with you is nothing but manipulation. You know what she’s like. You saw what she was like in court. You heard her.”

He takes another swallow of bourbon. “For once there’s a woman more powerful than you, and you can’t stand it. Maybe can’t stand my relationship with her. So you got to bad-mouth her because what else can you do. You’re stuck down here in no-man’s-land and about to become a housewife.”

“Don’t insult me. I don’t want to fight with you.”

He drinks, and his meanness is wide awake now. “My relationship with her is maybe why you wanted us to move from Florida. I’m seeing it now.”

“I believe Hurricane Wilma is why we moved from Florida,” she says, as the feeling in her stomach gets worse. “That and my need to have a real office, a real practice, again.”

He drains his glass, pours more.

“You’ve had enough,” she says.

“You got that right.” He lifts his glass, takes another swallow.

“I think it’s time I call a cab to take you home.”

“Maybe you should start a real practice somewhere else and get the hell out of here. You’d be better off.”

“You’re not the judge of where I’d be better off,” she says, watching him carefully, firelight moving on his big face. “Please don’t drink anymore. You’ve had enough.”

“I’ve had enough, all right.”

“Marino, please don’t let Dr. Self drive a wedge between you and me.”

“I don’t need her to do that. You done it on your own.”

“Let’s don’t do this.”

“Let’s do.” Slurring, swaying a bit in his chair, a gleam in his eyes that’s unnerving. “I don’t know how many days I got left. Who the hell knows what’s going to happen. So I don’t intend to waste my time in a place I hate, working for someone who don’t treat me with the respect I deserve. Like you’re better than me. Well, you’re not.”

“What do you mean by how many days you’ve got left? Are you telling me you’re sick?” she says.

“Sick and tired. That’s what I’m telling you.”

She’s never seen him this drunk. He’s swaying on his feet, pouring more bourbon, spilling it. Her impulse is to take the bottle away from him, but the look in his eyes stops her.

“You live alone and it ain’t safe,” he says. “It’s not safe, you’re living here in this little old house alone.”

“I’ve always lived alone, more or less.”

“Yeah. What the fuck’s that say about Benton? Hope you two have a nice life.”

She’s never seen Marino this drunk and hateful, and she doesn’t know what to do.

“I’m in a situation where I got to make choices. So now I’m gonna tell you the truth.” He spits as he talks, the glass of bourbon perilously tilted in his hand. “I’m bored as hell working for you.”

“If that’s how you feel, I’m glad you’re telling me.” But the more she tries to soothe him, the more inflamed he gets.

“Benton the rich snob. Doctor Wesley. So because I ain’t a doctor, lawyer, or Indian chief, I’m not good enough for you. Tell you one goddamn thing, I’m good enough for Shandy, and she’s sure as hell not what you think. From a better family than yours. She didn’t grow up poor in Miami with some blue-collar grocery store worker just off the boat.”

“You’re very drunk. You can sleep in the guest room.”

“Your family’s no better than mine. Just-off-the-boat Italians with nothing but cheap macaroni and tomato sauce to eat five nights a week,” he says.

“Let me get you a cab.”

He slams his glass down on the coffee table. “I think it’s a real good idea for me to get on my horse and ride.” He grabs a chair to steady himself.

“You’re not going anywhere near that motorcycle,” she says.

He starts walking, knocks against the door frame as she holds on to his arm. He almost drags her toward the front door as she tries to stop him, implores him not to go. He digs in a pocket for his motorcycle key and she snatches it out of his hand.

“Give me my key. I’m saying it real polite.”

She clenches it in her fist behind her back, in the small foyer at the front door. “You’re not getting on your bike. You can hardly walk. You’re taking a cab or staying here tonight. I’m not going to let you kill yourself or somebody else. Please listen to me.”

“Give it to me.” He stares at her with flat eyes, and he’s a huge man she no longer knows, a stranger who might physically hurt her. “Give it to me.” He reaches behind her and grabs her wrist and she is shocked by fear.

“Marino, let go of me.” She struggles to free her arm, but it may as well be in a vise. “You’re hurting me.”

He reaches around and grabs her other wrist, and fear turns to terror as he leans into her, his massive body pressing her against the wall. Her mind races with desperate thoughts of how to stop him before he goes any further.

“Marino, let go of me. You’re hurting me. Let’s go sit back down in the living room.” She tries to sound unafraid, her arms painfully pinned behind her. He presses hard against her. “Marino. Stop it. You don’t mean this. You’re very drunk.”

He kisses her and grabs her, and she turns her head away, tries to push his hands away, struggles and tells him no. The motorcycle key clatters to the floor as he kisses her and she resists him and tries to make him listen. He rips open her blouse. She tells him to stop, tries to stop him as he tears at her clothes. She tries to push away his hands, and tells him he’s hurting her, and then she doesn’t struggle with him anymore because he’s somebody else. He isn’t Marino. He’s a stranger attacking her inside her house. She sees the pistol in the back of his jeans as he drops to his knees, hurting her with his hands and mouth.

“Marino? This is what you want? To rape me? Marino?” She sounds so calm and unafraid, her voice seems to come from outside her body. “Marino? Is this what you want? To rape me? I know you don’t want that. I know you don’t.”

He suddenly stops. He releases her, and the air moves and is cool on her skin, wet from his saliva and chafed and raw from his violence and his beard. He covers his face with his hands and hunches forward on his knees and hugs her around her legs and begins to sob like a child. She slides the pistol out of his waistband as he cries.

“Let go.” She tries to move away from him. “Let me go.”

On his knees, he covers his face with his hands. She drops out the pistol’s magazine and pulls back the slide to make sure there isn’t a round in the chamber. She tucks the gun in the drawer of a table by the door and picks up the motorcycle key. She hides it and the magazine inside the umbrella stand. She helps Marino up, helps him back to the guest bedroom off the kitchen. The bed is small, and he seems to fill every inch of it as she makes him lie down. She pulls off his boots and covers him with a quilt.

“I’ll be right back,” she says, leaving the light on.

In the guest bath, she fills a glass with water and shakes four Advil tablets from the bottle. She covers herself with a robe, her wrists aching, her flesh raw and burning, the memory of his hands and mouth and tongue sickening. She bends over the toilet and gags. She leans against the edge of the sink and takes deep breaths and looks at her red face in the mirror and seems as much a stranger to herself as he is. She splashes herself with cold water, washes out her mouth, washes him away from every place he touched. She washes away tears, and it takes a few minutes to get control of herself. She returns to the guest room where he’s snoring.

“Marino. Wake up. Sit up.” She helps him, plumps pillows behind him. “Here, take these and drink the entire glass of water. You need to drink a lot of water. You’re going to feel like hell in the morning, but this will help.”

He drinks the water and takes the Advil, then turns his face to the wall as she brings him another glass. “Turn off the light,” he says to the wall.

“I need you to stay awake.”

He doesn’t answer her.

“You don’t have to look at me. But you must stay awake.”

He doesn’t look at her. He stinks like whisky and cigarettes and sweat, and the smell of him reminds her and she feels her soreness, feels where he has been and is nauseated again.

“Don’t worry,” he says thickly. “I’ll leave and you won’t ever have to see me. I’ll vanish for good.”

“You’re very, very drunk and don’t know what you’re doing,” she says. “But I want you to remember it. You need to stay awake long enough so you’ll remember this tomorrow. So we can get past it.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I almost shot him. I wanted to so bad. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“Who did you almost shoot?” she says.

“At the bar,” he says in his drunken gabble. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“Tell me what happened at the bar.”

Silence as he stares at the wall, his breathing heavy again.

“Who did you almost shoot?” she asks loudly.

“He said he’d been sent.”

“Sent?”

“Made threats about you. I almost shot him. Then I come over here and acted just like him. I should kill myself.”

“You’re not going to kill yourself.”

“I should.”

“That will be worse than what you just did. Do you understand me?”

He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t look at her.

“If you kill yourself, I won’t feel sorry for you and I won’t forgive you,” she says. “Killing yourself is selfish, and none of us will forgive you.”

“I’m not good enough for you. I never will be. Go on and say it and get it over with once and for all.” He talks as if he has rags in his mouth.

The phone on the bedside table rings, and she picks it up.

“It’s me,” Benton says. “You saw what I sent? How are you?”

“Yes, and you?”

“Kay? Are you all right?”

“Yes, and you?”

“Christ. Is someone there?” he says, alarmed.

“Everything’s fine.”

“Kay? Is someone there?”

“We’ll talk tomorrow. I’ve decided to stay home, work in the garden, ask Bull to come over and help.”

“You’re sure? You sure you’re okay with him?”

“I am now,” she says.

Four o’clock in the morning, Hilton Head. Crashing waves spread white foam on the beach as if the heaving sea is frothing at the mouth.

Will Rambo is quiet on the wooden steps, and he walks the length of the boardwalk and climbs over the locked gate. The faux-Italianate villa is stucco with multiple chimneys and archways, and a sharply pitched red barrel-tile roof. In the back are copper lights, and a stone table with a clutter of filthy ashtrays and empty glasses, and not so long ago, her car key. Since then, she has used the spare, although she drives infrequently. Mostly, she goes nowhere, and he is silent as he moves about, and palmetto trees and pines sway in the wind.

Trees waving like wands, casting their spell over Rome, and flower petals blowing like snow along Via D’Monte Tarpeo. Poppies were blood-red, and wisteria draped over ancient brick walls was purple like bruises. Pigeons bobbed along steps, and women fed feral cats Whiskas and eggs from plastic plates among the ruins.

It was a fine day for walking, and the tourist traffic wasn’t heavy, and she was a little drunk but at ease with him, happy with him. He knew she would be.

“I would like you to meet my father,” he said to her as they sat on a wall and looked at feral cats, and she remarked repeatedly that they were pitiful stray cats, inbred and deformed, and someone should save them.

“Not stray but feral. There’s a difference. These feral cats want to be here and would rip you apart if you tried to rescue them. They aren’t something discarded or hurt with nothing to look forward to but darting from garbage can to garbage can and hiding under houses until someone catches them and puts them to sleep.”

“Why would someone put them to sleep?” she asked.

“Because they would. That’s what would happen once they’re removed from their haven and end up in unsafe places where they are hit by cars and chased by dogs and constantly endangered and wounded beyond repair. Unlike these cats. Look at them, all alone, and no one dares go near them unless they allow it. They want to be exactly where they are, down there in the ruins.”

“You’re weird,” she said, nudging him. “I thought so when we met, but you’re cute.”

“Come on,” he said, and he helped her up.

“I’m too warm,” she complained, because he had draped his long, black coat around her and made her wear a cap and his dark glasses, even though the day wasn’t cold or sunny.

“You’re very famous, and people will stare,” he reminded her. “You know they will, and we can’t have people staring.”

“I need to find my friends before they think I’ve been kidnapped.”

“Come on. You must see the apartment. It’s quite spectacular. I’ll drive you there because I can tell you’re tired, and you can call your friends and invite them to join us, if you like. We’ll have some very fine wine and cheeses.”

Then darkness, as if a light went out in his head, and he woke up to scenes in brilliant broken pieces, like brilliant broken pieces of a shattered stained-glass window that once told a story or a truth.

The stairs on the north side of the house haven’t been swept, and the door leading into the laundry room hasn’t been opened since the housekeeper was here last, almost two months ago. On either side of the stairs are hibiscus bushes, and behind them through a pane of glass he can see the alarm panel and its red light. He opens his tackle box and withdraws a saddle-grip glass cutter with a carbide tip. He cuts out a pane of glass and sets it on the sandy dirt behind the bushes as the puppy inside his crate begins to bay, and Will hesitates, quite calm. He reaches inside and unlocks the deadbolt, then opens the door and the alarm begins to beep, and he enters the code to silence it.

He’s inside a house he has watched for many months. He’s imagined this and planned it at such great length that finally, the act of doing it is easy and perhaps a little disappointing. He squats and wiggles his sandy fingers through the spaces in the wire crate and whispers to the basset hound, “It’s all right. Everything’s going to be all right.”

The basset hound stops baying, and Will lets the dog lick the back of his hand, where there is no glue and no special sand.

“Good boy,” he whispers. “Don’t worry.”

His sandy feet carry him from the laundry room toward the sound of the movie playing again in the great room. Whenever she smokes outside, she has a bad habit of leaving the door open wide as she sits on the steps and stares at the black-bottom pool that is a gaping wound, and some of the smoke drifts inside as she sits there and smokes and stares at the pool. The smoke has permeated whatever it touches, and he smells the stale stench and it gives a flinty edge to the air, a hard, gray matte finish like her aura. It is sickly. A near-death aura.

The walls and ceiling are washed with ocher and umber, the colors of the earth, and the stone floor is the color of the sea. Every doorway is an arch, and there are huge pots of acanthus that are limp and brown because she hasn’t been watering them properly, and there is dark hair on the stone floor. Head hair, pubic hair, from when she paces about, sometimes nude, ripping at her hair. She’s asleep on the couch, her back to him, the bald spot on the top of her head pale like a full moon.

His bare, sandy feet are quiet, and the movie plays. Michael Douglas and Glenn Close are drinking wine to an aria from Madama Butterfly playing on the hi-fi. Will stands in the arch and watches Fatal Attraction, knows all of it, has seen it many, many times, has watched it with her through the window without her knowing. He hears the dialogue in his head before the characters are saying it, and then Michael Douglas is leaving, and Glenn Close is angry and rips off his shirt.

Ripping, tearing, desperate to get at what was underneath. He had so much blood on his hands he couldn’t see the color of his skin as he tried to tuck Roger’s intestines in, and the wind and sand blasted both of them and they could barely see or hear each other.

She sleeps on the couch, too drunk and drugged to hear him come in. She doesn’t feel his specter floating near her, waiting to carry her away. She will thank him.

“Will! Help me! Please help me! Oh, please, God!” Screaming. “It hurts so bad! Please don’t let me die!”

“You’re not going to die.” Holding him. “I’m here. I’m here. I’m right here.”

“I can’t stand it!”

“God will never give you more than you can bear.” His father always saying that, ever since Will was a boy.

“It isn’t true.”

“What isn’t true?” His father asked him in Rome as they drank wine in the dining room and Will was holding the stone foot of antiquity.

“It was all over my hands and my face, and I tasted it, tasted him. I tasted as much of him as I could to keep him alive in me because I promised he wouldn’t die.”

“We should go outside. Let’s go have a coffee.”

Will turns a knob on the wall, turns up the surround sound until the movie is blaring, and then she’s sitting up, and then she’s screaming, and he can barely hear her screams over the movie as he leans close to her, puts a sandy finger to her lips, shaking his head, slowly, to hush her. He refills her glass with vodka, hands it to her, and nods for her to drink. He sets the tackle box, flashlight, and camera on the rug and sits next to her on the couch and looks deeply into her bleary, bloodshot, panicky eyes. She has no eyelashes, has pulled all of them out. She doesn’t try to get up and run. He nods for her to drink, and she does. Already she’s accepting what must happen. She will thank him.

The movie vibrates the house and her lips say, “Please don’t hurt me.”

She was pretty once.

“Shhhhh.” He shakes his head, hushing her again with his sandy finger, touching her lips, pressing them hard against her teeth. His sandy fingers open the tackle box. Inside are more bottles of glue and glue remover, and the bag of sand, and a black-handled six-inch double-edged wallboard saw and reciprocating saw blade, and various hobby knives.

Then the voice in his head. Roger crying, screaming, bloody froth bubbling from his mouth. Only it isn’t Roger crying out, it’s the woman begging with bloody lips, “Please don’t hurt me!”

As Glenn Close tells Michael Douglas to fuck off, and the volume vibrates the great room.

She panics and sobs, shaking like someone having a seizure. He pulls his legs up on the couch, sits cross-legged. She stares at his sandpaper hands and sandpaper bottoms of mangled bare feet and the tackle box, the camera on the floor, and the realization of the inevitable seizes her blotchy, puffy face. He notices how unkempt her nails are and is overwhelmed by that same feeling he gets when he spiritually embraces people who are suffering unbearably and he releases them from their pain.

He can feel the subwoofer in his bones.

Her raw, bloody lips move. “Please don’t hurt me, please, please don’t,” and she cries and her nose runs and she wets her bloody lips with her tongue. “What do you want? Money? Please don’t hurt me.” Her bloody lips move.

He takes off his shirt and khaki pants, neatly folds them, places them on the coffee table. He takes off his underwear, places it on top of his other clothes. He feels the power. It spikes through his brain like an electric shock, and he grabs her hard around the wrists.

Chapter 11

Dawn. It looks like it might rain.

Rose gazes out a window of her corner apartment, the ocean gently lapping against the seawall across Murray Boulevard. Near her building—once a splendid hotel—are some of the most expensive homes in Charleston, formidable waterfront mansions she has photographed and arranged in a scrapbook that she peruses from time to time. It’s almost impossible for her to believe what’s happened, that she’s living both a nightmare and a dream.

When she moved to Charleston, her one request was that she live close to the water. “Close enough to know it’s there” is how she described it. “I suspect this will be the last time I’ll follow you anywhere,” she said to Scarpetta. “At my age, I don’t want a yard to bother with, and I’ve always wanted to live on the water, but not a marsh with that rotten-egg smell. The ocean. If only I could have the ocean at least close enough to walk to it.”

They spent a lot of time looking. Rose ended up on the Ashley River in a run-down apartment that Scarpetta, Lucy, and Marino renovated. It didn’t cost Rose a penny, and then Scarpetta gave her a raise. Without it, Rose couldn’t afford the lease, but that fact was never mentioned. All Scarpetta said was that Charleston is an expensive city compared to other places they’ve lived, but even if it wasn’t, Rose deserved a raise.

She makes coffee and watches the news and waits for Marino to call. Another hour passes, and she wonders where he is. Another hour, and not a word, and her frustration grows. She’s left several messages for him saying she can’t come in this morning and could he drop by to help her move her couch? Besides, she needs to talk to him. She told Scarpetta she would. Now’s as good a time as any. It’s almost ten. She’s called his cell phone again, and it goes straight to voicemail. She looks out the open window, and cool air blows in from beyond the seawall, the water choppy and moody, the color of pewter.

She knows better than to move the couch herself but is impatient and irked enough to do it. She coughs as she ponders the folly of a feat that would have been manageable not all that long ago. She wearily sits and loses herself in memories of last night, of talking and holding hands and kissing on this same couch. She felt things she didn’t know she could feel anymore, all the while wondering how long it can last. She can’t give it up, and it can’t last, and she feels a sadness so deep and dark that there’s no point in trying to see what’s in it.

The phone rings, and it’s Lucy.

“How did it go?” Rose asks her.

“Nate says hello.”

“I’m more interested in what he said about you.”

“Nothing new.”

“That’s very good news.” Rose moves to the kitchen counter and picks up the television remote control. She takes a deep breath. “Marino’s supposed to come by to move my couch, but as usual…”

A pause, then Lucy says, “That’s one of the things I’m calling about. I was going to drop by to see Aunt Kay and tell her about my appointment with Nate. She doesn’t know I went. I always tell her after the fact so she doesn’t go crazy worrying. Marino’s bike is parked at her house.”

“Was she expecting you?”

“No.”

“What time was this?”

“Around eight.”

“Impossible,” Rose says. “Marino’s still in a coma at eight. At least these days.”

“I went to Starbucks, then headed back to her house around nine, and guess what? I pass his potato-chip girlfriend in her BMW.”

“You sure it was her?”

“Want her plate number? Her DOB? What’s in her bank account—not much, by the way. Looks like she’s gone through most of her money. Not from her dead rich daddy, either. Tells you something he left her nothing. But she makes a lot of deposits that don’t make sense, spends it as fast as she gets it.”

“This is bad. Did she see you when you were coming back from Starbucks?”

“I was in my Ferrari. So unless she’s blind in addition to being a vapid twat. Sorry…”

“Don’t be. I know what a twat is, and no doubt she fits the bill. Marino has a special homing device that leads him directly to twats.”

“You don’t sound good. Like you can hardly breathe,” Lucy says. “How about I come over a little later and move the couch?”

“I’ll be right here,” Rose says, coughing as she hangs up.

She turns on the television in time to see a tennis ball kick up a puff of red dust off the line, Drew Martin’s serve so fast and out of reach, her opponent doesn’t even try. CNN plays footage from last year’s French Open, the news about Drew going on and on. Replays of tennis and her life and death. Over and over again. More footage. Rome. The ancient city, then the small cordoned-off construction site surrounded by police and yellow tape. Emergency lights pulsing.

“What else do we know at this time? Are there any new developments?”

“Rome officials continue to be tight-lipped. It would appear there are no leads and no suspects, and this terrible crime continues to be shrouded in mystery. People here ask why. You can see them laying flowers at the edge of the construction site where her body was found.”

More replays. Rose tries not to watch. She’s seen all of it so many times, but she continues to be mesmerized by it.

Drew slicing a backhand.

Drew charging the net and slamming a lob so hard it bounces into the stands. The crowd jumping to its feet and wildly cheering.

Drew’s pretty face on Dr. Self’s show. Talking fast, her mind jumping from one subject to the next, excited because she’d just won the U.S. Open, called the Tiger Woods of tennis. Dr. Self leaning into the interview, asking questions she shouldn’t ask.

“Are you a virgin, Drew?”

Laughing, blushing, hiding her face with her hands.

“Come on.” Dr. Self smiling, so damn full of herself. “This is what I’m talking about, everyone.” To her audience. “Shame. Why do we feel shame when we talk about sex?”

“I lost my virginity when I was ten,” Drew says. “To my brother’s bicycle.”

The crowd going crazy.

“Drew Martin dead at sweet sixteen,” an anchor says.

Rose manages to push the couch across the living room and shove it against the wall. She sits on it and cries. She gets up and paces and weeps, and moans that death is wrong and violence is unbearable and she hates it. Hates it all. In the bathroom, she retrieves a prescription bottle. In the kitchen, she pours herself a glass of wine. She takes a tablet and washes it down with wine, and moments later, coughing and barely able to breathe, she washes down a second tablet. The telephone rings and she is unsteady when she reaches for it, dropping the receiver, fumbling to pick it up.

“Hello?”

“Rose?” Scarpetta says.

“I shouldn’t watch the news.”

“Are you crying?”

The room’s spinning. She’s seeing double. “It’s just the flu.”

“I’m coming over,” Scarpetta says.

Marino rests his head against the back of the seat, his eyes masked by dark glasses, his big hands on his thighs.

He’s dressed in the same clothes he had on last night. He slept in them, and it looks like it. His face is a deep red hue, and he has the stale stench of a drunk who hasn’t bathed in a while. The sight and smell of him brings back memories that are too awful to describe, and she feels the rawness, the soreness of flesh he should never have seen or touched. She wears layers of silk and cotton, fabrics gentle to her skin, her shirt buttoned at the collar, her jacket zipped up. To hide her injuries. To hide her humiliation. Around him, she feels powerless and naked.

Another awful silence as she drives. The car is filled with the aromas of garlic and sharp cheese, and he has his window open.

He says, “The light hurts my eyes. I can’t believe how much the light’s killing my eyes.”

He has said this numerous times, offering an answer to an unasked question of why he won’t look at her or take off his dark glasses despite the overcast sky and rain. When she made coffee and dry toast barely an hour ago and brought it to him in bed, he groaned as he sat up and held his head. Unconvincingly, he asked, “Where am I?”

“You were very drunk last night.” She set the coffee and toast on the bedside table. “Do you remember?”

“If I eat anything, I’ll puke.”

“Do you remember last night?”

He says he doesn’t remember anything after riding his motorcycle to her house. His demeanor says he remembers all of it. He continues to complain about feeling sick.

“I wish you didn’t have food back there. Now’s not a good time for me to smell food.”

“Too bad. Rose has the flu.”

She parks in the lot next to Rose’s building.

“I sure as shit don’t want to get the flu,” he says.

“Then stay in the car.”

“I want to know what you did with my gun.” He has said this several times as well.

“As I’ve told you, it’s in a safe place.”

She parks. On the backseat is a box filled with covered dishes. She stayed up all night cooking. She cooked enough tagliolini with fontina sauce, lasagna Bolognese, and vegetable soup to feed twenty people.

“Last night you were in no condition to have a loaded gun,” she adds.

“I want to know where it is. What did you do with it?”

He walks slightly ahead of her, not bothering to ask if he can carry the box.

“I’ll tell you again. I took it from you last night. I took your motorcycle key. Do you remember my taking your key away from you because you insisted on riding your motorcycle when you could barely stand up?”

“That bourbon in your house,” he says as they walk toward the whitewashed building in the rain. “Booker’s.” As if it’s her fault. “I can’t afford good bourbon like that. It goes down so smooth, I forget it’s a-hundred-and-twenty-something proof.”

“So I’m to blame.”

“Don’t know why you got something that strong in your house.”

“Because you brought it over New Year’s Eve.”

“Someone may as well have hit me over the head with a tire iron,” he says as they climb steps and the doorman lets them in.

“Good morning, Ed,” Scarpetta says, aware of the sound of a TV inside his office off the lobby. She hears the news, more coverage of Drew Martin’s murder.

Ed looks toward his office, shakes his head, and says, “Terrible, terrible. She was a nice girl, a real nice girl. Saw her just here right before she got killed, tipped me twenty dollars every time she came through the door. Terrible. Such a nice girl. Acted like a normal person, you know.”

“She was staying here?” Scarpetta says. “I thought she always stayed at the Charleston Place Hotel. At least that’s what’s been in the news whenever she’s in this area.”

“Her tennis coach has an apartment here, hardly ever in it, but he’s got one,” Ed says.

Scarpetta wonders why she’s never heard about that. Now isn’t the time to ask. She’s worried about Rose. Ed pushes the elevator button and taps the button for Rose’s floor.

The doors shut. Marino’s dark glasses stare straight ahead.

“I think I got a migraine,” he says. “You got anything for a migraine?”

“You’ve already taken eight hundred milligrams of ibuprofen. Nothing else for at least five hours.”

“That don’t help a migraine. I wish you hadn’t had that stuff in the house. It’s like someone slipped me something, like I was drugged.”

“The only person who slipped you something is yourself.”

“I can’t believe you called Bull. What if he’s dangerous?”

She can’t believe he’d say such a thing after what happened last night.

“I sure as hell hope you don’t ask him to help in the office next,” he says. “What the hell does he know? He’ll just get in the way.”

“I can’t think about this right now. I’m thinking about Rose right now. And maybe this would be a good time for you to worry about somebody besides yourself.” Anger begins to rise, and Scarpetta walks quickly along a hallway of old white plaster walls and worn blue carpet.

She rings the bell to Rose’s apartment. No answer, no sound inside except the TV. She sets the box on the floor and tries the bell again. Then again. She calls her cell phone, her landline. She hears them ringing inside, then voicemail.

“Rose!” Scarpetta pounds on the door. “Rose!”

She hears the TV. Nothing but the TV.

“We’ve got to get a key,” she says to Marino. “Ed has one. Rose!”

“Fuck that.” Marino kicks the door as hard as he can, and wood splinters and the burglar chain breaks, brass links clinking to the floor as the door flies open and bangs against the wall.

Inside, Rose is on the couch, motionless, her eyes shut, her face ashen, strands of long, snowy hair unpinned.

“Call nine-one-one now!” Scarpetta puts pillows behind Rose to prop her up as Marino calls for an ambulance.

She takes Rose’s pulse. Sixty-one.

“They’re on their way,” Marino says.

“Go to the car. My medical bag’s in the trunk.”

He runs out of the apartment, and she notices a wineglass and a prescription bottle on the floor, almost hidden by the skirt of the couch. She’s stunned to see that Rose has been taking Roxicodone, a trade name for oxycodone hydrochloride, an opioid analgesic that’s notoriously habit-forming. The prescription of one hundred tablets was filled ten days ago. She takes the top off the bottle and counts the fifteen-milligram green tablets. There are seventeen left.

“Rose!” Scarpetta shakes her. She’s warm and sweating. “Rose, wake up! Can you hear me! Rose!”

Scarpetta goes to the bathroom and returns with a cool washcloth, places it on Rose’s forehead, and holds her hand, talking to her, trying to rouse her. Then Marino is back. He looks frantic and frightened as he hands Scarpetta the medical bag.

“She moved the couch. I was supposed to do it,” he says, his dark glasses staring at the couch.

Rose stirs as a siren sounds in the distance. Scarpetta takes a blood pressure cuff and a stethoscope from her medical bag.

“I promised to come over and move it,” Marino says. “She moved it by herself. It was over there.” His dark glasses look at an empty space near a window.

Scarpetta pushes up Rose’s sleeve, slides the stethoscope on her arm, wraps the cuff just above the bend in the arm, tight enough to stop blood flow.

The siren is very loud.

She squeezes the bulb, inflates the cuff, then opens the valve to release the air slowly as she listens to the blood beating its way along the artery. Air hisses quietly as the cuff deflates.

The siren stops. The ambulance is here.

Systolic pressure eighty-six. Diastolic pressure fifty-eight. She moves the diaphragm over Rose’s chest and back. Respiration is depressed, and she’s hypotensive.

Rose stirs, moves her head.

“Rose?” Scarpetta says loudly. “Can you hear me?”

Her eye lids flutter open.

“I’m going to take your temperature.” She places a digital thermometer under Rose’s tongue and in seconds it beeps. Temperature ninety-nine-point-one. She holds up the bottle of pills. “How many did you take?” she asks. “How much wine did you drink?”

“It’s just the flu.”

“You move the couch yourself?” Marino asks her, as if it matters.

She nods. “Overdid it. That’s all.”

Rapid footsteps and the clatter of paramedics and a stretcher in the hallway.

“No,” she protests. “Send them away.”

Two EMTs in blue jumpsuits fill the doorway and push the stretcher inside. On top of it is a defibrillator and other equipment.

Rose shakes her head. “No. I’m all right. I’m not going to the hospital.”

Ed appears in the doorway, worried, looking in.

“What’s the problem, ma’am?” One of the EMTs, blond with pale blue eyes, comes over to the couch and looks closely at Rose. He looks closely at Scarpetta.

“No.” Rose is adamant, waving them off. “I mean it! Please go away. I fainted. That’s all.”

“That’s not all,” Marino says to her, but his dark glasses are staring at the blond EMT. “I had to bust the damn door down.”

“And you better fix it before you leave,” Rose mutters.

Scarpetta introduces herself. She explains that it seems Rose mixed alcohol with oxycodone, was unconscious when they got here.

“Ma’am?” The blond EMT leans closer to Rose. “How much alcohol and oxycodone did you have, and when did you take it?”

“One more than usual. Three tablets. And just a little bit of wine. Half a glass.”

“Ma’am, it’s very important you’re honest with me about this.”

Scarpetta hands him the prescription bottle and says to Rose, “One tablet every four to six hours. You took two more than that. And you’re on a high dose already. I want you to go to the hospital just to make sure everything’s all right.”

“No.”

“Did you crush them or chew them or swallow them whole?” Scarpetta asks, because when the tablets are crushed, they dissolve more quickly and the oxycodone is more rapidly released and absorbed.

“I swallowed them whole, just like I always do. My knees were aching something awful.” She looks at Marino. “I shouldn’t have moved the couch.”

“If you won’t go with these nice EMTs, I’ll take you,” Scarpetta says, aware of the blond EMT’s stare.

“No.” Rose adamantly shakes her head.

Marino watches the blond EMT watch Scarpetta. Marino doesn’t protectively move close to her as he would have done in the past. She doesn’t address the most disturbing question—why Rose is on Roxicodone.

“I’m not going to the hospital,” Rose says. “I’m not. I mean it.”

“It looks like we’re not going to need you,” Scarpetta says to the EMTs. “But thanks.”

“I heard you lecture a few months back,” the blond EMT says to her. “The child fatality session at the National Forensic Academy. You lectured.”

His name tag reads T. Turkington. She has no recollection of him.

“What the hell were you doing there?” Marino asks him. “The NFA’s for cops.”

“I’m an investigator for the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Department. They sent me to the NFA. I’m a graduate.”

“Now, ain’t that strange,” Marino says. “Then what the hell are you doing here in Charleston, riding around in an ambulance?”

“My days off, I work as an EMT.”

“This ain’t Beaufort County.”

“Can use the extra pay. Emergency medicine’s good supplemental training for my real job. I have a girlfriend here. Or did.” Turkington is easygoing about it. To Scarpetta, he says, “If you’re sure everything’s all right in here, we’ll be on our way.”

“Thanks. I’ll keep my eye on her,” Scarpetta replies.

“Nice to see you again, by the way.” His blue eyes fix on her, and then he and his partner are gone.

Scarpetta says to Rose, “I’m taking you to the hospital to make sure nothing else is wrong.”

“You’re not taking me anywhere,” she says. “Would you please go find me a new door?” she says to Marino. “Or a new lock or whatever it takes to fix the mess you made.”

“You can use my car,” Scarpetta says, tossing him the keys. “I’ll walk home.”

“I need to get into your house.”

“It will have to wait until later,” she says.

The sun slips in and out of smoky clouds, and the sea heaves against the shore.

Ashley Dooley, a South Carolinian born and bred, has taken off his Windbreaker and tied the sleeves around his big belly. He points his brand-new camcorder at his wife, Madelisa, then stops filming when a black-and-white basset hound appears from the sea oats on the dune. The dog trots to Madelisa, his droopy ears dragging in the sand. He presses against her legs, panting.

“Oh, look, Ashley!” She squats and pets him. “Poor baby, he’s shaking. What’s the matter, honey? Don’t be scared. He’s still a puppy.”

Dogs love her. They seek her out. She’s never had a single dog growl at her or do anything but love her. Last year, they had to put Frisbee to sleep when he got cancer. Madelisa hasn’t gotten over it, won’t forgive Ashley for refusing treatment because of the expense.

“Move over there,” Ashley says. “You can have the dog in the film if you want. I’ll get all these fancy houses in the background. Holy shit, look at that one. Like something you’d see in Europe. Who the hell needs something that big?”

“I wish we could go to Europe.”

“I tell you, this camcorder’s something.”

Madelisa can’t stand to hear about it. Somehow he could afford thirteen hundred dollars for a camcorder but couldn’t spare a dime for Frisbee.

“Look at it. All those balconies and a red roof,” he’s saying. “Imagine living in something like that.”

If we lived in something like that, she thinks, I wouldn’t mind you buying fancy camcorders and a plasma-screen TV, and we could have afforded Frisbee’s vet bills. “I can’t imagine,” she says, posing in front of the dune. The basset hound sits on her foot, panting.

“I hear there’s a thirty-million-dollar one down that way.” He points. “Smile. That’s not a smile. A big smile. Think it’s owned by someone famous, maybe the man who started Wal-Mart. Why’s that dog panting so much? It’s not that hot out here. And he’s shivering, too. Maybe he’s sick, could have rabies.”

“No, pumpkin, he’s shaking like he’s scared. Maybe he’s thirsty. I told you to bring a bottle of water. The man who started Wal-Mart’s dead,” she adds, as she pets the basset hound and scans the beach, doesn’t notice anybody nearby, just a few people in the distance, fishing. “I think he’s lost,” she says. “I don’t see anybody around who might be his owner.”

“We’ll look for it, get some footage.”

“Look for what?” she asks, the dog pressed against her legs, panting, shaking. She checks him, noting he needs a bath and his claws need clipping. Then something else. “Oh, my goodness. I think he’s hurt.” She touches the top of the dog’s neck, looks at blood on her finger, begins parting his fur, looking for a wound, not finding one. “Now, that’s strange. How’d he get blood on him? There’s some more of it, too. But it doesn’t look like he’s hurt. Now that’s just yucky.”

She wipes her fingers on her shorts.

“Maybe there’s a carcass of a chewed-up cat somewhere.” Ashley hates cats. “Let’s keep walking. We’ve got our tennis clinic at two and I’m gonna need some lunch first. We got any of that honey-baked ham left?”

She looks back. The basset hound sits in the sand, panting, staring at them.

“I know you have a spare key in that little box you bury in your garden under that pile of bricks behind the bushes,” Rose says.

“He’s hung over as hell, and I don’t want him riding his motorcycle with a damn forty-caliber pistol jammed in the back of his jeans,” Scarpetta says.

“How did it end up at your house to begin with? How did he end up there, for that matter?”

“I don’t want to talk about him. I want to talk about you.”

“Why don’t you get off the couch and pull up a chair. It’s hard for me to talk when you’re practically sitting on top of me,” Rose says.

Scarpetta carries over a dining room chair, sets it down, and says, “Your medication.”

“I haven’t been stealing pills from the morgue, if that’s what you’re implying. All those pitiful people who come in with dozens of prescription bottles, because why? Because they don’t take them. Pills don’t fix a damn thing. If they did, those people wouldn’t end up in the morgue.”

“Your bottle has your name on it and the name of your physician. Now, I can look him up or you can tell me what kind of doctor he is and why you’re seeing him.”

“An oncologist.”

Scarpetta feels as if she’s been kicked in the chest.

“Please. Don’t make this harder for me,” Rose says. “I was hoping you wouldn’t find out until it was time to pick out an acceptable urn for my ashes. I know I did something I shouldn’t.” She catches her breath. “Was in such a state, got so upset, and was aching all over.”

Scarpetta takes her hand. “Funny how we get ambushed by our feelings. You’ve been stoical. Or dare I use the word stubborn? Now today you have to reckon with it.”

“I’m going to die,” Rose says. “I hate doing this to everyone.”

“What kind of cancer?” Holding Rose’s hand.

“Lung. Before you start thinking it’s from all that secondary smoke I was exposed to in the early days when you puffed away in your office…” Rose starts to say.

“I wish I hadn’t. I can’t tell you how much I wish that.”

“What’s killing me has nothing to do with you,” Rose says. “I promise. I come by it honestly.”

“Non–small cell or small cell?”

“Non–small.”

“Adenocarcinoma, squamous?”

“Adenocarcinoma. Same thing my aunt died from. Like me, she never smoked. Her grandfather died of squamous. He did smoke. I never in a million years imagined I’d get lung cancer. But then it’s never occurred to me I’d die. Isn’t it ridiculous.” She sighs, the color slowly returning to her face, the light to her eyes. “We look at death every day and it doesn’t change our denial about it. You’re right, Dr. Scarpetta. I guess today it hit me from behind. I never saw it coming.”

“Maybe it’s about time you call me Kay.”

She shakes her head.

“Why not? Aren’t we friends?”

Rose says, “We’ve always believed in boundaries, and they’ve served us well. I work for someone I’m honored to know. Her name is Dr. Scarpetta. Or Chief.” She smiles. “I could never call her Kay.”

“So now you’re depersonalizing me. Unless you’re talking about someone else.”

“She’s someone else. Someone you really don’t know. I think you have a much lower opinion of her than I do. Especially these days.”

“Sorry, I’m not this heroic woman you just described, but let me help what little I can—get you to the best cancer center in the country. Stanford Cancer Center. Where Lucy goes. I’ll take you. We’ll get you any treatment you…”

“No, no, no.” Rose shakes her head again slowly, side to side. “Now be quiet and listen to me. I’ve consulted all sorts of specialists. Do you remember last summer I went on a three-week cruise? A lie. The only cruise I went on was from one specialist to another, and then Lucy took me to Stanford, which is where I got my doctor. The prognosis is the same. My only choice was chemo and radiation, and I refused.”

“We should try anything we possibly can.”

“I’m already in stage three-B.”

“It’s spread to the lymph nodes?”

“Lymph nodes. And bone. Well on its way to being stage four. Surgery’s impossible.”

“Chemotherapy and radiotherapy, or even just radiation therapy by itself. We’ve got to try. We can’t just give up like this.”

“In the first place, there’s no we. It’s me. And no. I won’t put myself through it. I’ll be damned if I’m going to have all my hair fall out and be sick and miserable when I know this disease is going to kill me. Sooner rather than later. Lucy even said she would get me marijuana so the chemo wouldn’t make me as sick. Imagine me smoking pot.”

“Obviously, she’s known about this for as long as you have,” Scarpetta says.

Rose nods.

“You should have told me.”

“I told Lucy, and she’s a master of secrets, has so many I’m not sure any of us know what’s really true. What I didn’t want is this very thing. To make you feel bad.”

“Just tell me what I can do.” As grief tightens its grip.

“Change what you can. Don’t ever think you can’t.”

“Tell me. I’ll do anything you want,” Scarpetta says.

“It’s not until you’re dying that you begin to realize all the things in life you could have changed. This I can’t change.” Rose taps her chest. “You have the power to change almost anything you want.”

Images from last night, and for an instant, Scarpetta imagines she smells him, feels him, and she struggles not to show how devastated she is.

“What is it?” Rose squeezes her hand.

“How can I not feel terrible?”

“You were just thinking about something, and it wasn’t me,” Rose says. “Marino. He looks awful and is acting odd.”

“Because he got shit-face drunk,” Scarpetta says, anger in her voice.

“‘Shit-face.’ Now, that’s a term I haven’t heard you use. But then I’m getting rather vulgar myself these days. I actually used the word twat this morning when I was talking to Lucy on the phone—referring to Marino’s latest. Who Lucy happened to pass in your neighborhood around eight. When Marino’s motorcycle was still parked in front of your house.”

“I have a box of food for you. It’s still in the hall. Let me get it and I’ll put it away.”

A coughing fit, and when Rose removes the tissue from her mouth, it is spotted with bright red blood.

“Please let me take you back to Stanford,” Scarpetta says.

“Tell me what happened last night.”

“We talked.” Scarpetta feels her face turn red. “Until he was too drunk.”

“I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you blush.”

“A hot flash.”

“Yes, and I have the flu.”

“Tell me what to do for you.”

“Let me go about my business as usual. I don’t want to be resuscitated. I don’t want to die in a hospital.”

“Why don’t you move in with me?”

“That’s not going about my business as usual,” Rose says.

“Will you at least give me permission to talk to your doctor?”

“There’s nothing else for you to know. You asked what I want, and I’m telling you. No curative treatment. I want palliative care.”

“I have an extra room in my house. Small as it is. Maybe I should get a bigger place,” Scarpetta says.

“Don’t be so selfless it makes you selfish. And it’s selfish if you make me feel guilty and just plain horrible because I’m hurting everyone around me.”

Scarpetta hesitates, then says, “Can I tell Benton?”

“You can tell him. But not Marino. I don’t want you telling him.” Rose sits up, places her feet on the floor. She takes both of Scarpetta’s hands. “I’m no forensic pathologist,” she says. “But why are there fresh bruises on your wrists?”

The basset hound is still right where they left him, sitting in the sand near the No Trespassing sign.

“See, now, this just isn’t normal,” Madelisa exclaims. “Been sitting here for more than an hour, waiting for us to come back. Here, Droopy. You sweet little thing.”

“Honey, that’s not his name. Now, don’t be naming him. Look at his tag,” Ashley says. “See what his real name is and where he lives.”

She stoops down, and the basset hound ambles over to her, presses against her, licks her hands. She squints at the tag, doesn’t have her reading glasses. Ashley doesn’t have his, either.

“I can’t see it,” she says. “What little I can make out. Nope, doesn’t look like there’s a phone number. I didn’t bring my phone, anyhow.”

“I didn’t, either.”

“Now, that’s dumb. What if I twisted my ankle out here or something? Somebody’s barbecuing,” she says, sniffing, looking around, noticing a wisp of smoke rising from the back of the huge white house with the balconies and red roof—one of the few houses she’s seen with a No Trespassing sign. “Now, why aren’t you running off to see what’s cooking?” she says to the basset hound, stroking his floppy ears. “Maybe we could go out and buy us one of those little grills and cook out tonight.”

She tries to read the dog’s tags again, but it’s hopeless without her glasses, and she imagines rich people, imagines some millionaire grilling on the patio of that huge white house set back from the dune, partially hidden by tall pines.

“Say hello to your old-maid sister,” Ashley says, filming. “Tell her how luxurious our town house is here on Millionaire Row in Hilton Head. Tell her next time we’re staying in a mansion like that one where they’re barbecuing.”

Madelisa looks down the beach in the direction of their town house, unable to see it through thick trees. She returns her attention to the dog and says, “I bet he lives in the house right there.” Pointing to the white European-looking mansion where someone is barbecuing. “I’ll just go on over there and ask.”

“Go right on. I’ll wander a little bit, filming. Saw a few porpoises a minute ago.”

“Come on, Droopy. Let’s go find your family,” Madelisa says to the dog.

He sits in the sand and won’t come. She tugs his collar, but he’s not going anywhere. “Okay, then,” she says. “You stay put and I’ll find out if that big house is where you’re from. Maybe you got out and they don’t know it. But one thing’s for sure. Someone’s missing you something awful!”

She hugs and kisses him. She heads off across the hard sand, gets to the soft sand, walks right through sea oats, even though she hears it’s illegal to walk on the dunes. She hesitates at the No Trespassing sign, bravely steps up on the wooden boardwalk, heading to the huge white house where some rich person, maybe a celebrity, is cooking on the grill. Lunch, she supposes, as she keeps looking back, hoping the basset hound doesn’t run off. She can’t see him on the other side of the dune. She doesn’t see him on the beach, either, just Ashley, a small figure, filming several dolphins rolling through the water, their fins cutting through the waves, then dipping out of sight again. At the end of the boardwalk is a wooden gate, and she’s surprised it isn’t locked. It isn’t completely shut.

She walks through the backyard, looking everywhere, calling out “Hello!” She’s never seen such a big pool, what they call a black-bottom pool, trimmed with fancy tile that looks like it came from Italy or Spain or some other exotic faraway place. She looks around, calling out “hello,” pauses curiously at the smoking gas grill where a slab of raggedly cut meat is charred on one side, bloody-raw on top. It occurs to her that the meat is strange, doesn’t look like steak or pork, certainly not like chicken.

“Hello!” she calls out. “Anybody home?”

She bangs on the sun porch door. No answer. She walks around to the side of the house, supposing whoever is cooking might be somewhere over there, but the side yard is empty and overgrown. She peers through a space between the blinds and the edge of a big window and sees an empty kitchen, all stone and stainless steel. She’s never seen a kitchen like that except in magazines. She notices two big dog bowls on a mat near the butcher block.

“Hello!” she yells. “I think I have your dog! Hello!” She moves along the side of the house, calling out. She climbs up steps to a door, next to it a window missing a pane of glass. Another pane is broken. She thinks about hurrying back to the beach, but inside the laundry room is a big dog crate that’s empty.

“Hello!” Her heart beats hard. She’s trespassing, but she’s found the basset hound’s home and she’s got to help. How would she feel if it were Frisbee and someone didn’t bring him back?

“Hello!” She tries the door and it opens.

Chapter 12

Water drips from live oaks.

In the deep shadows of yew and tea olive trees, Scarpetta arranges broken pieces of pottery in the bottoms of pots to help with drainage so the plants don’t rot. The warm air is steamy from a hard rain that suddenly started and just as suddenly stopped.

Bull carries a ladder over to an oak tree that spreads its canopy over most of Scarpetta’s garden. She begins tamping potting soil into the pots and tucks in petunias, then parsley, dill, and fennel, because they attract butterflies. She relocates fuzzy silver lamb’s ears and artemisia into better spots where they will catch the sun. The scent of wet, loamy earth mingles with the pungency of old brick and moss as she moves rather stiffly—from years of unforgiving tile floors in the morgue—to a brick post overgrown with hollyfern. She starts diagnosing the problem.

“If I pull this fern out, Bull, I might damage the brick. What do you think?”

“That’s Charleston brick, probably two hundred years old, my guess.” From the top of the ladder. “I’d pull a little, see what happens.”

The fern peels off without complaint. She fills a watering can and tries not to think about Marino. She feels sick when she thinks about Rose.

Bull says, “Some man came through the alley on a chopper right before you got here.”

Scarpetta stops what she’s doing, stares up at him. “Was it Marino?”

When she got home from Rose’s apartment, his motorcycle was gone. He must have driven her car to his house and gotten a spare key.

“No, ma’am, it wasn’t him. I was up on the ladder limbing the loquats, could see the man on the chopper over the fence. He didn’t see me. Maybe nothing.” The clippers snap, and side shoots called suckers fall to the ground. “Anybody been bothering you, ’cause I’d like to know about it.”

“What was he doing?”

“Turned in and rode real slow about halfway, then turned around and went back. Looked to me like he had on a do-rag, maybe orange and yellow. Hard to tell from where I was. His chopper had bad pipes, rattled and spit like something about to quit. You should tell me if I should know something. I’ll be looking.”

“You ever seen him before around here?”

“I’d recognize that chopper.”

She thinks about what Marino told her last night. A biker threatened him in the parking lot, said something bad would happen to her if she didn’t leave town. Who would want her gone so badly as to pass on a message like that? The local coroner sticks in her mind.

She asks Bull, “You know much about the coroner here? Henry Hollings?”

“Only his funeral home business been in the family since the War, that huge place behind a high wall over there on Calhoun, not too far from here. I don’t like the thought of someone bothering you. Your neighbor sure is curious.”

Mrs. Grimball is looking out the window again.

“She watches me like a hawk,” Bull says. “If I might say so, she’s got an unkindness about her and don’t mind hurting people.”

Scarpetta goes back to work. Something’s eating the pansies. She tells Bull.

“There’s a bad rat problem around here,” he replies. It seems prophetic.

She examines more damaged pansies. “Slugs,” she decides.

“You could try beer,” Bull says with snaps of the pole cutter. “Put out saucers of it after dark. They crawl in it, get drunk, and drown.”

“And the beer attracts more slugs than you had before. I couldn’t drown anything.”

More suckers rain down from the oak tree. “Saw some raccoon droppings over there.” He points with the pole clipper. “Could be them eating the pansies.”

“Raccoons, squirrels. Nothing I can do about it.”

“There is, but you won’t. You sure don’t like to kill nothing. Kind of interesting when I think what you do. Would assume nothing much would bother you.” He talks from up in the tree.

“It seems what I do causes everything to bother me.”

“Uh-huh. That’s what happens when you know too much. Those hydrangeas over where you are. Put some rusty nails around them and they’ll turn a pretty blue.”

“Epsom salts will work, too.”

“Hadn’t heard that.”

Scarpetta looks through a jeweler’s lens at the back of a camellia leaf, notes whitish scales. “We’ll prune these, and because there are wound pathogens, we’re going to have to disinfect before using the tools on anything else. I need to get the plant pathologist here.”

“Uh-huh. Plants has diseases just like people.”

Crows begin to fuss in the canopy of the live oak he’s trimming. Several of them suddenly flap off.

Madelisa stands paralyzed like that lady in the Bible who didn’t do what God said and He turned her into a pillar of salt. She’s trespassing, breaking the law.

“Hello?” she calls out again.

She musters up the courage to walk out of the laundry room and into the grand kitchen of the grandest house she’s ever seen, still calling out “Hello!” and not sure what to do. She’s scared in a way she’s never felt before and should get out of here as fast as she can. She begins to wander, gawking at everything, feeling like a burglar, worrying she’s going to get caught—now or later—and go to jail.

She should leave, get out. Do it now. The hair pricks up on the back of her neck as she continues calling out “Hello!” and “Anybody home?” and wondering why in the world the house is unlocked with meat on the grill if no one’s here. She begins to imagine she’s being watched as she wanders, something warning her that she ought to run as fast as she can out of this house and get back to Ashley. She has no right to wander around being nosy but can’t help it now that she’s here. She’s never seen a house like this and can’t figure out why nobody is answering her, and she’s too curious to turn back, or feels like she can’t.

She passes through an arch into a tremendous living room. The floor is blue stone, looks like gemstone, and is arranged with gorgeous Oriental rugs, and there are huge exposed beams and a fireplace big enough to roast a pig. A movie screen is pulled down over an expanse of glass that faces the ocean. Dust drifts in the beam of light from the overhead projector, the screen lit up but blank, and there’s no sound. She looks at the wraparound black leather sofa, puzzled by the neatly folded clothing on top of it: a dark T-shirt, dark pants, a pair of men’s Jockey briefs. The big glass coffee table is cluttered with packs of cigarettes, prescription bottles, an almost empty fifth of Grey Goose vodka.

Madelisa imagines someone—probably a man—drunk and depressed or sick, maybe explaining why the dog got out. Someone was in here not long ago, drinking, she thinks, and whoever it was started cooking on the grill and seems to have vanished. Her heart pounds. She can’t shake the feeling she’s being watched, and she thinks, My Lord, it’s cold in here.

“Hello? Anybody home?” she calls out hoarsely.

Her feet seem to move on their own as she explores in awe, and fear hums inside her like electricity. She should leave. She’s trespassing like a burglar. Breaking and entering. She’s going to get in trouble. She feels something looking at her. The police will be looking at her, all right, if and when they find out, and she’s getting panicky, but her feet won’t listen. They keep moving her from one place to the next.

“Hello?” she calls out, her voice cracking.

Beyond the living room, off to the left of the foyer, is another room, and she hears running water.

“Hello!”

She hesitantly follows the sound of running water, can’t seem to stop her feet. They keep right on, and she finds herself in a large bedroom with fancy, formal furniture and drawn silk curtains and pictures all over the walls. A beautiful little girl with a very pretty, happy woman who must be her mother. The little girl joyous in a wading pool with a puppy—the basset hound. The same pretty woman crying, sitting on a couch talking to the famous talk-show psychiatrist Dr. Self, big cameras rolled in close. The same pretty lady posing with Drew Martin and a handsome man with olive skin and very dark hair. Drew and the man are in tennis clothes, holding racquets on a tennis court somewhere.

Drew Martin’s dead. Murdered.

The pale blue duvet on the bed is messy. On the black marble floor near the head of the bed are clothes that seem to have been dropped there. A pink jogging suit, a pair of socks, a bra. The sound of running water gets louder as her feet move toward it, and Madelisa tells her feet to run the other way but they won’t. Run, she tells them as they walk her into a bathroom of black onyx and copper. RUN! She slowly takes in the wet, bloody towels in the copper sink, the bloody saw-toothed knife and bloody box cutters on the back of the black toilet, the neat stack of clean, pale rose linens on top of the hamper.

Behind tiger-striped curtains drawn around the copper tub, water runs, splashing on something that doesn’t sound like metal.

Chapter 13

After dark. Scarpetta shines her flashlight on a stainless-steel Colt revolver in the middle of the alley behind her house.

She hasn’t called the police. If the coroner is involved in this latest turn of sinister events, then calling the police might make matters worse. No telling who he has in his pocket. Bull has quite a story, and she doesn’t know what to think. He says when the crows flapped off from the oak tree in her garden, he knew that had meaning, so he told her an untruth, said he had to go on home, when what he intended to do was some sneaking—that’s how he put it. He tucked himself behind shrubbery between her two sets of gates and waited. He waited the better part of five hours. Scarpetta had no idea.

She went about her business. Finished what she was doing in the garden. Took a shower. Worked in her upstairs office. Made phone calls. Checked on Rose. Checked on Lucy. Checked on Benton. All the while, she didn’t know Bull was hiding between the two sets of gates behind the house. He says it’s like fishing. You don’t catch anything unless you fool the fish into thinking you’ve left for the day. When the sun was lower and the shadows longer and Bull had been sitting on dark, cool bricks between the gates all afternoon, he saw a man in the alleyway. The man walked right up to Scarpetta’s outer gate and tried to squeeze his hand through it to unlock it. When that didn’t work, he started to climb the ironwork, and that’s when Bull swung the gate open and got into it with him. He thinks it’s the man who was on the chopper, but whoever it was, he was up to something serious, and when they got into the scuffle, the man dropped his gun.

“Stay right here,” she tells Bull in the dark alley. “If one of the neighbors comes out or anyone shows up for any reason, no one gets near anything. No one touches anything. Fortunately, I don’t think anybody can see what we’re doing.”

The beam of Bull’s flashlight probes the uneven bricks as she returns to her house. She climbs the stairs to the second story, and in a few minutes is back in the alley with her camera and crime scene case. She takes photographs. She pulls on latex gloves. She picks up the revolver, opens the cylinder, and ejects six thirty-eight-caliber cartridges, placing them in one paper bag, the gun in another. She seals them with bright yellow evidence tape that she labels and initials with a Sharpie.

Bull continues to search, his flashlight bobbing as he walks, stops, crouches, then walks some more, all of it very slowly. A few more minutes pass, and he says, “There’s something here. I think you better look.”

She walks over to him, watching where she steps, and about a hundred feet from her gates on the leaf-littered asphalt is a small gold coin attached to a broken gold chain. They blaze in the beam of her flashlight, the gold as bright as the moon.

“You were this far away from my gates when you struggled with him?” she says with doubt. “Then why’s his gun way over there?” She points toward the dark shapes of her gates and garden wall.

“Hard to tell where I was,” he says. “Things like that happen fast. I didn’t think I was way over here, but I can’t say it as a fact.”

She looks back toward her house. “From here to there is pretty far,” she says. “You sure you didn’t chase him after he dropped the gun?”

“All I can say,” Bull says, “is a gold chain with a gold coin isn’t going to lie around out here long. So I could have chased him and it got broke when we tussled. I didn’t think I chased him, but when you got life and death going on, time and distance don’t always measure right.”

“They don’t always,” she agrees.

She pulls on fresh gloves and picks up the broken necklace by a small area of the chain. Without a lens, she can’t tell what type of coin it is, can make out only a crowned head on one side, a wreath and the number 1 on the other.

“So it probably broke off when I started tussling with him,” Bull decides, as if he’s convinced himself. “Sure hope they don’t make you turn all this over to them. The police, I mean.”

“There’s nothing to turn over,” she says. “So far, there’s no crime. Just a scuffle between you and a stranger. Which I don’t intend to mention to anyone. Except Lucy. We’ll see what we can do in the labs tomorrow.”

He’s already been in trouble. He’s not getting into trouble again, especially on her account.

“When folks find a gun lying around, they supposed to call the police,” Bull says.

“Well, I’m not going to.” She packs up what she carried outside.

“You’re fretting they’d think I was involved in something and haul me off. Don’t you get in a mess because of me, Dr. Kay.”

“No one’s hauling you anywhere,” she says.

Gianni Lupano’s black Porsche 911 Carrera is permanently located in Charleston, no matter how seldom he’s here.

“Where is he?” Lucy asks Ed.

“Haven’t seen him.”

“But he’s still in town.”

“I talked to him yesterday. He called and asked me to get maintenance up there because his air-conditioning wasn’t working right. So while he was out, and I don’t know where he went, they changed the filter. He’s a private one. I know about his coming and going because he gets me to start his car once a week so the battery don’t go dead.” Ed opens a foam to-go box, and his small office smells like french fries. “You mind? Don’t want it to get cold. Who told you about his car?”

“Rose didn’t know he has a place in the building,” Lucy says from the doorway, watching the lobby, seeing who walks in. “When she found out, she figured who he is and told me she’s seen him driving an expensive sports car that she thought was a Porsche.”

“She’s got a Volvo as old as my cat.”

“I’ve always loved cars, so Rose knows a lot about them, whether she likes it or not,” Lucy says. “Ask her about Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini, she’ll tell you. Around here, people don’t rent Porsches. Maybe a Mercedes but not a Porsche like he’s got. So I figured he might keep it here.”

“How’s she doing?” Ed sits at his desk, eating a cheeseburger from the Sweetwater Cafe. “That was a bad time of it earlier.”

“Well,” Lucy says. “She’s not feeling all that great.”

“I had the flu shot this year. Got the flu twice, plus a cold. It’s like giving you candy so you don’t get a cavity. Last time I’m doing it.”

“Was Gianni Lupano here when Drew was murdered in Rome?” Lucy asks. “I was told he was in New York, but that doesn’t mean it’s true.”

“She won the tournament here on a Sunday, the middle of the month.” He wipes his mouth with a paper napkin, picks up a big soda, and sucks on the straw. “I know that night Gianni left Charleston, because he asked me to look after his car. Said he didn’t know when he’d be back, then all of a sudden, here he is.”

“But you haven’t seen him.”

“Almost never do.”

“You talk to him on the phone.”

“That’s usually it.”

“I don’t understand it,” Lucy says. “Other than Drew playing the Family Circle Cup, why would he be in Charleston? The tournament’s what? One week a year?”

“You’d be surprised the people who got places in the area. Movie stars, even.”

“His car have a GPS?”

“It’s got everything. That’s some car.”

“I need to borrow the key.”

“Oh.” Ed sets the cheeseburger back in the container. “I can’t do that.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to drive it, just need to check something, and I know you won’t say a word about it.”

“I can’t give you the key.” He’s stopped eating. “He ever found out…”

“I need the key for ten minutes, fifteen at the most. He’ll never find out, I promise.”

“Maybe you could start her up while you’re at it. No harm in it.” He rips open a packet of ketchup.

“Will do.”

She goes out a back door and finds the Porsche in a secluded corner of the parking lot. She turns on the engine and opens the glove box to check the registration. The Carrera is a 2006 and registered to Lupano. She turns on the GPS, checks the history of the stored destinations, and writes them down.

The rapid respiration of the magnet keeping cool.

Inside the MRI suite, Benton looks through glass at Dr. Self’s sheet-draped feet. She’s on a sliding table inside the bore of the fourteen-ton magnet, her chin taped down to remind her not to move her head, which is against a coil that will receive the radio frequency pulses necessary to image her brain. Over her ears is a set of gradient-damping headphones. Through them, a little later, when the functional imaging starts, she’ll hear the audiotape of her mother’s voice.

“So far, so good,” he says to Dr. Susan Lane. “Except for her fun and games. I’m awfully sorry she’s kept everybody waiting.” To the tech: “Josh? How about you? Awake?”

“Can’t tell you how much I’ve been looking forward to this,” Josh says from his console. “My little girl’s been throwing up all day. Ask my wife how much she’d like to kill me right now.”

“Never known one person to bring such happiness into the world.” Benton means Dr. Self, the eye of the storm. He looks through glass at her feet, catches a glimpse of stockings. “She’s wearing hose?”

“You’re lucky she’s wearing anything. When I brought her in, she insisted on taking everything off,” Dr. Lane says.

“I’m not surprised.” He’s careful. Although Dr. Self can’t hear them unless they use the intercom, she can see them. “Manic as hell. Has been since she got here. Been a productive stay. Ask her. She’s as sane as a judge.”

“I did ask her about anything metal, asked if she had on an underwire bra,” Dr. Lane says. “Told her the scanner has a magnetic pull sixty thousand times greater than the earth’s and nothing ferrous can be near it, and bra burning would have a different meaning if there was underwire and she didn’t tell us. She said she did, was quite proud of the fact, and went on and on about the—ah-hmmm—burden of having large breasts. Of course, I told her she had to take off the bra, and she said she preferred to take off everything and asked for a johnny.”

“I rest my case.”

“So she has on a johnny, but I did convince her to keep her pants on. And her stockings.”

“Good job, Susan. Let’s get this over with.”

Dr. Lane pushes the talk button of the intercom and says, “What we’re going to do now is start with some localizing images—structural imaging, in other words. This first part is going to last about six minutes, and you’re going to hear some rather loud, strange noises that the machine makes. How are you doing?”

“Can we start, please?” Dr. Self’s voice.

Intercom off, and Dr. Lane says to Benton, “You ready for the PANAS?” Positive and Negative Affect Scales rating.

Benton pushes the intercom button again and says, “Dr. Self, I’m going to start with a series of questions about how you’re feeling. And I’ll be asking you these same questions several other times during our session, all right?”

“I know what a PANAS is.” Her voice.

Benton and Dr. Lane exchange glances, their facial expressions relaxed, revealing nothing as Dr. Lane says sarcastically, “Wonderful.”

Benton says, “Ignore it. Let’s just do this.”

Josh looks at Benton, ready to start. Benton thinks of his conversation with Dr. Maroni and the implied accusation that Josh told Lucy about their VIP patient, and then Lucy told Scarpetta. It still puzzles Benton. What was Dr. Maroni trying to say? As he looks at Dr. Self through the glass, something comes to him. The file that isn’t in Rome. The Sandman’s file. Maybe it’s here at McLean.

A monitor displays vital signs remotely relayed by Dr. Self’s finger holder and a blood pressure cuff. Benton says, “BP one twelve over seventy-eight.” He writes it down. “Pulse seventy-two.”

“What’s her pulse ox?” Dr. Lane asks.

He tells her that Dr. Self’s arterial oxyhemoglobin saturation—or the measurement of oxygen saturation in her blood—is ninety-nine. Normal. He presses the intercom button to start the PANAS.

“Dr. Self? Are you ready for a few questions?”

“Finally.” Her voice over the intercom.

“I’ll ask questions, and I want you to rate what you’re feeling on a scale of one to five. One means you feel nothing. Two means you feel a little. Three is moderately, four is very much, and five is extremely. Make sense?”

“I’m familiar with a PANAS. I’m a psychiatrist.”

“It appears she’s a neuroscientist, too,” Dr. Lane comments. “She’s going to cheat this part of it.”

“I don’t care.” Benton presses the intercom button and goes through the questions, the same ones he’ll ask her several more times during the testing. Is she feeling upset, ashamed, distressed, hostile, irritable, guilty? Or interested, proud, determined, active, strong, inspired, excited, enthusiastic, alert? She assigns a rating of one to all of them, claiming she feels nothing.

He checks her vitals and writes them down. They are normal, unchanged.

“Josh?” Dr. Lane indicates it’s time.

The structural scan begins. What sounds like loud hammering, and images of Dr. Self’s brain are displayed on Josh’s computer screen. They don’t reveal much. Unless there is some gross pathology, such as a tumor, they will see nothing until later, when thousands of images captured by the MRI are analyzed.

“We’re ready to begin,” Dr. Lane says over the intercom. “You all right in there?”

“Yes.” Impatient.

“The first thirty seconds, you’re not going to hear anything,” Dr. Lane explains. “So be silent and relax. Then you’re going to hear an audiotape of your mother’s voice, and I want you to just listen. Be completely still and just listen.”

Dr. Self’s vitals remain the same.

An eerie sonar sound that brings to mind a submarine as Benton looks at Dr. Self’s blanketed feet on the other side of the glass.

“The weather here’s been perfectly wonderful, Marilyn.” The recorded voice of Gladys Self. “I haven’t even bothered with the air conditioner—not that it works. Rattles like a huge insect. I just keep the windows and doors open because the temperature isn’t so bad right now.”

Although this is the neutral set, the most innocuous one of all, Dr. Self’s vital signs have changed.

“Pulse seventy-three, seventy-four,” Benton says, writing it down.

“I’d say this isn’t neutral for her,” Dr. Lane says.

“I was thinking of all those gorgeous fruit trees you used to have when you lived down here, Marilyn, the ones the Department of Agriculture had to cut down because of the citrus canker. I love a pretty yard. And you’d be pleased to know that silly eradication program has pretty much ground to a halt because it doesn’t work. Such a shame. Life is all about timing, isn’t it?”

“Pulse seventy-five, seventy-six. Pulse ox ninety-eight,” Benton says.

“…The darnedest thing, Marilyn. This submarine going back and forth all day about a mile offshore. Has a little American flag waving from the whatever you call it. The tower where the periscope is? Must be the war. Back and forth, back and forth, some kind of practice, the little flag waving. I say to my friends, practice for what? Did anybody tell them they don’t need submarines in Iraq…?”

The first neutral set ends, and during a thirty-second recovery period, Dr. Self’s blood pressure is taken again. It’s gone up to one sixteen over eighty-two. Then her mother’s voice again. Gladys Self talks about where she likes to shop these days in South Florida, and the never-ending construction, high-rises sprouting up everywhere, she says. A lot of them empty because the real estate market has gone to hell. Mainly because of the war in Iraq. What it’s done to everyone.

Dr. Self reacts the same way.

“Wow,” Dr. Lane says. “Something’s certainly got her paying attention. Just look at her pulse ox.”

It’s dropped to ninety-seven.

Her mother’s voice again. Positive comments. Then the criticism.

“…You were a pathological liar, Marilyn. From the time you could talk, I never could get the truth out of you. Then later? What happened? Where did you get those morals of yours? Not from anyone in this family. You and your dirty little secrets. It’s disgusting and reprehensible. What happened to your heart, Marilyn? If only your fans knew! Shame on you, Marilyn…”

Dr. Self’s oxygenated blood has dropped ninety-six percent, her breathing more rapid, shallower, and audible through the intercom.

“…The people you threw away. And you know what and who I mean. You lie as if it’s the truth. That’s what’s worried me all your life, and it will catch up with you one of these days…”

“Pulse one hundred and twenty-three,” Dr. Lane says.

“She just moved her head,” Josh says.

“Can the motion software correct for it?” Dr. Lane asks.

“I don’t know.”

“…And you think money solves everything. Send your widow’s mites and it absolves you of responsibility. Pay people off. Oh, we’ll see. One of these days you’ll reap what you sow. I don’t want your money. I have drinks in the tiki bar with my friends and they don’t even know who you are to me…”

Pulse one hundred and thirty-four. Oxygenated blood down to ninety-five. Her feet are restless. Nine seconds left. Mother talks, activating neurons in her daughter’s brain. Blood flows to those neurons, and with the increase of blood is an increase in deoxygenated blood that is detected by the scanner. Functional images are captured. Dr. Self is in physical and emotional distress. It isn’t an act.

“I don’t like what’s going on with her vitals. That’s it. No more,” Benton says to Dr. Lane.

“I agree.”

He gets on the intercom. “Dr. Self. We’re going to stop.”

From a locked cabinet inside the computer lab, Lucy retrieves a tool kit, a thumb drive, and a small black box as she talks to Benton on the phone.

“Don’t ask questions,” he says. “We just finished a scan. Better put, had to abort one. I can’t tell you about it, but I need something.”

“Okay.” She sits in front of a computer.

“I need you to talk to Josh. I need you to get in.”

“To do what?”

“A patient is having her e-mails forwarded to the Pavilion’s server.”

“And?”

“And also on the same server are electronic files. One for an individual who saw the Pavilion’s clinical director. You know who I mean.”

“And?”

“And he saw a person of interest in Rome last November,” Benton says over the phone. “All I can tell you is this patient of interest served in Iraq, seems he’s a referral from Dr. Self.”

“And?” Lucy logs on to the Internet.

“Josh just finished the scan. The one aborted. On a person who’s leaving tonight, meaning no more forwarded e-mails. Time is of the essence.”

“Still there? The person who’s leaving?”

“Right now, yes. Josh has already left, has a sick baby at home. Is in a hurry.”

“If you give me your password, I can access the network,” Lucy says. “That will make it easier. But you’re going to be down for about an hour.”

She reaches Josh on his cell phone. He’s in his car, driving away from the hospital. That’s even better. She tells him Benton can’t get into his e-mail, there’s something going on with the server, she has to fix it immediately, sounds like it will take some time. She can do it remotely, but she needs the system administrator password unless he wants to turn around and handle it himself. He sure doesn’t want to do that, starts talking about his wife, their baby. Okay, it would be great if Lucy could take care of it. They work on technical problems all the time, and it would never occur to him that her intention is to access a patient’s e-mail account and Dr. Maroni’s private files. Even if Josh suspected the worst, he would assume she would just hack in, wouldn’t ask. He knows her abilities, how she makes her money, for God’s sake.

She doesn’t want to hack into Benton’s hospital. And it would take too long. An hour later, she calls Benton back. “Don’t have time to look,” she says. “Leave that up to you. I forwarded everything. And your e-mail’s up.”

She leaves the lab and rides off on her Agusta Brutale motorcycle and is overwhelmed by anxiety and anger. Dr. Self is at McLean. She has been for almost two weeks. Goddamn it. Benton has known it.

She rides fast, the warm wind slapping her helmet, as if trying to bring her to her senses.

She understands why Benton couldn’t say a word, but it’s not right. Dr. Self and Marino e-mailing each other, and all the while she’s under Benton’s nose at McLean. He doesn’t warn Marino or Scarpetta. He doesn’t warn Lucy as the two of them watch Marino on camera in the morgue, giving Shandy a tour. Lucy making comments about Marino, about his e-mails to Dr. Self, and Benton just listens, and now Lucy feels stupid. She feels betrayed. He doesn’t mind asking her to break into confidential electronic files, but he can’t tell her that Dr. Self is a patient and is sitting in her private room at the very private Pavilion, paying three thousand fucking dollars a day to fuck everyone.

Sixth gear, tucked in, and passing cars on the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge with its soaring peaks and vertical cables that remind her of the Stanford Cancer Center, of the lady playing incongruous songs on her harp. Marino may have been messed up already, but he didn’t bargain for the chaos Dr. Self could cause. He’s too simple to comprehend a neutron bomb. Compared to Dr. Self, he’s a big, dumb kid with a slingshot in his back pocket. Maybe he started it by sending her an e-mail, but she knows how to finish something. She knows how to finish him.

Racing past shrimp boats docked in Shem Creek, crossing the Ben Sawyer Bridge to Sullivan’s Island, where Marino lives in what he said at one time was his dream home—a tiny, run-down fishing shack on stilts, with a red metal roof. The windows are dark, not even a porch light on. Behind the shack, a very long pier cuts through the marsh and ends at a narrow creek that snakes to the Intracoastal Waterway. When he moved here, he bought a drift boat and enjoyed exploring the creeks and fishing or just cruising and drinking beer. She’s not sure what happened. Where did he go? Who’s living in his body?

The patch of a front yard is sandy and dappled with spindly weeds. Under the shack, she picks her way through an assortment of junk. Old ice chests, a rusting grill, crab pots, rotting fishnets, garbage cans that smell like a swamp. She climbs warped wooden steps and tries the paint-peeled door. The lock is flimsy, but she doesn’t want to pry it open. Better to take the door off the hinges and get in that way. A screwdriver, and she’s inside Marino’s dream house. He has no alarm system, always says his guns are alarming enough.

She pulls the string of an overhead bulb, and in the harsh glare and uneven shadows, she looks around to see what’s changed since she was here last. When was that? Six months ago? He’s done nothing new, as if he stopped living here after a while. The living room is a bare wooden floor with a cheap plaid couch, two straight-back chairs, a big-screen TV, a home computer and printer. Against a wall is a kitchenette, a few empty beer cans and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the counter, lots of cold cuts and cheese and more beer inside the refrigerator.

She sits at Marino’s desk and from the USB port of his computer removes a two-hundred-and-fifty-six-megabyte thumb drive attached to a lanyard. She opens her tool kit and selects needle-nose pliers, a screwdriver pen, a battery-powered drill—as tiny as one a jeweler might use. Inside the small black box are four unidirectional microphones, each no more than eight millimeters in size, or about the size of a baby aspirin. Pulling the plastic casing off the thumb drive, she removes the shaft and the lanyard, and embeds a microphone, its metal mesh top unnoticeable in the small hole where the lanyard originally was attached. The drill makes a quiet hum as it bores a second hole in the base of the casing, where she inserts the ring of the lanyard, reattaching it.

Next she digs into a pocket of her cargo pants and pulls out another thumb drive—the one she retrieved from the lab—and inserts it into the USB port. She downloads her own version of a spyware application that will relay Marino’s every keystroke to one of her e-mail accounts. She scrolls through his hard drive, looking for documents. Almost nothing except the e-mails from Dr. Self that he copied onto his computer at the office. No big surprise. She doesn’t imagine him sitting around writing professional journal articles or a novel. He’s bad enough about doing paperwork. She plugs his thumb drive back into the port and begins a quick walk around, opening drawers. Cigarettes, a couple Playboy magazines, a .357-magnum Smith & Wesson, a few dollars and loose change, receipts, junk mail.

She’s never figured out how he fits inside the bedroom, where the closet is a rod attached between the walls at the foot of the bed, clothes jammed and sloppily hung, other items on the floor, including his huge boxer shorts, socks. She spots a lacy red bra and panties, a studded black leather belt and a crocodile one, way too small to be his, a plastic butter tub filled with condoms and cock rings. The bed is unmade. God knows when the linens were washed last.

Next door is a bathroom the size of a phone booth. A toilet, a shower, a sink. Lucy checks the medicine cabinet, finds the expected toiletries and hangover remedies. She removes a bottle of Fiorinal with Codeine prescribed to Shandy Snook. It’s almost empty. On another shelf is a tube of Testroderm, prescribed to someone she’s never heard of, and she enters the information on her iPhone. She reattaches the door to its hinges and makes her way down the dark, rickety stairs. The wind has kicked up, and she hears a faint noise coming from the pier. She slips out her Glock, listening, shining the light in the direction of the noise, but the beam falls short, the length of the pier dissolving into solid darkness.

She climbs stairs that lead to the pier, old with curling boards, some of them missing. The smell of pluff mud is strong, and she begins to swat at no-see-ums and remembers what an anthropologist told her. It’s all about your blood type. Pests like mosquitos like type O. That would be her, but she’s never been sure how a no-see-um can smell her blood type if she isn’t bleeding. They swarm around her, attacking her, even biting her scalp.

Her footsteps are quiet as she walks and listens, hearing a bumping sound. The flashlight moves over weathered wood and bent rusty nails, and a breeze touches the marsh grass, whispers through it. The lights of Charleston seem distant in the sulfur-smelling, humid air, the moon elusive behind thick clouds, and at the end of the pier, she looks down at the source of the disconcerting sound. Marino’s bass boat is gone, and bright orange bumpers rock against pilings in dull thuds.

Chapter 14

Karen and Dr. Self on the front steps of the Pavilion in the almost-dark.

A porch light that isn’t too bright, and Dr. Self slides a folded piece of paper out of her raincoat pocket. She opens it, gets out a pen. In the woods beyond them, the high-pitched static of insects. The faraway cry of coyotes.

“What’s that?” Karen asks Dr. Self.

“Whenever I have guests on my shows, they sign one of these. It simply gives me permission to have them on the air. To talk about them. No one can help you, Karen. That’s clear, isn’t it?”

“I feel a little better.”

“You always do. Because they program you. Just as they tried to program me. It’s a conspiracy. That’s why they made me listen to my mother.”

Karen takes the waiver from her, tries to read it. There’s not enough light.

“I’d like to share our wonderful conversations and the insights from them that might help my millions of viewers around the world. I need your permission. Unless you’d rather I use an alias.”

“Oh, no! I’d be very happy for you to talk about me and use my real name. And even be on your show, Marilyn! What conspiracy? Do you think it includes me?”

“You need to sign this.” She gives Karen the pen.

Karen signs it. “If you’ll let me know if you’re going to talk about me so I can watch. I mean, if you do. Do you think you really will?”

“If you’re still here.”

“What?”

“It can’t be my first show, Karen. My first one is about Frankenstein and shocking experiments. Being drugged against my will. Subjected to torment and humiliation in the magnet. Let me repeat, a huge magnet, while I listened to my mother, while they forced me to hear her voice lying about me, blaming me. It could be weeks before you’re on my show, you see. I hope you’re still here.”

“You mean the hospital? I’m leaving first thing in the morning.”

“I mean here.”

“Where?”

“Do you still want to be in this world, Karen? Or did you ever want to be in it? That’s really the question.”

Karen lights a cigarette with trembling hands.

“You saw my series on Drew Martin,” Dr. Self says.

“It’s so sad.”

“I should tell everyone the truth about her coach. I certainly tried to tell her.”

“What did he do?”

“Have you ever taken a look at my website?”

“No. I should have.” Karen sits hunched over on the cold stone step, smoking.

“How would you like to be on it? Until we can get you on my show?”

“Be on it? You mean, you tell my story on it?”

“Briefly. We have a section called Self Talk. People blog, tell their stories, and write to each other. Of course, some of them can’t write very well, and I have a team of people who edit, rewrite, take dictation, interview. Remember when we first met? I gave you my card?”

“I still have it.”

“I want you to send your story to the e-mail address on that card, and we’ll post it. What an inspiration you can be. Unlike poor Dr. Wesley’s niece.”

“Who?”

“She’s not really his niece. She has a brain tumor. Not even my tools can cure somebody of that.”

“Oh, my. That’s awful. I suppose a brain tumor could make somebody crazy, and there’s no help for them.”

“You can read all about her when you log on. You’ll see her story and all the blogs. You’d be astonished,” Dr. Self says from one step above her, the breeze in her favor, the smoke drifting the other way. “Your story? Quite a message it will send. How many times have you been hospitalized? At least ten. Why the failure?”

Dr. Self imagines herself asking her audience this as cameras move in tight on her face—one of the most recognizable faces on earth. She loves her name. Her name is part of her incredible destiny. Self. She’s always refused to give it up. She wouldn’t change her name for anyone, and she would never share it, and anybody who doesn’t want it is condemned because the unforgivable sin isn’t sex. It’s failure.

“I’ll be on your show anytime. Please call me. I can be there at a moment’s notice,” Karen keeps saying. “As long as I don’t have to talk about…I can’t say it.”

But even back then, when Dr. Self’s fantasies were the most vivid, when her thinking became magical and the premonitions began, she never dreamed of what would happen.

I’m Dr. Marilyn Self. Welcome to Self on Self. SOS. Do you need help? At the beginning of each show, to the wild applause from a live audience as millions watch from all over the world.

“You won’t make me tell it, will you? My family will never forgive me. It’s why I can’t stop drinking. I’ll tell you if you don’t make me say it on TV or on your website.” Karen is lost in her drivel.

Thank you, thank you. Sometimes Dr. Self can’t get the audience to stop clapping. I adore all of you, too.

“My Boston terrier, Bandit. I let her out late one night and forgot to let her back in because I was so drunk. It was wintertime.”

Applause that sounds like a hard rain, like a thousand hands clapping.

“And the next morning I found her dead by the back door, and the wood was all clawed up from her scratching on it. My poor little Bandit with her short little fur. Shivering, crying, and barking, I’m sure. Scratching to get back in because it was freezing cold.” Karen weeps. “And so I just kill off my brain so I don’t have to think. They said I have all these white areas and widening of…well, and the atrophy. Way to go, Karen, I say. You’re killing off your brain. You can see it. Plain as day, you can see I’m not normal.” She touches her temple. “It was right up there on the light box in the neurologist’s office, big as all outdoors, my abnormal brain. I’m never going to be normal. I’m almost sixty, and what’s done is done.”

“People are unforgiving about dogs,” Dr. Self says, lost in herself.

“I know I am. What can I do to get over it? Please tell me.”

“People with mental disease have peculiarities in the shape of their skulls. Lunatics have very contracted or deformed heads,” Dr. Self says. “Maniacs have soft brains. Such scientific insights gleaned from a study done in Paris in 1824, which concluded that out of one hundred idiots and imbeciles examined, only fourteen had normal heads.”

“Are you saying I’m an imbecile?”

“Sound all that different from what the doctors here have been telling you? That your head is somehow different, meaning you are somehow different?”

“I’m an imbecile? I killed my dog.”

“These superstitions and manipulations have been around for centuries. Measuring the skulls of people locked up in lunatic asylums and dissecting the brains of idiots and imbeciles.”

“I’m an imbecile?”

“Today, they put you in some magic tube—a magnet—and tell you your brain is deformed, and they make you listen to your mother.” Dr. Self stops talking as a tall figure walks toward them with purpose in the dark.

“Karen, if you don’t mind, I need to talk to Dr. Self,” Benton Wesley says.

“Am I an imbecile?” Karen says, getting up from the step.

“You’re not an imbecile,” Benton says kindly.

Karen says good-bye to him. “You were always nice to me,” she says to him. “I’m flying home and won’t be back,” she says to him.

Dr. Self invites Benton to sit next to her on the steps, but he won’t. She senses his anger, and it’s a triumph, yet one more.

“I’m feeling much better,” she says to him.

He’s transformed by shadows pushed back by lamps.

She’s never seen him in the dark, and the realization is fascinating.

“I wonder what Dr. Maroni would say right now. I wonder what Kay would say,” she says. “Reminds me of spring break at the beach. A young girl notices a glorious young man, and then? He notices her. They sit in the sand and wade in the water and splash each other and do everything they desire until the sun comes up. They don’t care that they’re wet and sticky with salt and each other. Where did the magic go, Benton? Getting old is when nothing’s enough and you know you’ll never feel magic again. I know what death is, and so do you. Sit next to me, Benton. I’m glad you want to chat before I go.”

“I talked to your mother,” Benton says. “Again.”

“You must like her.”

“She told me something very interesting that’s caused me to retract something I said to you, Dr. Self.”

“Apologies are always welcome. From you, they’re quite an unexpected treat.”

“You were right about Dr. Maroni,” Benton says. “About your having sex with him.”

“I never said I had sex with him.” Dr. Self goes cold inside. “When would that have happened? In my goddamn room with a goddamn view? I was drugged. I couldn’t have had sex with anyone unless it was against my will. He drugged me.”

“I’m not talking about now.”

“While I was unconscious, he opened my gown and fondled me. He said he loved my body.”

“Because he remembered it.”

“Who said I had sex with him? Did that goddamn bitch say that? What would she know about what happened when I checked in? You must have told her I’m a patient. I’ll sue you. I said he couldn’t help himself, couldn’t resist, and then he fled. I said he knew what he’d done was wrong and so he fled to Italy. I never said I had sex with him. I never told you that. He drugged me and took advantage of me, and I should have known he would. Why wouldn’t he?”

It excites her. It did then and it still does, and she had no idea it would. At the time she chided him but didn’t tell him to stop. She said, “Why is it necessary to examine me so enthusiastically?” And he said, “Because it’s important I know.” And she said, “Yes. You should know what isn’t yours.” And he said as he explored, “It’s like a special place you once visited and haven’t seen in many years. You want to find out what’s changed and what hasn’t and whether you could live it again.” And she said, “Could you?” And he said, “No.” Then he fled, and that was the worst thing he did, because he’d done it before.

“I’m talking about a very long time ago,” Benton says.

Water laps quietly.

Will Rambo is surrounded by water and the night as he rows away from Sullivan’s Island, where he left the Cadillac in a secluded spot an easy walk from where he borrowed the bass boat. He has borrowed it before. He uses the outboard engine when needed. When he wants quiet, he rows. Water laps. In the dark.

Into the Grotta Bianca, the place he took the first one. The feeling, the familiarity, as fragments come together in a deep cavern in his mind among dripstones of limestone, and moss where sunlight touched. He walked her beyond the Column of Hercules into an underworld of stone corridors with prisms of minerals and the constant sound of water dripping.

That dreamlike day they were all alone except once, when he let excited schoolchildren pass in their jackets and hats, and he said to her, “Noisy like a swarm of bats.” And she laughed and said she was having fun with him, and she grabbed his arm and pressed against him, and he felt the softness of her against him. Through silence, only the sound of water dripping. He took her through the Tunnel of Snakes beneath chandeliers of stone. Past translucent curtains of stone into the Corridor of the Desert.

“If you left me here, I would never find my way out,” she said.

“Why would I leave you? I’m your guide. In the desert, you can’t survive without a guide unless you know your way.”

And the sandstorm rose up in a mighty wall, and he rubbed his eyes, trying not to see it in his mind that day.

“How do you know the way? You must come here often,” she said, and then he left the sandstorm and was back in the cave, and she was so beautiful, pale and well defined, as if carved of quartz, but sad because her lover had left her for another woman.

“What makes you so special you can know a place like this?” she said to Will. “Three kilometers deep into the earth and an endless maze of wet stone. How horrible to be lost in here. I wonder if anyone’s ever gotten lost in here. After hours, when they turn out the lights, it must be pitch-black and cold as a cellar in here.”

He couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. All he saw was bright red as they were sandblasted until he thought he would have no skin left.

“Will! Oh, God! Help me, Will!” Roger’s screams became the screams of the schoolchildren a corridor away, and the roar of the storm stopped.

Water dripped and their footsteps sounded wet. “Why do you keep rubbing your eyes?” she asked.

“I could find my way even in the dark. I can see very well in the dark and came here often when I was a child. I’m your guide.” He was very kind, very gentle with her because he understood her loss was more than she could bear. “See how the stone’s translucent with light? It’s flat and strong like tendons and sinews, and crystals are the waxy yellow of bone. And through this narrow corridor is the Dome of Milano, gray, damp, and cool like the tissue and vessels of a very old body.”

“My shoes and the cuffs of my pants are spattered with wet limestone, like whitewash. You’ve ruined my clothes.”

Her complaints irritated him. He showed her a natural pond scattered with green coins on the bottom, and wondered aloud if anyone’s wishes had come true, and she tossed a coin in and it plashed and sank to the bottom.

“Make all the wishes you want,” he says. “But they never come true, or if they do, too bad for you.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say,” she said. “How can you say that it would be bad if a wish came true? You don’t know what I wished. What if my wish was to make love to you? Are you a bad lover?”

He didn’t answer her as he got angrier, because if they made love, she would see his bare feet. The last time he made love was in Iraq, a twelve-year-old girl who screamed and cried and pounded him with small fists. Then she stopped and went to sleep, and he has never felt anything about it because she had no life, nothing to look forward to except the endless destruction of her country, and endless deaths. Her face fades from his mind as water drips. He holds the pistol in his hand as Roger screams because the pain is too much.

In the Cave of the Cupola, stones were round like skulls, and water dripped, dripped, dripped, as if it had rained, and then there were formations of stony frost and icicles and spurs that glowed like candlelight. He told her not to touch them.

“If you touch them, they turn black like soot,” he warned.

“The story of my life,” she said. “Whatever I touch turns to shit.”

“You will thank me,” he said.

“For what?” she said.

In the Corridor of the Return, it was warm and humid, and water ran down the walls like blood. He held the pistol and was one finger away from the end of all he knew about himself. If Roger could thank him, he would.

A simple thanks, and doing it again isn’t needed. People are ungrateful and take away whatever has meaning. Then one doesn’t care anymore. One can’t.

A red-and-white-striped lighthouse, built soon after the War, is isolated three hundred feet offshore and no longer has a beacon.

Will’s shoulders burn from rowing, and his buttocks ache on the fiberglass bench. It’s hard work because his payload weighs almost as much as the flat-bottom boat, and now that he’s close to his place, he won’t use the outboard motor. He never does. It makes noise, and he wants no noise, even if there is no one to hear it. No one lives here. No one comes here except during the day, and then only in nice weather. Even then, no one knows this place is his. The love of a lighthouse and a bucket of sand. How many little boys own an island? A glove and a ball, and a picnic and camping. All gone. Dead. The forlorn passage in a boat to the other side.

Across the water are the lights of Mount Pleasant, and the lights of James Island and Charleston. Southwest is Folly Beach. Tomorrow will be warm and cloudy, and by late afternoon, the tide will be low. The boat scrapes over oyster shells as he drags it onto the beach.

Chapter 15

Inside the forensic photography lab, early the next morning. It is Wednesday now.

Scarpetta sets up what she might need, the science this time simple. From cabinets and drawers she retrieves ceramic bowls, paper, and foam cups, paper towels, sterile swabs, envelopes, modeling clay, distilled water, a bottle of gun blue (a selenium dioxide solution that turns metal surfaces a dark blue/black), a bottle of RTX (ruthenium tetroxide), tubes of superglue, and a small aluminum pan. She attaches a macro lens and a remote shutter release to a digital camera mounted on a copy stand, and covers a countertop with thick brown paper.

Although she has a choice of which concoctions to use so latent prints will show themselves on nonporous surfaces, such as metal, the standard fare is fuming. No magic, just chemistry. Superglue is composed almost entirely of cyanoacrylate, an acrylic resin that reacts to the amino acids, glucose, sodium, lactic acid, and other chemicals exuded from skin pores. When superglue vapors come in contact with a latent print (not visible to the unaided eye), a chemical reaction forms a new composite—one hopes, a very durable and visible white ridge detail.

Scarpetta ponders her approach. DNA swabbing, but not in this lab, and it shouldn’t be done first and doesn’t need to be first because neither RTX nor superglue destroys DNA. Superglue, she decides, and she removes the revolver from its paper bag and writes down the serial number. She opens the empty cylinder and plugs both ends of the barrel with wads of paper towel. From another bag, she retrieves the six .38 special live rounds, setting them upright inside a fuming chamber, which is nothing more than a heat source inside a glass tank. From a wire anchored across the length of it, she suspends the revolver by its trigger guard. She places a cup of warm water inside for humidity, squeezes superglue into a small aluminum pan, and covers the fuming chamber with a lid. She turns on an exhaust fan.

Another pair of fresh gloves, and she picks up the plastic bag with the gold coin necklace inside. The gold chain is a very likely source of DNA, and she bags that separately and labels it. The coin is a possible source of DNA but also of fingerprints, and she holds it lightly by its edges and looks at it through a lens as she hears the biometric lock of the lab’s front door. Then Lucy walks in. Scarpetta can feel her mood.

“I wish we had a program that does photo recognition,” Scarpetta says, because she knows when not to ask questions about how Lucy is feeling and why.

“We do,” Lucy says, avoiding her eyes. “But you have to have something to compare it with. Very few police departments have searchable databases of mug shots, and those that do? Doesn’t matter. Nothing’s integrated. Whoever this asshole is, we’ll probably have to ID him some other way. And I don’t necessarily mean the asshole on the chopper who supposedly showed up in your alley.”

“Then who do you mean?”

“I mean whoever was wearing the necklace and had the gun. And I mean you don’t know it wasn’t Bull.”

“That wouldn’t make any sense.”

“Sure as hell would if he wanted to seem like a hero. Or hide something else he’s up to. You don’t know who had the gun or necklace, because you never saw whoever lost them.”

“Unless the evidence indicates otherwise,” Scarpetta says, “I’ll take him at his word and feel grateful that he put himself in harm’s way to protect me.”

“Believe what you want.”

Scarpetta looks at Lucy’s face. “I believe something’s wrong.”

“I’m just pointing out that the alleged altercation between him and whoever this guy on a chopper is wasn’t witnessed. That’s all.”

Scarpetta checks her watch. She walks over to the fuming chamber. “Five minutes. That should do it.” She removes the lid to bring the process to a halt. “We need to run the serial number of the revolver.”

Lucy moves close, looks inside the glass tank. She puts on gloves, reaches inside, and detaches the wire and retrieves the revolver. “Ridge detail. A little. Here on the barrel.” She turns the gun this way and that, sets it down on the paper-covered countertop. She reaches back inside the tank and plucks out the cartridges. “A few partials. I think there’s enough minutiae.” She sets them down, too.

“I’ll photograph them, and perhaps you can scan in the photos so we can get the characteristics and have them run on IAFIS.”

Scarpetta picks up the phone, calls the fingerprints lab, explains what they’re doing.

“I’ll work with them first to save time,” Lucy says, and she isn’t friendly. “Lose the color channels so the white’s inverted to black and get them run ASAP.”

“Something’s the matter. I guess you’ll tell me when you’re ready.”

Lucy doesn’t listen. Angrily, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

Her favorite point to make when she’s cynical. A print is scanned into IAFIS, and the computer doesn’t know if it’s looking at a rock or a fish. The automated system doesn’t think. It knows nothing. It overlays the characteristics of one print on top of the matching characteristics of another print, meaning if characteristics are missing or obscured or haven’t been correctly encoded by a competent forensic examiner, there’s a good chance a search will come to nothing. IAFIS isn’t the problem. People are. Same is true of DNA. The results are only as good as what’s collected and how it’s processed and by whom.

“You know how rare it is when prints are even rolled properly?” Lucy rants on. Her tone bites. “You get some Deputy Bubba in a jail taking all these ten-print cards, still doing centuries-old shitty ink-and-roll, and they’re all dumped into IAFIS and are crap, when they wouldn’t be if we were using biometric optical live scanning. But no jail’s got money. No money for anything in this fucking country.”

Scarpetta leaves the gold coin inside its transparent plastic envelope and looks at it under a lens. “You want to tell me why you’re in such an awful mood?” She’s afraid of the answer.

“Where’s the serial number so I can enter the gun into NCIC?”

“That piece of paper over there on the counter. Have you been talking to Rose?”

Lucy gets it, sits before a computer terminal. Keys start clicking. “Called to check on her. She said you need checking on.”

“A U.S. one-dollar piece,” Scarpetta says of the magnified coin so she doesn’t have to say anything else. “Eighteen seventy-three.” And she notices something she’s never seen before in unprocessed evidence.

Lucy says, “I’d like to test-fire this in the water tank and run ballistics on it through NIBIN.”

The National Integrated Ballistic Identification Network.

“See if the revolver’s been used in any other crime,” Lucy says. “Although you’re not considering what happened a crime yet and don’t want to involve the police.”

“As I’ve explained”—Scarpetta doesn’t want to sound defensive—“Bull struggled with him and knocked the gun out of his hands.” She studies the coin, adjusting the magnification. “I can’t prove the man in question on the chopper was there to harm me. He never trespassed, just tried.”

“So Bull says.”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think this coin has already been superglued for prints.” Through the lens, Scarpetta examines what looks like pale white ridge detail on front and back.

“What do you mean, if you didn’t know better? You don’t know better. You don’t know anything about it or where it’s been or anything except Bull found it behind your house. Who lost it’s another story.”

“Sure looks like a polymer residue. Like superglue. I don’t understand,” Scarpetta says, carrying the plastic-protected coin to the copy stand. “A lot of things I don’t understand.” She glances up at Lucy. “I guess when you’re ready to talk to me, you will.” She takes off her gloves, puts on new ones and a face mask.

“Sounds like all we need to do is photograph them. No gun blue or RTX.” Lucy refers to the ridge detail on the coin.

“At most, maybe black powder. But I suspect we won’t need even that.” Scarpetta adjusts the camera mounted on the copy stand’s column. She manipulates the arms of the four lights. “I’ll photograph it. Then everything can go to DNA.”

She tears off a section of brown paper for the copy stand’s base, removes the coin from its envelope, and sets it down heads up. She cuts a foam cup in half, places one funnel-shaped half over the coin. Homemade tent lighting to minimize glare, and the ridge detail is much more visible. She reaches for the remote shutter release and starts taking pictures.

“Superglue,” Lucy says. “So maybe it’s evidence from a crime and somehow ended up in circulation again, so to speak.”

“That certainly would explain it. Don’t know if it’s right, but it would explain it.”

Keys rapidly click. “Gold one-dollar piece.” Lucy says. “American, eighteen seventy-three. See what I can find about that.” Hits more keys. “Why would someone take Fiorinal with codeine? And what is it, exactly?”

“Butalbital plus codeine phosphate, aspirin, caffeine,” Scarpetta says, carefully turning the coin so she can photograph the other side. “A strong narcotic pain reliever. Often prescribed for severe tension headaches.” The camera’s shutter shuts. “Why?”

“What about Testroderm?”

“A testosterone gel you rub into your skin.”

“You ever heard of a Stephen Siegel?”

Scarpetta thinks for a moment, can’t come up with anyone, the name completely unfamiliar. “Not that I recall.”

“The Testroderm was prescribed by him, and it just so happens he’s a slimeball proctologist in Charlotte, where Shandy Snook is from. And it just so happens that her father was a patient of this proctologist, which would suggest Shandy knows him and is able to get prescriptions when she wants them.”

“Where was this prescription filled?”

“A pharmacy on Sullivan’s Island, where it just so happens Shandy has a two-million-dollar house in the name of an LLC,” Lucy says, typing again. “Maybe it would be a good idea for you to ask Marino what the hell’s going on. I think all of us ought to be worried.”

“What worries me most is how angry you are.”

“I think you don’t know what I’m like when I’m really angry.” Lucy taps on the keyboard, rapid, hard, angry taps. “So Marino’s all nice and doped up. Illegally. Probably slathering on testosterone gel like it’s suntan lotion and popping pills like crazy to help with his hangovers because he’s suddenly turned into a raging drunk King Kong.” Loudly tapping keys. “Probably suffering priapism and could have a fucking heart attack. Or become so aggressive he’s out of control when he’s already out of control because of the booze. Amazing the effect one person can have on another in one short week.”

“Clearly this new girlfriend is very bad news.”

“I don’t mean her. You had to tell him your news.”

“Yes, I did. I had to tell him. And you and Rose,” Scarpetta quietly says.

“Your gold coin’s worth about six hundred dollars,” Lucy says, closing a file on the computer. “Not including the chain.”

Dr. Maroni sits before the fire in his apartment south of San Marco, the domes of the basilica dreary in the rain. People, mostly the locals, have on green rubber boots, while the tourists wear cheap yellow ones. In no time, the water rises above the streets of Venice.

“I simply heard about the body.” He talks on the phone to Benton.

“How? At first the case wasn’t important. Why would you hear of it?”

“Otto told me.”

“You mean Captain Poma.”

Benton is determined to distance himself from the captain, can’t even bring himself to use his first name.

Dr. Maroni says, “Otto called about something else and mentioned it.”

“Why would he know? There wasn’t much in the news at first.”

“He knew because he’s Carabiniere.”

“And that makes him omniscient?” Benton says.

“You’re resentful of him.”

“What I am is puzzled,” Benton says. “He’s a medico legale with the Carabinieri. And it was the national police, not the Carabinieri, that had jurisdiction in the case. And as usual, this is because the national police got to the scene first. When I was a kid, that was called having dibs. In law enforcement, it’s called unheard-of.”

“What can I say? It’s the way things are done in Italy. Jurisdiction depends on who arrives at the scene first, or who’s called. But that’s not what’s making you so irritable.”

“I’m not irritable.”

“You’re telling a psychiatrist you’re not irritable.” Dr. Maroni lights his pipe. “I’m not there to see your affect, but I don’t need to. You’re irritable. Tell me why it matters how I found out about the dead woman near Bari?”

“Now you’re implying I’m not objective.”

“What I’m implying is you feel threatened by Otto. Let me try to explain the sequence of events more clearly. The body was found on the side of the Autostrade outside Bari, and I thought nothing of it at first when I heard about it. No one knew who she was, and it was believed she was a prostitute. The police speculated the killing was connected to Sacra Corona Unita—the Puglia mafia. Otto said he was quite happy the Carabinieri wasn’t involved, because he wasn’t fond of dealing with gangsters. In his words, there’s nothing redeeming about victims who are as corrupt as their killers. I believe it was a day later when he informed me he’d spoken to the forensic pathologist at the Sezione di Medicina Legale in Bari. It appeared the victim was a missing Canadian tourist last seen at a discotheque in Ostuni. She was quite drunk. She left with a man. A young woman fitting the same description was seen the next day at Grotta Bianca in Puglia. The White Cave.”

“Again, Captain Poma is omniscient, and it seems the entire world reports to him.”

“Again, you sound resentful of him.”

“Let’s talk about the White Cave. We have to assume this killer makes symbolic associations,” Benton says.

“The deeper levels of consciousness,” Dr. Maroni says. “Buried childhood memories. Suppressed memories of trauma and pain. We might interpret the exploration of a cave as his mythological journey into the secrets of his own neuroses and psychoses, his fears. Something terrible happened to him, and it probably predates what he thinks is the terrible thing that happened to him.”

“What do you remember about his physical description? Did people who claimed to have seen him with the victim in the disco, the cave, or elsewhere give a physical description?”

“Young, wearing a cap,” Dr. Maroni tells him. “That’s it.”

“That’s it? Race?”

“In both the disco and the cave, it was very dark.”

“In your patient notes—right here, I’m looking at them—your patient mentioned meeting a Canadian woman in a disco. He said this the day after her body was found. Then you never heard from him again. What was his race?”

“He’s white.”

“You say in your notes he indicated he had, and I quote, ‘left the girl on the roadside in Bari.’”

“At that time, it wasn’t known that she was Canadian. She was unidentified. It was assumed she was a prostitute, as I said.”

“When you found out she was a Canadian tourist, you didn’t make a connection?”

“Naturally, I was worried. But I had no proof.”

“Yes, Paulo, protect the patient. Nobody gave a shit about protecting the Canadian tourist, whose only crime was to have a little too much fun at a disco and meet someone she obviously liked and thought she could trust. Her vacation in southern Italy ends with an autopsy in a cemetery. She’s lucky she wasn’t buried in a pauper’s grave.”

“You are very impatient and upset,” Dr. Maroni says to him.

“Maybe now that you have your notes in front of you, Paulo, your memory will be jogged.”

“I didn’t release these notes to you. I can’t imagine how you got them.” He has to say that repeatedly, and Benton has to play along.

“If you store patient notes in an electronic format on the hospital server, you might want to leave the file-sharing function off,” Benton says over the line. “Because if someone figures out what hard disk these very confidential files are on, they can be accessed.”

“The Internet is a treacherous place.”

“The Canadian tourist was murdered almost a year ago,” Benton says. “Same type of mutilation. Tell me how it is you didn’t think of that case—didn’t think of your patient—after what was done to Drew Martin? Chunks of flesh cut from the same area of the body. Nude, dumped in a place where it will be discovered quickly and shockingly. And no evidence.”

“It doesn’t appear he rapes them.”

“We don’t know what he does. Especially if he forces them to sit in a tub of cold water for God knows how long. I’d like to get Kay on the line. I called her right before I called you. Hopefully, she’s at least glanced at what I sent.”

Dr. Maroni waits. He stares at the image on his screen as rain falls hard beyond his apartment and the canal rises. He opens the shutters far enough to see that the water is more than a foot deep on the sidewalks. He’s grateful he has no need to go out today. Flooding is not the adventure for him that it seems to be for the tourists.

“Paulo?” Benton is back. “Kay?”

“I’m here.”

“She has the files,” Benton says to Dr. Maroni. “You’re looking at the two photographs?” he says to Scarpetta. “And the other files?”

“What he did to Drew Martin’s eyes,” she says right off. “No evidence of this with the woman murdered near Bari. I’m looking at her autopsy report. In Italian. I’m making out what I can. And I’m wondering why you have the autopsy report included in the file of this patient, the Sandman, I presume?”

“Clearly, he calls himself that,” Dr. Maroni says. “Based on Dr. Self’s e-mails. And you’ve looked at some of them?”

“I’m looking now.”

“Why the autopsy report was in your patient’s file,” Benton reminds him. “The Sandman’s file.”

“Because I was concerned. But I had no proof.”

“Asphyxia?” Scarpetta questions. “Based on petechiae, and an absence of other findings.”

“Possible she could have been a drowning?” Dr. Maroni asks, the files Benton forwarded to him printed and on his lap. “Possible Drew was, too?”

“No, Drew absolutely wasn’t. She was strangled with a ligature.”

“The reason I think of a drowning is the tub in Drew’s case,” Dr. Maroni says. “And now this latest photograph of the woman in the copper tub. But I understand if I’m wrong.”

“You’re wrong about Drew. But victims in tubs prior to death—or what we unfortunately assume is death—I agree. We have to consider drowning if we have no evidence otherwise. I will tell you with certainty,” Scarpetta repeats, “that Drew didn’t drown. But this doesn’t mean the victim from Bari didn’t. And we can’t know what’s happened to this woman in the copper tub. We can’t say she’s even dead, although I’m afraid of it.”

“She looks drugged,” Benton says.

“I strongly suspect the three women in question have that in common,” Scarpetta says. “The victim in Bari was compromised, based on her alcohol level, which was three times the legal limit. Drew’s was more than twice the legal limit.”

“Compromises them so he can control them,” Benton says. “So nothing would hint to you the victim in Bari was drowned? Nothing at all on the report? What about diatoms?”

“Diatoms?” Dr. Maroni asks.

“Microscopic algae,” Scarpetta says. “First, someone would have had to check, which isn’t likely if drowning isn’t suspected.”

“Why would it be? She was found alongside a road,” Dr. Maroni says.

“Second,” Scarpetta says, “diatoms are ubiquitous. They’re in water. They’re airborne. The only examination that might yield significant information is if bone marrow or internal organs are examined. And you’re right, Dr. Maroni. Why would they have been? As for the victim in Bari, I’m suspicious she may have been a victim of opportunity. Perhaps the Sandman—from now on I’ll refer to him as that…”

“We don’t know how he referred to himself back then,” Dr. Maroni says. “My patient certainly never mentioned this name.”

“I’ll call him the Sandman for the sake of clarity,” Scarpetta says. “Perhaps he was cruising bars, discos, tourist attractions, and it was her tragic misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Drew Martin, on the other hand, doesn’t strike me as random.”

“We don’t know that, either.” Dr. Maroni smokes his pipe.

“I think I do know that,” she says. “He began writing e-mails to Dr. Self about Drew Martin last fall.”

“Assuming he’s the killer.”

“He sent Dr. Self the photograph of Drew in the tub that he took within hours of her murder,” Scarpetta says. “In my book, that makes him the killer.”

“Please tell me more about her eyes,” Dr. Maroni says to her.

“Based on this report, the killer didn’t remove the Canadian victim’s eyes. Drew’s eyes were removed, the sockets filled with sand, the eyelids glued shut. Thankfully, based on what I know, it appears this was done postmortem.”

“Not sadism but symbolism,” Benton says.

“The Sandman sprinkles sand in your eyes and makes you go to sleep,” Scarpetta says.

“This is the mythology I point out,” Dr. Maroni says. “Freudian, Jungian, but relevant. We ignore the depth psychology of this case at our own peril.”

“I’m not ignoring anything. I wish you hadn’t ignored what you knew about your patient. You worried he might have something to do with the tourist’s murder and said nothing,” Benton says.

Debating. Hinting of mistakes and blame. The three-way conversation continues as the city of Venice floods. Then Scarpetta says she is in the middle of work at the labs, and if there is nothing more they need from her, she’ll get off the phone. She does, and Dr. Maroni resumes his defense.

“That would have been a violation. I had no proof, no evidence whatsoever,” he says to Benton. “You know the rules. What if we ran to the police every time a patient makes violent allusions or references to violent acts that we have no reason to believe are true? We’d be reporting patients to the police daily.”

“I think your patient should have been reported, and I think you should have asked Dr. Self more about him.”

“I think you’re not an FBI agent who can arrest people anymore, Benton. You’re a forensic psychologist at a psychiatric hospital. You’re on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. Your first loyalty is to the patient.”

“Maybe I’m not capable of that anymore. After two weeks of Dr. Self, I don’t feel the same about anything. Including you, Paulo. You protected your patient, and now at least two other women are dead.”

“If he did it.”

“He did.”

“Tell me what Dr. Self did when you confronted her with these images. The one of Drew in the tub. The room looks Italian and old,” Dr. Maroni says.

“It would be in Rome or near Rome. It would have to be,” Benton says. “We can assume she was murdered in Rome.”

“And then this second image?” He clicks on a second file that was in Dr. Self’s e-mail. A woman in a tub, this one copper. She appears to be in her thirties, with long, dark hair. Her lips are swollen and bloody, her right eye swollen shut. “What did Dr. Self say when you showed her this most recent image that the Sandman sent to her?”

“When it was sent, she was in the magnet. When I showed it to her later, it was the first time she’d seen it. Her main concern was we hacked—her word—into her e-mail and that we’d violated her legal rights, and we’d violated HIPAA because Lucy was the hacker—Dr. Self’s accusation—and that means outsiders knew Dr. Self was a patient at McLean. How did Lucy get blamed, by the way? I wonder.”

“Curious she would, without hesitation, be blamed. I agree.”

“Have you seen what Dr. Self posted on her website? Supposedly a confessional by Lucy, talking freely about her brain tumor. It’s everywhere.”

“Lucy did that?” Dr. Maroni is surprised. This he didn’t know.

“She most assuredly didn’t. I can only assume Dr. Self somehow discovered that Lucy comes to McLean for regular scans, and as part of her insatiable appetite to harass, she contrived this confessional on her website.”

“How is Lucy?”

“How do you think?”

“What else did Dr. Self say about this second image? The woman in the copper tub. We have no idea who she is?”

“So someone must have planted in Dr. Self’s mind that Lucy got into her e-mail. Very strange.”

“The woman in the copper tub,” Dr. Maroni says again. “What did Dr. Self say when you confronted her on the steps in the dark? That must have been something.” He waits. Relights his pipe.

“I never said she was on the steps.”

Dr. Maroni smiles and puffs smoke as the tobacco in the pipe’s bowl glows. “Again, when you showed this to her, what did she say?”

“She asked if the image is real. I said we can’t know without seeing the files on the computer of the person who sent it. But it looks genuine. I don’t see the telltale signs of something that’s been tampered with. A missing shadow. An error in perspective. Lighting or weather that doesn’t make sense.”

“No, it doesn’t look tampered with,” Dr. Maroni says, studying it on his screen as the rain falls beyond his shutters and canal water splashes against stucco. “As much as I know about such a thing.”

“She insisted it could be a sick ruse. A sick joke. I said Drew Martin’s photo is real, and it was more than a sick joke. She’s dead. I voiced my concern that the woman in this second photo is also dead. It seems someone is talking to Dr. Self indiscriminately, and not just about this case. I wonder who.”

“And she said?”

“And she said it wasn’t her fault,” Benton says.

“And now that Lucy has gotten us this information, she might know…” Dr. Maroni starts to say, but Benton gets there first.

“Where they’re sent from. Lucy’s explained it. Having access to Dr. Self’s e-mail made it possible to trace the IP address of the Sandman. Just more proof she doesn’t care. She could have traced the IP address herself or gotten someone else to do it. But she didn’t. It probably never entered her mind. It traces to a domain in Charleston, specifically, the port.”

“This is most interesting.”

“You’re so wide open and effusive, Paulo.”

“I’m not sure what you mean by that. ‘Wide open and effusive’?”

“Lucy talked to the port’s IT, the guy who manages all of the computers, the wireless network, and so on,” Benton says. “What’s important, according to her, is the Sandman’s IP doesn’t correspond to any MAC at the port. That’s the Machine Address Code. Whatever computer the Sandman is using to send his e-mails, it doesn’t seem to be one at the port, meaning it’s unlikely he’s an employee there. Lucy has pointed out several possible scenarios. He could be someone in and out of the port—on a cruise ship, a cargo ship—and when he docks, he hijacks the port’s network. If that’s the case, he must work for a cruise ship or cargo vessel that’s been in Charleston at the port whenever he’s sent Dr. Self e-mails. Every one of his e-mails—all twenty-seven that Lucy found in Dr. Self’s inbox—were sent from the port’s wireless network. Including this one she just got. The woman in the copper tub.”

“Then he must be in Charleston now,” Dr. Maroni says. “I hope you have the port under surveillance. This may be the way to catch him.”

“We must be careful, whatever we do. Can’t involve the police right now. He’ll be scared off.”

“There must be calendars for cruises, for cargo ships. Is there an overlapping of those dates and when he sent e-mails to Dr. Self?”

“Yes and no. Some dates of a particular cruise ship—and I’m talking schedules for embarking and debarking—do correspond with date stamps on the e-mails he sent. But some don’t. Which makes me fairly certain he has some reason to be in Charleston, possibly even lives there, and gets access to the port’s network by perhaps parking very close to it and hijacking it.”

“Now you’re leaving me,” Dr. Maroni says. “I live in a very old world.” He lights his pipe again, and one reason he enjoys a pipe is the pleasure of lighting it.

“Analogous to driving around with a scanner and monitoring people on cell phones,” Benton explains.

“I suppose this isn’t Dr. Self’s fault, either,” Dr. Maroni ruefully says. “This killer has been sending e-mails from Charleston since last fall, and she could have known it and told someone.”

“She could have told you, Paulo, when she referred the Sandman to you.”

“And she knows about this Charleston connection?”

“I told her. I hoped it might prompt her to recall something or divulge other information that might help us.”

“And what did she say when you told her that the Sandman has been e-mailing her from Charleston all this time?”

“She said it wasn’t her fault,” Benton replies. “Then took her limousine to the airport and got on her private plane.”

Chapter 16

Applause and music and Dr. Self’s voice. Her website.

Scarpetta can’t hide her extreme distress as she reads Lucy’s bogus confessional article about her brain scans at McLean and why she has them and what it’s like to live with it. Scarpetta reads the blogs until it’s too much, and Lucy can’t help but think her aunt’s upset is easier than what she ought to be feeling.

“There’s nothing I can do. What’s done is done,” Lucy says as she scans partial fingerprints into a digital imaging system. “Even I can’t un-send things, un-post things, un-anything. One way to look at it is once it’s out there, I don’t have to dread being outed because of it anymore.”

“Outed? That’s a telling way to describe it.”

“By my definition, having a physical liability is worse than anything else I’ve been outed for. So maybe it’s better to have people finally know and get it over with. Truth is a relief. Better not to hide something, don’t you think? Funny thing about people knowing is it opens up the possibility of unexpected gifts. People reaching out when you didn’t know they cared. Voices from the past talking to you again. Other voices finally shutting up. Some people finally getting out of your life.”

“Who are you referring to?”

“Let’s just say I’ve not been surprised.”

“Gift or not. Dr. Self had no right,” Scarpetta says.

“You should listen to what you’re saying.”

Scarpetta doesn’t answer her.

“You want to consider how it might be your fault. You know, if I weren’t the niece of the infamous Dr. Scarpetta, there wouldn’t be the interest. You have this unrelenting need to make everything your fault and try to fix it,” Lucy says.

“I can’t look at this anymore.” Scarpetta logs out.

“That’s your flaw,” Lucy says. “One I have a hard time with, if you must know.”

“We need to find a lawyer who specializes in things like this. Internet libel. Defamation of character on the Internet, which is so unregulated, it’s like a society with no laws.”

“Try proving I didn’t write it. Try making a case for any of it. Don’t focus on me because you don’t want to focus on something about yourself. I’ve left you alone about it all morning, and now it’s enough. I can’t anymore.”

Scarpetta starts clearing off a countertop, putting things away.

“I sit here listening to you talk so calmly on the phone to Benton. To Dr. Maroni. How can you do it and not choke on denial and avoidance?”

Scarpetta runs water in a steel sink near an eyewash station. She scrubs her hands as if she’s just done an autopsy instead of working inside a pristinely clean lab where nothing much goes on except photography. Lucy sees the bruises on her aunt’s wrists. She can try all she likes, but she can’t hide them.

“Are you going to protect that bastard for the rest of your life?” Lucy means Marino. “All right. Don’t answer me. Maybe the biggest difference between him and me isn’t what’s obvious. I won’t let Dr. Self drive me to doing anything fatal to myself.”

“Fatal? I hope not. I don’t like it when you use that word.” Scarpetta busies herself with repackaging the gold coin and its chain. “What are you talking about? Something fatal.”

Lucy takes off her lab coat, hangs it on the back of the shut door. “I’m not going to give her the pleasure of goading me into something that can’t be repaired. I’m not Marino.”

“We need to get these to DNA immediately.” Scarpetta tears off evidence tape to seal envelopes. “I’ll hand them over directly to keep the chain of evidence intact, and maybe in thirty-six hours? Maybe less? If there are no unforeseen complications. I don’t want the analysis to wait. I’m sure you understand why. If someone came to visit me with a gun.”

“I remember that time in Richmond. Christmas, and I was spending it with you, home from UVA, had brought a friend with me. He hit on her right in front of me.”

“Which time? He’s done that more than once.” Scarpetta has an expression on her face that Lucy’s never seen before.

Her aunt fills out paperwork, busies herself with one thing after another, anything so she doesn’t have to look at her, because she can’t. Lucy doesn’t recall a time when her aunt seemed angry and shamed. Maybe angry but never shamed, and Lucy’s bad feeling gets worse.

“Because he couldn’t handle being around women he wanted desperately to impress, and worse than not being impressed, at least in the way he’s always wanted, we had no interest in him except in a way he’s never been able to handle,” Lucy says. “We wanted to relate to him as one person to another, and so what does he do? He tries to grope my girlfriend right in front of me. Of course, he was drunk.”

She gets up from the work station and walks over to the counter where her aunt is now preoccupied with removing color markers from a drawer and taking off their caps, testing each one to make sure the ink hasn’t been used up or dried out.

“I didn’t put up with it,” Lucy says. “I fought back. I was only eighteen and I called him on it, and he’s lucky I didn’t do something worse. Are you going to keep distracting yourself as if somehow that will make it go away?”

Lucy takes her aunt’s hands and gently pushes up the sleeves. Her wrists are a bright red. Deep tissue damage, as if she’s been clamped hard by iron manacles.

“Let’s don’t get into this,” Scarpetta says. “I know you care.” She pulls her wrists away, pulls down her sleeves. “But please leave me alone about it, Lucy.”

“What did he do to you?”

Scarpetta sits.

“You’d better tell me everything,” Lucy says. “I don’t care what Dr. Self did to provoke him, and we both know it doesn’t take much. He’s gone too far, and there’s no going back and there’s no exception to the rule. I’ll punish him.”

“Please. Let me deal with it.”

“You aren’t, and you won’t. You always make excuses for him.”

“I’m not. But punishing him isn’t the answer. What good will it do?”

“What exactly happened?” Lucy is quiet and calm. But inside she goes numb, the way she gets when she’s capable of anything. “He was at your house all night. What did he do? Nothing you wanted, that’s for sure, or you wouldn’t be bruised. You wouldn’t want anything from him anyway, so he forced you, didn’t he? He grabbed your wrists. What did he do? Your neck is raw. Where else? What did the son of a bitch do? All the trash he sleeps with, no telling what diseases…”

“It didn’t go that far.”

“How far is that far? What did he do.” Lucy says it not as a question but as a point of fact that demands further explanation.

“He was drunk,” Scarpetta says. “Now we find out he’s probably on a testosterone supplement that could make him very aggressive, depending on how much he’s using, and he doesn’t know the meaning of moderation. His excesses. Too much. Too much. You’re right, his drinking this past week, and his smoking. He’s never good with boundaries, but now there are none. Well, I suppose it’s all been leading up to this.”

“All been leading up to this? After all these years, your relationship has been leading up to his sexually assaulting you?”

“I’ve never seen him like that. He was someone I didn’t know. So aggressive and angry, completely out of control. Maybe we should be more worried about him than me.”

“Don’t start.”

“Please try to understand.”

“I’ll understand better when you tell me what he did.” Lucy’s voice is flat, the way she sounds when she’s capable of anything. “What did he do? The more you dodge it, the more I want to punish him, and the worse it will be when I do. And you know enough to take me seriously, Aunt Kay.”

“He went only so far then stopped and started crying,” Scarpetta says.

“How far is ‘only so far’?”

“I can’t talk about this.”

“Really? And if you’d called the police? They’d demand details. You know how it goes. Violated once. Then violated again when you tell all and some cop starts imagining it happening, and secretly gets off on it. These perverts who go from courtroom to courtroom looking for rape cases so they can sit in the back and listen to all the details.”

“Why are you going off on this tangent? It has nothing to do with me.”

“What do you think would have happened had you called the police and Marino were charged with sexual battery? At the very least? You’d end up in court, and God knows what a spectator sport that would be. People listening to all the details, imagining all of it, as if, in a sense, you were undressed in public, viewed as a sexual object, degraded. The great Dr. Kay Scarpetta naked and manhandled for all the world to see.”

“It didn’t go that far.”

“Really? Open your shirt. What are you hiding? I can see abrasions on your neck.” Lucy reaches for Scarpetta’s shirt, starts on the top button.

Scarpetta pushes her hands away. “You’re not a forensic nurse, and I’ve heard enough. Don’t make me angry with you.”

Lucy’s own anger begins to work its way to the surface. She feels it in her heart, in her feet, in her hands. “I’ll take care of this,” she says.

“I don’t want you to take care of it. Clearly, you’ve already broken into his house and searched it. I know how you take care of things, and I know how to take care of myself. What I don’t need is some confrontation between the two of you.”

“What did he do? What exactly did that drunk, stupid son of a bitch do to you?”

Scarpetta is silent.

“He takes that garbage girlfriend on a tour of your building. Benton and I watch every second of it, can see as plain as day he has a hard-on in the morgue. No wonder. He’s a walking hard-on doped up on some hormone gel so he can please that fucking bitch who’s less than half his age. And then he does this to you.”

“Stop it.”

“I won’t stop it. What did he do? He rip your clothes off? Where are they? They’re evidence. Where are your clothes?”

“Stop it, Lucy.”

“Where are they? I want them. I want the clothes you had on. What did you do with them?”

“You’re making it worse.”

“You threw them out, didn’t you?”

“Leave it alone.”

“Sexual battery. A felony. And you aren’t going to tell Benton or you would have already. And you weren’t going to tell me. Rose had to tell me, at least tell me she suspected it. What’s wrong with you? I thought you were a strong woman. I thought you were powerful. All my life I’ve thought it. There. The flaw. Someone who lets him do this and doesn’t tell. Why did you let him?”

“And that’s what this is about.”

“Why did you?”

“That’s what this is about,” Scarpetta says. “Let’s talk about your flaw.”

“Don’t turn this on me.”

“I could have called the police. I was within reach of his gun and could have killed him and it would have been justified. There are a lot of things I could have done,” Scarpetta says.

“Then why didn’t you?”

“I chose the lesser of evils. It will be all right. All other choices wouldn’t have been,” Scarpetta says. “You know why you’re doing this.”

“It’s not what I’m doing. It’s what you did.”

“Because of your mother—my pathetic sister. Bringing one man after another into the house. Worse than male-dependent. She’s male-addicted,” Scarpetta says. “Do you remember what you asked me once? You asked why men were always more important than you.”

Lucy clenches her hands.

“You said any man in your mother’s life was more important than you. And you were right. Remember my telling you why? Because Dorothy’s an empty vessel. It’s not about you. It’s about her. You always felt violated because of what went on in your home…” Her voice trails off and a shadow turns her eyes a deeper blue. “Did something happen? Something else? Did one of her boyfriends ever act inappropriately with you?”

“I probably wanted attention.”

“What happened?”

“Forget it.”

“What happened, Lucy?” Scarpetta says.

“Forget it. This isn’t about me right now. And I was a little kid. You aren’t a little kid.”

“I may as well have been. How could I have fought him off?”

They get quiet for a while. The tension between them suddenly goes slack. Lucy doesn’t want to fight with her anymore, and she resents Marino as much as she’s resented anyone in her life because, for an instant, he made her unkind toward her aunt. She showed no mercy toward her aunt, who did nothing but suffer. He inflicted an injury that can’t ever heal, not really, and Lucy just made it worse.

“That wasn’t fair,” Lucy says. “I just wish I’d been there.”

“You can’t always fix things, either,” Scarpetta says. “You and I are more alike than we’re different.”

“Drew Martin’s coach has been to Henry Hollings’s funeral home,” Lucy says, because they shouldn’t talk about Marino anymore. “The address is stored in his Porsche’s GPS. I can check it out if you’d prefer to stay away from the coroner.”

“No,” she says. “I think it’s time we meet.”

An office tastefully furnished with fine antiques and damask draperies pulled back to let the outdoors in. On mahogany-paneled walls are oil portraits of Henry Hollings’s ancestors, an array of somber men watching over their past.

His desk chair is swiveled around as he faces the window. Beyond it is yet another perfectly splendid Charleston garden. He doesn’t seem aware that Scarpetta is standing in the doorway.

“I have a recommendation I think you just might like.” He talks on the phone in a soothing voice with a thick southern cadence. “We have urns made just for that, an excellent innovation most people don’t know about. Biodegradable, dissolve in water, nothing ornate or expensive…Yes, if you plan on a water committal…That’s right…Scatter his ashes at sea…Indeed. You prevent them from blowing everywhere by simply immersing the urn. I understand it might not seem the same. Of course, you can choose whatever’s meaningful to you, and I’ll assist in any way I can…Yes, yes, it’s what I recommend…No, you don’t want them blowing everywhere. How do I put this delicately? Blowing in the boat. That would be unfortunate.”

He adds several sympathetic comments and hangs up. When he turns around, he doesn’t seem surprised to see Scarpetta. He’s expecting her. She called first. If it occurs to him she was listening to his conversation, he doesn’t seem concerned or the least bit offended. It disconcerts her that he seems sincerely thoughtful and kind. There’s a certain comfort in assumptions, and hers has always been that he is greedy, unctuous, and full of self-importance.

“Dr. Scarpetta.” He smiles as he gets up and walks around his perfectly organized desk to shake her hand.

“I appreciate your seeing me, especially on such short notice,” she says, choosing the wing chair while he settles on the couch, his choice of where he sits significant. If he wanted to overpower or belittle her, he would remain enthroned behind his massive burlwood partner’s desk.

Henry Hollings is a distinguished man in a beautiful hand-tailored dark suit with creased trousers, and a black silk-lined single-button jacket, and a pale blue shirt. His hair is the same silver as his silver silk tie, his face lined but not in a harsh way, the wrinkles indicating that he smiles more than he frowns. His eyes are kind. It continues to disturb her that he doesn’t fit the image of the cunning politician she expected, and she reminds herself that that’s the problem with cunning politicians. They fool people right before they take advantage of them.

“Let me be forthright,” Scarpetta says. “You’ve had ample opportunity to acknowledge I’m here. It’s been almost two years. Let me just say that and we’ll move on.”

“Seeking you out would have been forward of me,” he says.

“It would have been gracious. I’m the new person in town. We have the same agendas. Or should.”

“Thank you for your candor. It affords me an opportunity to explain. We tend to be ethnocentric in Charleston, quite skilled at taking our time, waiting to see what’s what. I suspect you may have noticed by now that things don’t tend to happen speedily. Why, people don’t even walk fast.” He smiles. “So I’ve been waiting for you to take the initiative, if you ever made that choice. I didn’t think you would. If you’ll allow me to explain further? You’re a forensic pathologist. Of considerable reputation, I might add, and people such as yourself generally have a low opinion of elected coroners. We’re not doctors or forensic experts, as a rule. I expected you would experience some defensive feelings about me when you set up your practice here.”

“Then it would seem both of us have made assumptions.” She’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, or at least pretend.

“Charleston can be gossipy.” He reminds her of a Matthew Brady photograph—sitting straight, legs crossed, hands folded in his lap. “A lot of it spiteful and small-minded,” he says.

“I’m sure you and I can get along as professionals.” She’s not sure of any such thing.

“Are you familiar with your neighbor Mrs. Grimball?”

“I mainly see her when she’s looking out her window at me.”

“Apparently, she complained about a hearse being in the alley behind your house. Twice.”

“I’m aware of once.” She can’t think of a second time. “Lucious Meddick. And a mysterious and erroneous listing of my address, which I’m hoping has been cleared up.”

“She made a complaint to people who could have caused you quite a lot of trouble. I got a call about it and interceded. I said I knew for a fact you didn’t have body deliveries at your house, and there must be a misunderstanding.”

“I’m wondering if you would have told me this if I hadn’t happened to call you.”

“If I were out to get you, why would I have protected you in this instance?” he says.

“I don’t know.”

“I happen to think there’s plenty of death and tragedy to go around. But not everybody feels the same way,” he says. “There’s not a funeral home in South Carolina that doesn’t want my business. Including Lucious Meddick’s. I don’t believe for one minute he truly thought your carriage house was the morgue. Even if he read the wrong address somewhere.”

“Why would he want to hurt me? I don’t even know him.”

“That’s your answer. He doesn’t view you as a source of revenue because, and this is just my guess, you aren’t doing anything to help him,” Hollings says.

“I don’t do marketing.”

“If you’ll allow me, I’ll send an e-mail to every coroner, funeral home, and removal service you might deal with and make sure they have your correct address.”

“That’s not necessary. I can do it myself.” The nicer he is, the less she trusts him.

“Frankly, it’s better if it comes from me. It sends the message that you and I are working together. Isn’t that why you’re here?”

“Gianni Lupano,” she says.

His expression is blank.

“Drew Martin’s tennis coach.”

“I’m sure you know I have absolutely no jurisdiction in her case. No information beyond what’s been in the news,” Hollings says.

“He’s visited your funeral home in the past. At least once.”

“If he came here to ask questions about her, I most assuredly would be aware of it.”

“He’s been here for some reason,” she says.

“Might I ask how you can know that for a fact? Perhaps you’ve heard more Charleston gossip than I have.”

“At the very least, he’s been in your parking lot, let me put it that way,” she says.

“I see.” He nods. “I suppose the police or someone looked at the GPS in his car and my address was in there. And that would lead me to ask if he’s a suspect in her murder.”

“I imagine everyone associated with her is being questioned. Or will be. And you said ‘his car.’ How do you know he has a car in Charleston?”

“Because I happen to know he has an apartment here,” he says.

“Most people—including people in his building—don’t know he has an apartment here. I’m wondering why you do.”

“We keep a guest book,” he says. “It’s always on a podium outside the chapel, so those who attend a wake or a service can sign in. Perhaps he attended a funeral here. You’re welcome to look at the book. Or books. Going back as far as you’d like.”

“The last two years would be fine,” she says.

Shackles attached to a wooden chair inside an interrogation room.

Madelisa Dooley wonders if she’ll end up in that room next. For lying.

“A lot of drugs, but we’ve got everything,” Investigator Turkington says as she and Ashley follow him past one unsettling room after another inside the southern branch of the Beaufort County Sheriff’s office. “Burglaries, robberies, homicides.”

It’s larger than she imagined, because it never occurred to her there might be crime on Hilton Head Island. But according to Turkington, there’s enough of it south of the Broad River to keep sixty sworn officers, including eight investigators, busy around the clock.

“Last year,” he says, “we worked more than six hundred serious crimes.”

Madelisa wonders how many of them were trespassing and lying.

“I can’t tell you how shocked I am,” she nervously says. “We thought it was so safe here, haven’t even bothered locking our door.”

He leads them into a conference room and says, “You’d be amazed how many people think just because they’re rich, they’re immune to anything bad happening to them.”

It flatters Madelisa that he must assume she and Ashley are rich. She can’t think of anybody who’s ever thought that about them, and she’s happy for a moment until she remembers why they’re here. Any minute, this young man in his smart suit and tie will figure out the truth about Mr. and Mrs. Ashley Dooley’s economic status. He’ll put two and two together when he finds out about their unimpressive North Charleston address and the cheap town house they rented here, so far back in the pine trees one can’t even see a hint of the ocean.

“Please have a seat.” He pulls out a chair for her.

“You sure are right,” she says. “Money certainly doesn’t make you happy or cause people to get along.” As if she knows.

“That’s quite a camcorder you’ve got there,” he says to Ashley. “How much that set you back? At least a thousand.” He indicates for Ashley to hand it over to him.

“I don’t know why you’ve got to take it from me,” he says. “Why can’t you just look at what I got real quick?”

“What I’m still unclear about”—Turkington’s pale eyes stare right at her—“is why you went up to that house to begin with. Why you walked right on to that property, even though there’s a No Trespassing sign.”

“She was looking for the owner,” Ashley replies, as if he’s talking to his camcorder on the table.

“Mr. Dooley, please don’t answer for your wife. According to what she told me, you weren’t a witness, were out on the beach when she found what she did in the house.”

“I don’t see why you’ve got to keep it.” Ashley obsesses about his camcorder while Madelisa obsesses about the basset hound all alone in the car.

She left the windows cracked so he could get air, and thank God it’s not hot out. Oh, please, don’t let him bark. She loves that dog already. Poor baby. What he’s been through, and she remembers touching the sticky blood on his fur. She can’t mention the dog, even if it might help her explain that the only reason she went near house was to find his owner. If the police discover she has that poor, sweet puppy, they’ll take him, and he’ll end up in the pound and eventually be put to sleep. Just like Frisbee.

“Looking for the owner of the house. So you’ve said a number of times. I’m still unclear as to why you were looking for the owner.” Turkington’s pale eyes are fixed on her again, his pen resting on the legal pad he’s writing on as he continues to make a record of her lies.

“It’s such a beautiful house,” she says. “I wanted Ashley to film it but didn’t think that was right without permission. So I looked for people out by the pool, looked for anybody who might be home.”

“There aren’t many people here this time of year, not up there where you were. A lot of those big places are second, third homes for very wealthy people and they don’t rent them and it’s off-season.”

“That’s exactly true,” she agrees.

“But you assumed someone was home because you said you saw something cooking on the grill?”

“That’s exactly right.”

“How’d you see that from the beach?”

“I saw smoke.”

“You saw smoke from the grill and maybe smelled what was being barbecued.” He writes it down.

“That’s exactly right.”

“What was it?”

“What was what?”

“What was being cooked on the grill?”

“Meat. Pork, maybe. Could have been London broil, I guess.”

“And you took it upon yourself to walk right into the house.” He makes more notes, then the pen goes still and he looks up at her. “You know, that’s the part that I still can’t figure out.”

It’s the part she’s had a hard time figuring out, too, no matter how much she’s thought about it. What lie can she tell that will have the ring of truth?

“Like I told you over the phone,” she says, “I was looking for the owner and then started getting worried. Started imagining some rich old person barbecuing and all of a sudden having a heart attack. Why else would you put something on the grill and then disappear? So I kept calling ‘Anybody home?’ Then I found the laundry-room door open.”

“You mean unlocked.”

“Yes, it was.”

“The door next to the window where you said a pane of glass was missing and another pane was broken,” Investigator Turkington says, writing it down.

“And I went in, knowing I probably shouldn’t. But I thought in my head, What if that rich old person is lying on the floor after having a stroke?”

“That’s the thing—where you make hard choices in life,” Ashley says, his eyes jumping back and forth from the investigator to the camcorder. “Don’t go in? Or never forgive yourself later when you read in the paper that someone could have used your help.”

“Did you film the house, sir?”

“Filmed some porpoises while I was waiting for Madelisa to come back out.”

“I asked if you filmed the house.”

“Let me think. I guess a little bit. Earlier, with Madelisa in front of it. But I wasn’t going to show it to anybody if she couldn’t get permission.”

“I see. You wanted permission to film the house but filmed it anyway without permission.”

“And when we didn’t get permission, I erased it,” Ashley says.

“Really?” Turkington says, looking at him for a long moment. “Your wife runs out of the house afraid somebody’s been murdered in there and it occurs to you to erase part of what you filmed because you failed to get permission from whoever might have been murdered?”

“I know it sounds strange,” Madelisa says. “But what matters is I didn’t mean any harm.”

Ashley says, “When Madelisa ran out and was all upset about what she saw in there, I was desperate to call nine-one-one but didn’t have my phone. She didn’t have hers, either.”

“And you didn’t think to use the one in the house?”

“Not after what I saw in there!” Madelisa says. “I felt like he was still in there!”

“‘He’?”

“It was just this awful feeling. I’ve never been so scared. You don’t really think after what I saw I’d stop to use the phone when I could feel something watching me.” She rummages through her purse for a tissue.

“So we hurried back to our condo, and she got so hysterical, I had to calm her down,” Ashley says. “She just cried like a baby and we missed our tennis clinic. She cried and cried, well into the night. Finally, I said, ‘Honey, why don’t you sleep on it and let’s talk about it again in the morning.’ Truth is, I wasn’t sure I believed her. My wife here has quite the imagination. Reads all these mystery books, watches all these crime shows, you know. But when she kept on crying, I started to get worried maybe there was something to it. So I called you.”

“Not until after another tennis clinic,” Turkington points out. “She’s still so upset, yet you went to tennis this morning, then back to your condo, showered, changed, and packed the car to head back to Charleston. Then finally got around to calling the police? I’m sorry. I’m supposed to believe this?”

“If it wasn’t true, why’d we cut our vacation two days short? We planned it for a whole year,” Ashley says. “You’d think you’d get a refund when there’s an emergency. Maybe you could put in a word for us with the rental agent.”

“If that’s why you called the police,” Turkington says, “you just wasted your time.”

“I wish you wouldn’t keep my camcorder. I erased what little bit I filmed in front of the house. There’s nothing to see. Just Madelisa in front of it, talking to her sister for maybe ten seconds.”

“Now her sister was with you?”

“Talking to her on the camcorder. I don’t know what you’d see that’s helpful, because I erased it.”

Madelisa made him erase it because of the dog. He had filmed her petting the dog.

“Maybe if I saw what you recorded,” Turkington says to Ashley, “I would see the smoke rising up from the barbecue. You said that’s what you saw from the beach, didn’t you? So if you filmed the house, wouldn’t the smoke be in it?”

This takes Ashley by surprise. “Well, I don’t think I got that part, wasn’t aiming my camcorder in that direction. Can’t you just watch what’s on it and give it back? I mean, most of what’s on there is Madelisa and a few porpoises and other stuff I’ve filmed at home. I don’t see why you’ve got to keep my camcorder.”

“We have to be sure there’s nothing you recorded that might give us information about what happened, details you might not be aware of.”

“Like what?” Ashley says, alarmed.

“Like, for instance, are you telling the truth about your not going inside the house after your wife told you what she did.” Investigator Turkington is getting very unfriendly now. “I find it unusual you didn’t go in and check out your wife’s story for yourself.”

“If what she said was true, there’s no way I was walking in there,” Ashley says. “What if some killer was hiding in there?”

Madelisa remembers the sound of running water, the blood, the clothes, the photograph of the dead tennis player. She envisions the mess in the huge living room, all those prescription bottles and vodka. And the projector turned on with nothing playing on the movie screen. The detective doesn’t believe her. She’s in for a world of trouble. Breaking and entering. Stealing a dog. Lying. He can’t find out about the dog. They’ll take him and put him to sleep. She loves that dog. The hell with lies. She’ll tell lies all the way to hell for that dog.

“I know this isn’t my business,” Madelisa says, and it takes all her nerve to ask, “but do you know who lives in that house and if anything bad’s happened?”

“We know who lives there, a woman whose name I don’t care to divulge. It just so happens she’s not home, and her dog and car are gone.”

“Her car’s gone?” Madelisa’s lower lip starts to tremble.

“Sounds like she went somewhere and took her dog, don’t you think? And you know what else I think? You wanted a free tour of her mansion and then worried someone might have seen you trespassing. So you made up this wild tale to cover your butts. That was almost clever.”

“If you bother to look inside her house, you’ll know the truth.” Madelisa’s voice shakes.

“We did bother, ma’am. I sent a few officers over there to check, and they didn’t find anything you supposedly saw. No pane of glass missing from a window by the laundry-room door. No broken glass. No blood. No knives. The gas grill was turned off, clean as a whistle. No sign something had recently been cooked on it. And the projector wasn’t on,” he says.

In the arrangement office where Hollings and his staff meet with families, Scarpetta sits on a pale gold-and-cream-striped sofa and goes through a second guest book.

Based on everything she’s seen so far, Hollings is a tasteful, thoughtful man. The large, thick guest books are bound in fine black leather with lined creamy pages, and because of the magnitude of his business, three to four books a year are required. A tedious search through the first four months of last year’s hasn’t produced evidence that Gianni Lupano attended a funeral here.

She picks up another guest book and begins to work her way through it, running her finger down each page, recognizing well-known Charleston family names. No Gianni Lupano for January through March. No sign of him for April, and Scarpetta’s disappointment grows. Nothing for May or June. Her finger stops at a generous, looping signature easy to decipher. On July 12 of last year, it seems he attended the funeral service of someone named Holly Webster. It appears the attendance was small—only eleven people signed the guest book. Scarpetta writes down each name and gets up from the sofa. She walks past the chapel, where two ladies inside are arranging flowers around a polished bronze casket. Up a flight of mahogany stairs, she returns to Henry Hollings’s office. Once again, his back is to the door and he’s on the phone.

“Some people prefer to fold the flag in tri-corners and place it behind the person’s head,” he is saying in his soothing, lilting voice. “Well, certainly. We can drape it over the casket. What do I recommend?” He holds up a sheet of paper. “You seem to be leaning toward the walnut with champagne satin. But also the twenty-gauge steel…I sure do know. Everybody says the same thing…. It’s hard. Just as hard as it can be to make decisions like this. You want me to be honest, I’d go for the steel.”

He talks a few minutes longer, turns around, and sees Scarpetta in his doorway again. “Some of these are so hard,” he says to her. “Seventy-two-year-old veteran, recently lost his wife, very depressed. Puts a shotgun in his mouth. We did what we could, but no cosmetics or restorative procedures in the world were going to make him viewable, and I know you know what I’m talking about. You can’t possibly have an open casket, and the family won’t take no for an answer.”

“Who was Holly Webster?” Scarpetta asks.

“Such a terrible tragedy.” He doesn’t hesitate. “One of those cases you never forget.”

“Do you remember Gianni Lupano attending her funeral?”

“I wouldn’t have known him back then,” he oddly says.

“Was he a family friend?”

He gets up from his desk and slides open a cherry cabinet drawer. He looks through files and pulls one out.

“What I have here are details of the funeral arrangements, copies of invoices and such, which I can’t let you look at out of respect for the family’s privacy. But I can let you look at news clippings.” He hands them to her. “I keep them on any death I handle. As you know, the only source of legal records on this will be from police and the medical examiner who worked the case, and the coroner who referred the case here for the autopsy, since Beaufort County doesn’t have an ME’s office. But then, you know all about that, since he’s referring his cases to you now. When Holly died, they weren’t using you yet. Otherwise, I suppose this sad situation would have landed in your lap instead of mine.”

She detects no hint of resentment. He doesn’t seem to care.

He says, “The death occurred at Hilton Head, a very wealthy family.”

She opens the file. There are but a few clippings, the most detailed one in Hilton Head’s Island Packet. According to that account, in the late morning of July 10, 2006, Holly Webster was playing on the patio with her puppy basset hound. The Olympic-size pool was off-limits unless the child was supervised, and on this morning she wasn’t. According to the newspaper, her parents were out of town, and friends were staying at the house. No mention of the parents’ whereabouts or their friends’ names. At almost noon, someone went out to tell Holly it was time for lunch. She was nowhere in sight, the puppy walking back and forth at the edge of the pool, pawing at the water. The little girl’s body was discovered at the bottom, her long, dark hair caught in the drain. Nearby was a rubber bone that police believe the child was trying to retrieve for her dog.

Another clipping, a very brief one. Not even two months later, the mother, Lydia Webster, was a guest on Dr. Self’s talk show.

“I remember hearing about this case,” Scarpetta says. “I believe I was in Massachusetts when it happened.”

“Bad news but not big news. The police played it down as best they could. For one reason, resort areas aren’t particularly keen on publicizing, shall we say, negative events.” Hollings reaches for the phone. “I don’t think he’ll tell you anything, the ME who did the autopsy. But let’s see.” He pauses, then, “Henry Hollings here…Fine, fine…Up to your ears. I know, I know…They really do need to get some help for you down there…No, haven’t been out in my boat for a while…. Right…I owe you a fishing trip. And you owe me for doing a lecture down there to all those wannabe kids who think death investigations are entertainment…The Holly Webster case. I’ve got Dr. Scarpetta here. Wonder if you would mind talking to her for a minute?”

Hollings hands her the phone. She explains to the MUSC assistant chief medical examiner that she has been called in as a consultant on a case that might have a connection to Holly Webster’s drowning.

“What case?” the assistant chief asks.

“I’m sorry but I can’t discuss it,” she replies. “It’s a homicide under investigation.”

“Glad you understand the way it works. I can’t discuss the Webster case.”

What he means is he won’t.

“I’m not trying to be difficult,” Scarpetta says to him. “Let me go this far out on a limb. I’m here with Coroner Hollings because it appears Drew Martin’s tennis coach, Gianni Lupano, attended Holly Webster’s funeral. I’m trying to figure out why and can’t say more than that.”

“Not familiar. Never heard of him.”

“That was one of my questions—if you had any idea what connection he might have had with the Webster family.”

“No idea.”

“What can you tell me about Holly’s death?”

“Drowning. Accidental, and nothing to indicate otherwise.”

“Meaning no pathognomonic findings. Diagnosis based on circumstances,” Scarpetta says. “Mostly based on the way she was found.”

“That’s correct.”

“Would you mind telling me the name of the investigating officer?”

“No problem. Hold on.” As computer keys click. “Let me see here. Right, I thought so. Turkington of the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Department. You want to know anything else, you need to call him.”

Scarpetta thanks him again, gets off the phone, and says to Hollings. “Are you aware that the mother, Lydia Webster, appeared on Dr. Self’s talk show not even two months after her child’s death?”

“I didn’t watch the show, don’t watch any of her shows. That woman ought to be shot,” he says.

“Any idea how Mrs. Webster ended up on Dr. Self’s show?”

“I would guess she has quite a team of researchers who scour the news for material. Line up guests that way. In my opinion, it would have been psychologically destructive for Mrs. Webster to expose herself in front of the world when she hadn’t coped with what happened. I understand it was the same sort of situation with Drew Martin,” he says.

“You’re referring to her appearance on Dr. Self’s show last fall?”

“I hear a lot of what goes on around here, whether I want to or not. When she comes to town, she always stays at the Charleston Place Hotel. This last time, not even three weeks ago, she was rarely in her room, certainly never slept there. Housekeeping would come in and find her bed made, no sign of her being there except her belongings, or at least some of them.”

“And how might you know all this?” Scarpetta says.

“A very good friend of mine is the head of security. When relatives, friends of the deceased come to town, I recommend the Charleston Place. Providing they can afford it.”

Scarpetta recalls what Ed the doorman said. Drew was in and out of the apartment building, always tipped him twenty dollars. Maybe it was more than generosity. Maybe she was reminding him to keep his mouth shut.

Chapter 17

Sea Pines, the most exclusive plantation on Hilton Head Island.

For five dollars, one can buy a day pass at the security gate, and the guards, in their gray-and-blue uniforms, don’t demand identification. Scarpetta used to complain about it when she and Benton had a condo here, and the memories of those days are still painful.

“She bought the Cadillac in Savannah,” Investigator Turkington is saying as he drives Scarpetta and Lucy in his unmarked cruiser. “White. Which isn’t helpful. You got any idea how many white Cadillacs and Lincolns there are around here? Probably two out of three rental cars are white.”

“And the guards at the gate don’t remember seeing it, maybe at an unusual hour? The cameras pick up anything?” Lucy says from the front seat.

“Nothing useful. You know how it is. One person says maybe they saw it. Another person says no. My thought is he drove it out, not in, so they wouldn’t have noticed it anyway.”

“Depends on when he took it,” Lucy says. “She keep it in the garage?”

“It’s been observed parked in her driveway, as a rule. So it would strike me as unlikely he’s had it for a while. What?” He glances at her as he drives. “He somehow got hold of her keys, took her car, and she didn’t notice?”

“No telling what she noticed. Or didn’t.”

“You’re still sure the worst happened,” Turkington starts to say.

“Yes, I am. Based on facts and common sense.” Lucy has been bantering with him since he picked them up at the airport and made a smart-aleck comment about her helicopter.

He called it an eggbeater. She called him a Luddite. He didn’t know what a Luddite was, still doesn’t. She didn’t define it for him.

“But that doesn’t preclude her having been abducted for ransom,” Lucy says. “I’m not saying that’s impossible. I don’t believe it, but sure, it’s possible, and we should do exactly what we’re doing. Have every investigative agency looking.”

“Sure as hell wish we could have kept it out of the news. Becky says they’ve been chasing people away from the house all morning.”

“Who’s Becky?” Lucy asks.

“Chief of crime scene investigation. Like me, she’s got a second job as an EMT.”

Scarpetta wonders why that matters. Maybe he’s self-conscious about needing a second job.

“Then again, I guess you don’t have to worry about paying the rent,” he says.

“Sure do. It’s just mine’s a little bit more than yours.”

“Yeah, just a little. Can’t imagine what those labs are costing you. Or your fifty houses and Ferraris.”

“Not quite fifty, and how do you know what I’ve got?”

“Many departments using your labs yet?” he asks.

“A few. Still under construction, but we’ve got the basics. And we’re accredited. You get to choose. Us or SLED.” South Carolina Law Enforcement Division.

“We’re faster,” she adds. “If you need something that’s not on the menu, we’ve got friends in high-tech places. Oak Ridge. Y-Twelve.”

“I thought they make nuclear weapons.”

“That’s not all they do.”

“You’re kidding. They do forensic stuff? Like what?” he asks.

“It’s a secret.”

“Doesn’t matter. We can’t afford you.”

“Nope, you can’t. Doesn’t mean we wouldn’t help.”

His dark glasses appear in the rearview mirror. He says to Scarpetta, probably because he’s had enough of Lucy, “You still with us back there?”

He wears a suit the color of cream, and Scarpetta wonders how he stays clean at crime scenes. She picks up on the more important points he and Lucy were discussing, reminds them that no one should assume anything at all, including when Lydia Webster’s Cadillac disappeared, because it appears she rarely drove anyway, only on occasion, for cigarettes, booze, some food. Sadly, driving wasn’t a good idea. She was too impaired. So the car could have been gone for days, and its disappearance may have nothing to do with the dog’s being gone. Then there are the images the Sandman e-mailed to Dr. Self. Both Drew Martin and Lydia Webster were photographed in bathtubs that seem to have been filled with cold water. Both of them look drugged, and what about what Mrs. Dooley saw? This case must be worked as a homicide, no matter what the truth may be. Because—and Scarpetta’s been preaching this for more than twenty years—you can’t go back.

Then she goes back into her own private place. She can’t help it. Her thoughts return to the last time she was in Hilton Head, when she cleared out Benton’s condo. It never entered her mind during the darkest of dark times that his murder might have been contrived to hide him from those who certainly would have killed him, given the chance. Where are those would-be hit men now? Did they lose interest, decide he was no longer a threat or worthy of retribution? She’s asked Benton. He won’t talk about it, says he can’t. She rolls down the window of Turkington’s car and her ring winks in the sun, but it doesn’t reassure her, and the good weather won’t last. Later today, yet another storm is supposed to roll in.

The road winds through golf courses, and over short bridges that briefly span narrow canals and small ponds. On a grassy embankment, an alligator looks like a log, and turtles are quiet in the mud, and a snowy egret stands on stick legs in shallow water. The conversation in the front seat is centered on Dr. Self for a while, and light turns to shadow in the shade of huge oak trees. Spanish moss looks like dead, gray hair. Little has changed. A few new houses have been built here and there, and she remembers long walks and salt air and wind, and sunsets on the balcony, and the moment all of it came to an end. She envisions what she believed was him in the charred ruins of the building where he supposedly died. She sees his silver hair and incinerated flesh in the blackened wood and filth from a fire that was still smoldering when she arrived. His face was gone, nothing but burned bone, and his autopsy records were false. She was fooled. Devastated. Destroyed, and she is forever different because of what Benton did—far more different than she is because of Marino.

They park in the driveway of Lydia Webster’s sprawling white villa. Scarpetta remembers seeing it before, from the beach, and it seems surreal because of why they’re here. Police cars line the street.

“They got the place about a year ago. Some tycoon from Dubai had it before that,” Turkington says, opening his door. “Real sad. They’d just finished a massive renovation and moved in when the little girl drowned. I don’t know how Mrs. Webster stood being inside the place after that.”

“Sometimes people can’t let go,” Scarpetta says as they walk over pavers toward the double teakwood doors at the top of stone steps. “So they stay embedded in a place and its memories.”

“She get this in the settlement?” Lucy asks.

“Probably would have.” As if, in truth, there’s no doubt she’s dead. “Still in the middle of the divorce. Her husband’s into hedge funds, investments, whatever. Almost as rich as you are.”

“How about we stop talking about that,” Lucy says, annoyed.

Turkington opens the front door. Crime scene investigators are inside. Propped against a stucco wall in the foyer is a window with a broken pane of glass.

“The lady on vacation,” Turkington says to Scarpetta. “Madelisa Dooley. According to her statement, the glass was removed from the window when she came in through the laundry room. This pane here.” He squats and points to a pane of glass on the bottom right-hand side of the window. “It’s the one he removed and glued back. If you look, you can just barely see the glue. I made her think we didn’t find the broken glass when officers first looked here. I wanted to see if she changed her story, so I told her the glass wasn’t broken.”

“I guess you didn’t foam it first,” Scarpetta says.

“I’ve heard about that,” Turkington says. “We need to start doing it. My theory is, if Mrs. Dooley’s got her story right, something went on in the house after she left.”

“We’ll foam it before it’s wrapped up and transported,” Scarpetta says, “so we can stabilize the broken glass.”

“Help yourself.” He walks off toward the living room, where an investigator takes photographs of the clutter on the coffee table and another lifts up cushions from the couch.

Scarpetta and Lucy open their black cases. They put on shoe covers and gloves, and a woman in range pants and a polo shirt with FORENSICS in bold letters on the back walks out of the living room. She’s probably in her forties, with brown eyes and short, dark hair. She’s petite, and it’s difficult for Scarpetta to imagine that a woman so short and slight would want to go into law enforcement.

“You must be Becky,” Scarpetta says, and she introduces herself and Lucy.

Becky indicates the window leaning against the wall and says, “The lower-right pane of glass. Tommy must have explained.” She means Turkington, and she points a gloved finger. “A glass cutter was used, then the pane was glued back. The reason I noticed?” She’s proud of herself. “Sand stuck in the glue. See?”

They look. They can see it.

“So it appears when Mrs. Dooley came in looking for the owner,” Becky tells them, “the glass certainly could have been out of the window and on the ground. I find it credible she did what she said. Got the hell out of here, and then the killer straightened up after himself.”

Lucy inserts two pressurized containers into a holster that is attached to a mixing gun.

“Creepy to think about,” Becky says. “The poor lady was probably in here when he was. She said she felt like somebody was watching her. This that glue spray? I’ve heard of it. Holds the broken glass in place. What’s it made out of?”

“Mostly polyurethane and compressed gas,” Scarpetta says. “You taken photographs? Dusted for prints? Swabbed for DNA?”

Lucy photographs the window anyway, with and without a scale.

“Photos, swabs. No prints. We’ll see about DNA, but I’d be shocked, as clean as it is,” Becky says. “He obviously cleaned the window, the entire window. I don’t know how it got broke. Looks like a big bird flew into it. Like a pelican or a buzzard.”

Scarpetta begins making notes, documenting areas of damaged glass and measuring them.

Lucy tapes the edges of the window frame and asks, “Which side do you think?”

“I’m thinking this was broken from the inside,” Scarpetta says. “Can we turn this? We need to spray the other side.”

She and Lucy carefully lift the window and turn it around, so it faces the other way. They lean it against the wall and take more photographs and make more notes while Becky stays out of the way and watches.

Scarpetta says to her, “I need a little help here. Can you stand over here?”

Becky stands next to her.

“Show me on the wall where the broken glass would be if the window were in situ. In a minute, I’ll look at where you removed it from, but for now, let’s get an idea.”

Becky touches the wall. “Course, I’m short,” she says.

“About the level of my head,” Scarpetta says, studying the broken glass. “This breakage is similar to what I see in car accidents. When the person isn’t belted and his head hits the windshield. This area isn’t punched out.” She points to the hole in the glass. “It simply received the brunt of the blow, and I’m betting there are some glass fragments on the floor. Inside the laundry room. Maybe on the windowsill, too.”

“I collected them. You thinking somebody hit their head on the glass?” Becky asks. “Wouldn’t you think there’d be blood?”

“Not necessarily.”

Lucy tapes brown butcher’s paper over one side of the window. She opens the front door and asks Scarpetta and Becky to step outside while she sprays.

“I met Lydia Webster once.” Becky keeps talking, and they’re on the porch. “When her little girl drowned and I had to come take photographs. I can’t tell you what that did to me, since I’ve got a little girl of my own. Still see Holly in her little purple swimsuit, just floating underwater upside down with her hair caught in the drain. We got Lydia’s driver’s license, by the way, have the info on an APB, but don’t get your fingers crossed on that one. She’s about your height. That would be about right if she ran into the glass and broke it. I don’t know if Tommy told you, but her wallet was right there in the kitchen. Doesn’t look like it was touched. I don’t think whoever we’re talking about here was motivated by robbery.”

Even outside, Scarpetta can smell the polyurethane. She looks out at large live oaks draped with Spanish moss, and a blue water tower peeking above pines. Two people on bicycles slowly ride past and stare.

“You can come back in.” Lucy is in the doorway, taking off her goggles and face mask.

The broken windowpane is covered in thick yellowish foam.

“So what do we want to do with it?” Becky asks, her eyes lingering on Lucy.

“I’d like to wrap it up and take it with us,” Scarpetta says.

“And check it for what?”

“The glue. Anything microscopic that’s adhering to it. The elemental or chemical composition of it. Sometimes you don’t know what you’re looking for until you find it.”

“Good luck fitting a window under a microscope,” Becky jokes.

“And I’ll also want the broken glass you collected,” Scarpetta says.

“The swabs?”

“Anything you want us to test at the labs. Can we take a look at the laundry room?” Scarpetta says.

It is next to the kitchen, and inside to the right of the door, brown paper has been taped over the empty space where the window was removed. Scarpetta is careful how she approaches what is believed to be the killer’s point of entry. She does what she always does—stands outside and looks in, scanning every inch. She asks if the laundry room has been photographed. It has, and it’s been checked for footprints, shoe prints, fingerprints. Against one wall are four expensive washers and dryers, and against the opposite wall, an empty dog crate. There are storage closets and a large table. In a corner, a wicker laundry basket is piled with dirty clothes.

“Was this door locked when you got here?” Scarpetta asks of the carved teak door that leads outside.

“No, and Mrs. Dooley says it was unlocked, which is why she was able to walk right in. What I’m thinking is he removed the pane of glass and reached his hand inside. You can see”—Becky walks over to the paper-covered space where the window used to be—“if you removed the glass here, it’s easy to reach the deadbolt inside. That’s why we tell people not to have keyless deadbolts near glass. Of course, if the burglar alarm was on…”

“Do we know it wasn’t?”

“It wasn’t when Mrs. Dooley walked in.”

“But we don’t know if it was on or off when he did?”

“I’ve thought about that. Seems if it was on, the glass breakers,” Becky starts to say, then thinks again. “Well, I don’t guess cutting the glass would set them off. They’re noise-sensitive.”

“Suggesting the alarm wasn’t on when the other pane of glass was broken. Suggesting he was inside the house at that point. Unless the glass was broken at an earlier time. And I doubt it.”

“Me, too,” Becky agrees. “Seems like you’d get that fixed to keep the rain and bugs out. Or at least pick up the broken glass. Especially since she kept the dog in there. I’m wondering if maybe she struggled with him. Tried to run for the door to get away. Night before last, she set off her alarm. Don’t know if you knew that. This was a fairly regular occurrence, because she’d get so drunk and forget the alarm was on and open the slider, which instantly set it off. Then she couldn’t remember her password when the service called her. So we’d get dispatched.”

“No record of her alarm going off since then?” Scarpetta says. “Have you had a chance to get the history from the alarm company? For example, when did it go off last? When was it armed and disarmed last?”

“The false alarm I mentioned is the last time it went off.”

Scarpetta says, “When the police responded, do they remember seeing her white Cadillac?”

Becky says no. The officers don’t remember the car being there. But it could have been in the garage. She adds, “It appears she set the alarm about the time it got dark on Monday, and then it was unset later on at nine or so, then reset it. Then unset it again at four-fourteen the next morning. Meaning yesterday.”

“And not reset after that?” Scarpetta says.

“It wasn’t. This is just my opinion, but when people are drinking and drugging, they don’t keep normal hours. Sleep during the day on and off. Get up at strange hours. So maybe she unset the alarm at four-fourteen to take the dog out, maybe to smoke, and the guy was watching her, maybe had been watching her for a while. Stalking her, I’m saying. For all we know, he may already have cut out the glass and was just waiting back here in the dark. There’s bamboo and bushes along this side of the house and no neighbors home, so even with the floodlights on, he could hide back here and no one was going to see him. It’s weird about the dog. Where is he?”

“I’ve got someone checking on that,” Scarpetta says.

“Maybe he can talk and solve the case.” Joking.

“We need to find him. You never know what might solve a case.”

“If he ran off, someone would have found him,” Becky says. “It’s not like you see basset hounds every day, and people notice loose dogs around here. The other thing is, if Mrs. Dooley was telling the truth, then he must have stayed with Mrs. Webster for a while, maybe kept her alive for hours. The alarm was unset at four-fourteen yesterday, and Mrs. Dooley found the blood and everything around lunchtime—about eight hours later, and he was probably still inside the house.”

Scarpetta examines the dirty clothes inside the laundry basket. On top is a T-shirt that is loosely folded, and with a gloved hand, she picks it up and lets it fall open. It’s damp and streaked with dirt. She gets up and looks inside the sink. The stainless steel is spotted from splashing water, and a small amount of water is pooled around the drain.

“I’m wondering if he used this to clean the window,” Scarpetta says. “It still feels damp, and it’s dirty, as if someone used it as a cleaning rag. I’d like to seal it in a paper bag, submit it to the labs.”

“To look for what?” Becky asks that question again.

“If he held this, we might get his DNA. Could be trace evidence. I guess we’d better decide which labs.”

“SLED’s fine and dandy but will take forever. If you can help us with your labs?”

“That’s why we’ve got them.” Scarpetta looks at the alarm keypad near the door that leads into the hallway. “Maybe he disarmed the alarm when he came in. I don’t think we should assume he didn’t. An LCD touchpad instead of buttons. A good surface for prints. And maybe DNA.”

“That would mean he knew her if he unset the alarm. Makes sense when you think about how long he was in the house.”

“It would mean he’s familiar with this place. It doesn’t mean he knew her,” Scarpetta says. “What’s the code?”

“What we call the ‘one, two, three, four, walk right in my door’ code. Probably preset, and she never bothered to change it. Let me make sure about the labs before we start receipting everything to you. I need to ask Tommy.”

He’s in the foyer with Lucy, and Becky asks him about the labs, and he says it’s amazing what’s going private these days. Some departments are even hiring private cops.

“We will be,” Lucy says, handing Scarpetta a pair of yellow-tinted goggles. “We had them in Florida.”

Becky gets interested in the hard case open on the floor. She looks at the five flashlight-shaped forensic high-intensity light sources, the nickel nine-volt batteries, the goggles, and multiport charger. “I’ve been begging the sheriff to get us one of these portable Crime-lites. Each one of them’s a different bandwidth, right?”

“Violet, blue, blue-green, and green spectra,” Lucy says. “And this handy broad-bandwidth white light”—she picks it up—“with interchangeable filters in blue, green, and red for contrast enhancement.”

“Works good?”

“Body fluids, fingerprints, drug residues, fibers, or trace evidence. Yup. Works good.”

She selects a violet light in the 400-to 430-nanometer range and she, Becky, and Scarpetta walk into the living room. All the shades are open, and beyond them is the black-bottom pool where Holly Webster drowned, and beyond that dunes, sea oats, the beach. The ocean is calm, and sunlight flashes in the tide like small silver fish.

“There’s plenty of footprints in here, too,” Becky offers as they look around. “Bare footprints, shoe prints, all of them small, probably hers. It’s strange, because there’s no evidence he wiped down the floors before he left—like he must have done to the window. So you would think there’d be shoe prints. This shiny stone, what is it? I’ve never seen blue tiles like this. It looks like the ocean.”

“That’s probably what it’s supposed to look like,” Scarpetta says. “Sodalite blue marble, maybe lapis.”

“No shit. I had a ring made out of lapis once. I can’t believe someone’s got a whole floor of it. Hides the dirt pretty good,” she says, “but it sure as hell hasn’t been cleaned in recent memory. A lot of dust and stuff, the entire house is like that. You shine a flashlight at an angle and you see what I mean. I just don’t understand why it doesn’t appear he left a single shoe print, not even in the laundry room where he came in.”

“I’m going to wander around,” Lucy says. “What about upstairs?”

“I don’t think she was using the upstairs. Doubt he went up there. It’s undisturbed. Just guest rooms, an art gallery, and game room up there. Never seen a house like this. Must be nice.”

“Not for her,” Scarpetta says, looking at the long, dark hair all over the floor, at the empty glasses and bottle of vodka on the table in front of the couch. “I don’t think this place gave her a moment’s happiness.”

Madelisa hasn’t been home an hour when the doorbell rings.

In the past, she wouldn’t have bothered to ask who’s there.

“Who is it?” she calls out from behind the locked door.

“Investigator Pete Marino from the medical examiner’s office,” a voice says, a deep voice with an accent that reminds her of the North, of Yankees.

Madelisa suspects what she feared. The lady in Hilton Head is dead. Why else would someone from the medical examiner’s office show up here? She wishes Ashley hadn’t decided to run errands the minute they got home, leaving her alone after what she’d been through. She listens for the basset hound. Thank goodness he’s quiet in the spare bedroom. She opens the front door and is terrified. The huge man is dressed like a motorcycle thug. He’s the monster who killed that poor woman, and he followed Madelisa home to kill her next.

“I don’t know anything,” she says, trying to shut the door.

The thug blocks the door with his foot, walks right into the house. “Easy does it,” he says to her, and he opens his wallet, shows her his badge. “Like I said. I’m Pete Marino from the ME’s office.”

She doesn’t know what to do. If she tries to call the police, he’ll kill her on the spot. Anybody can buy a badge these days.

“Let’s sit down and have us a little talk,” he says. “I just got word about your visit to the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Department in Hilton Head.”

“Who told you about that?” She feels a little better. “Did that investigator get hold of you, and why would he? I told him everything I know. He didn’t believe me, anyhow. Who told you where I live? Now, that concerns me. I cooperate with the authorities, and they give out my home address.”

“We got a little problem with your story,” Pete Marino says.

Lucy’s yellow goggles look at Scarpetta.

They are in the master bedroom, and the shades are down. On top of the brown silk bedspread, several stains and smears fluoresce neon green in the high-intensity violet light.

“Could be seminal fluid,” Lucy says. “Could also be something else.” She scans the bed with the light.

“Saliva, urine, sebaceous oils, sweat,” Scarpetta says. She leans close to a large luminescent spot. “I don’t smell anything,” she adds. “Hold the light right here. Problem is, no telling when the spread was cleaned last. I don’t think housekeeping was a priority. Typical of people who are depressed. Bedspread goes to the labs. What we need is her toothbrush, hairbrush. Of course, the tumblers on the coffee table.”

“On the back steps, there’s an ashtray full of cigarette butts,” Lucy says. “I don’t think her DNA’s going to be a problem. Or her footprints, fingerprints. The problem’s him. He knows what he’s doing. These days, everybody’s an expert.”

“No,” Scarpetta says. “They just think they are.”

She takes off her goggles, and the green fluorescence on the bedspread disappears. Lucy turns off the Crime-lite and takes off her goggles, too.

“What are we doing?” she says.

Scarpetta is studying a photograph she noticed when they first came into the bedroom. Dr. Self sits on a living-room set, and across from her is a pretty woman with long, dark hair. Television cameras are rolled in close. People in the audience are clapping and smiling.

“When she was on Dr. Self’s show,” Scarpetta says to Lucy. “But what I wasn’t expecting is this other one.”

Lydia with Drew Martin and a dark, swarthy man Scarpetta assumes is Drew’s coach, Gianni Lupano. The three of them smile and squint in the sun on center court of the Family Circle Cup Tennis Center on Daniel Island, a few miles from downtown Charleston.

“So, what’s the common denominator?” Lucy says. “Let me guess. Dr. Self-ish.”

“Not this past tournament,” Scarpetta says. “Look at the difference in the pictures.” She points to the photograph of Lydia with Drew. She points to the photograph of Lydia with Dr. Self. “The marked deterioration. Look at her eyes.”

Lucy turns on the bedroom light.

“When this picture was taken at the Family Circle Cup stadium, Lydia certainly didn’t look like someone chronically abusing alcohol and prescription drugs,” she says.

“And pulling out her hair,” Lucy says. “I don’t understand why anybody does that. Head hair, pubic hair. Everywhere. That picture of her in the tub? She looks like she’s missing half her hair. Eyebrows, eyelashes.”

“Trichotillomania,” Scarpetta says. “Obsessive-compulsive disorder. Anxiety. Depression. Her life was a living hell.”

“If Dr. Self’s the common denominator, then what about the lady murdered in Bari? The Canadian tourist. There’s no indication she was ever on Dr. Self’s show or knew her.”

“I think that might be when he got his first taste of it.”

“Taste of what?” Lucy asks.

“Taste of killing civilians,” Scarpetta says.

“That doesn’t explain the Dr. Self connection.”

“Sending photographs to her indicates he’s created a psychological landscape and a ritual for his crimes. And it also becomes a game, serves a purpose. Removes him from the horror of what he’s doing, because to face the fact that he’s sadistically inflicting pain and death might be more than he can bear. So he has to give it a meaning. He has to make it cunning.” She retrieves a very unscientific but practical packet of Post-its from her crime scene case. “Rather much like religion. If you do something in the name of God, that makes it okay. Stoning people to death. Burning them at the stake. The Inquisition. The Crusades. Oppressing people who aren’t just like you. He’s given a meaning to what he does. My opinion, anyway.”

She probes the bed with a bright white light, and uses the sticky side of Post-its to collect any fibers, hairs, dirt, or sand she sees.

“Then you don’t think Dr. Self is personally significant to this guy? That she’s just a prop in his drama? That he just latched on to her because she’s there. On the air. A household name.”

Scarpetta places the Post-its in a plastic evidence bag and seals it with yellow crime scene tape that she labels and dates with a Sharpie. She and Lucy begin to fold the bedspread.

“I think it’s extremely personal,” Scarpetta replies. “You don’t place someone in the matrix of your game or psychological drama if it isn’t personal. I can’t answer the why part of it.”

A loud ripping noise as Lucy tears a large sheet of brown paper from its roll.

“For example, he may have never met her. Same thing stalkers do. Or he might have,” Scarpetta says. “For all we know, he’s been on her show or has spent time with her.”

They center the folded spread on the paper.

“You’re right. One way or other, it’s personal,” Lucy decides. “Maybe he kills the woman in Bari and does all but confess it to Dr. Maroni, perhaps thinking Dr. Self will find out. Well, she doesn’t. So now what?”

“He feels even more ignored.”

“Then what?”

“Escalation.”

“What happens when Mother doesn’t pay attention to her profoundly disturbed and damaged child?” Scarpetta asks as she wraps.

“Let me think,” Lucy says. “The child grows up to be me?”

Scarpetta cuts off a strip of yellow tape and says, “What a terrible thing. Torture and kill women who were guests on your show. Or do it to get your attention.”

The sixty-inch flat-screen television talks to Marino. It tells him something about Madelisa that he can use against her.

“That a plasma screen?” he asks. “Must be the biggest one I’ve ever seen.”

She’s overweight, with heavy-lidded eyes, and could use a good dentist. Her dentures remind him of a white picket fence, and her hairstylist ought to be shot. She sits on a floral-print couch, her hands fidgety.

She says, “My husband and his toys. I don’t know what it is, except big and expensive.”

“Must be something watching a game on that thing. Me? I’d probably sit in front of it, never get a damn thing done.”

Which is probably what she does. Sit in front of the TV like a zombie.

“What do you like to watch?” he asks.

“I like crime shows and mysteries, because I can usually figure them out. But after what just happened to me, I’m not sure I can watch anything violent ever again.”

“Then you probably know a lot about forensics,” Marino says. “Seeing as how you watch all these crime shows.”

“I was on jury duty about a year ago and knew more about forensics than the judge did. That doesn’t say much about the judge. But I know a few things.”

“How about image recovery?”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“As in photographs, videotapes, digital recordings that have been erased.”

“Would you like some iced tea? I can make it.”

“Not right now.”

“I think Ashley’s going to pick up some Jimmy Dengate’s. You ever had fried chicken from there? He’ll be home any minute, and maybe you’d like some.”

“What I’d like is for you to quit changing the subject. See, with image recovery, it’s next to impossible to totally get rid of a digital image that’s on a disk or memory stick or whatever. You can delete stuff all day and we can get it back.” This isn’t entirely true, but Marino has no compunction about lying.

Madelisa looks like a cornered mouse.

“You know what I’m getting at, don’t you?” Marino says, and he’s got her where he wants her but he doesn’t feel good about it, and he himself isn’t quite sure what he’s getting at.

When Scarpetta called him a while ago and said Turkington is suspicious about what Mr. Dooley erased because he kept mentioning it during the interview, Marino said he’d get an answer. More than anything right now, he wants to please Scarpetta, make her think something’s still worthwhile about him. He was shocked she called him.

“Why are you asking me?” Madelisa says, and she begins to cry. “I said, I don’t know anything other than what I already told that investigator.”

She continues glancing past Marino toward the back of her small, yellow house. Yellow wallpaper, yellow carpet. Marino’s never seen so much yellow. It looks like an interior decorator peed on everything the Dooleys own.

“The reason I bring up image recovery is I understand your husband erased part of what he videotaped out there on the beach,” Marino says, unmoved by her tears.

“It was just me standing in front of the house before I had permission. That’s the only thing he erased. Of course, I never did get permission, because how could I? It’s not that I didn’t try. I have manners.”

“I really don’t give a shit about you and your manners. What I care about is what you’re hiding from me and everybody else.” He leans forward in the recliner chair. “I know damn well you’re not being totally honest with me. Why do I know that? Because of science.”

He doesn’t know anything of the sort. To recover deleted images from a digital recorder isn’t a given. If it can be done at all, the process is painstaking and would take a while.

“Please don’t,” she begs him. “I’m so sorry, but please don’t take him. I love him so much.”

Marino has no idea what she’s talking about. It occurs to him she means her husband, but he isn’t sure.

He says, “If I don’t take him, what then? How do I explain it when I leave here and I’m asked?”

“Pretend you don’t know about it.” She cries harder. “What difference does it make? He didn’t do anything. Oh, the poor baby. Who knows what he’s been through. He was shaking and had blood on him. He didn’t do anything except get scared and escape, and if you take him you know what will happen. They’ll put him to sleep. Oh, please, let me keep him. Please! Please! Please!”

“Why did he have blood on him?” Marino asks.

In the master bathroom, Scarpetta shines a flashlight obliquely over an onyx floor the color of tigereye.

“Bare footprints,” she says from the doorway. “Smallish. Maybe hers again. And more hair.”

“If what Madelisa Dooley says is to be believed, he had to have walked around in here. This is so weird,” Becky says as Lucy shows up with a small blue-and-yellow box and a bottle of sterile water.

Scarpetta steps inside the bathroom. She pulls open the tiger-striped shower curtain and shines the light inside the deep copper tub. Nothing, then something catches her attention, and she picks up what looks like a piece of broken white pottery that for some reason was between a bar of white soap and a dish hooked to the side of the tub. She examines it carefully. She gets out her jeweler’s lens.

“Part of a dental crown,” she says. “Not porcelain. A temporary that somehow got broken.”

“I wonder where the rest of it is,” Becky says, crouching in the doorway and peering at the floor, turning on her flashlight and shining it in all directions. “Unless it’s not recent.”

“Could have gone down the drain. We should check the trap. Could be anywhere.” Scarpetta thinks she sees a trace of dried blood on what she estimates is almost half of a crown from what she believes is a front tooth. “We have any way of knowing if Lydia Webster has been to the dentist lately?”

“I can check it out. There’s not that many dentists on the island. So unless she went elsewhere, it shouldn’t be hard to track down.”

“It would have to be recent, very recent,” Scarpetta says. “I don’t care how much you neglect your hygiene, you don’t ignore a broken crown, especially on a front tooth.”

“Could be his,” Lucy says.

“That would be even better,” Scarpetta says. “We need a small paper envelope.”

“I’ll get it,” Lucy says.

“I don’t see anything. If it broke in here, I don’t see the rest of it. I guess it could still be attached to the tooth. I broke a crown once and part of it was still stuck to the little nub that’s left of my tooth.” Becky looks past Scarpetta, at the copper tub. “Talk about the biggest false-positive on the planet,” she adds. “This will be a new one for the books. One of the few times I need to use luminal, and the damn tub and sink are copper. Well, we can forget it.”

“I don’t use luminol anymore,” Scarpetta says, as if the oxidizing agent is a disloyal friend.

Until recently, it was a forensic staple and she never questioned using it to find blood no longer visible. If blood had been washed away or even painted over, the way to know was to mix up a spray bottle of luminol and see what fluoresced. The problems have always been many. Like a dog that wags its tail at all the neighbors, luminol is excited by more than the hemoglobin in blood and is, unfortunately, quite responsive to a number of things: paint, varnish, Drano, bleach, dandelions, thistle, creeping myrtle, corn. And, of course, copper.

Lucy retrieves a small container of Hemastix for a presumptive test, looking for any residue of what may be scrubbed-away blood. The presumptive test says blood might be there, and Scarpetta opens the box of Bluestar Magnum and removes a brown glass bottle and a foil pack, and a spray bottle.

“Stronger, longer-lasting, don’t have to use it in total darkness,” she explains to Becky. “No sodium perborate tetrahydrate, so it’s nontoxic. Can use it on copper because the reaction will be a different intensity, a different color spectrum, and will have a different duration than blood.”

She has yet to see blood inside the master bathroom. Despite what Madelisa claimed, the most intense white light revealed not the slightest stain. But this is no longer surprising. By all indications so far, after she fled from the house, the killer meticulously cleaned up after himself. Scarpetta selects the finest setting on the spray bottle’s nozzle and pours in four ounces of sterile water. To this she adds two tablets. She gently stirs with a pipette for several minutes, then opens the brown glass bottle and pours in a sodium hydroxide solution.

She begins to spray, and spots and streaks and shapes and spatters luminesce bright cobalt blue all over the room. Becky takes photographs. A little later, when Scarpetta has finished cleaning up after herself and is repacking her crime scene case, her cell phone rings. It’s the fingerprint examiner from Lucy’s labs.

“You’re not going to believe this,” he says.

“Don’t ever start a conversation like that with me unless you mean it.” Scarpetta isn’t joking.

“The print on the gold coin.” He’s excited, talking fast. “We got a hit—the unidentified little boy who was found last week. The kid from Hilton Head.”

“Are you sure? You can’t be sure. It makes no sense.”

“May not make sense, but there’s no doubt about it.”

“Don’t say that, either, unless you mean it. My first reaction is there’s an error,” Scarpetta says.

“There’s not. I pulled his ten-print card from the prints Marino took in the morgue. I visually verified it. Unquestionably, the ridge detail from the partial on the coin matches the unidentified kid’s right thumbprint. There’s no mistake.”

“A fingerprint on a coin that’s been fumed with glue? I don’t see how.”

“Believe me, I’m with you. We all know the fingerprints of prepubescent kids don’t last long enough to fume. They’re mostly water. Just sweat instead of the oils, amino acids, and all the rest that comes with puberty. I’ve never superglued a kid’s prints and don’t think you could. But this print is from a kid, and that kid is the one in your morgue.”

“Maybe that’s not how it happened,” Scarpetta says. “Maybe the coin was never fumed.”

“Had to be. There’s ridge detail in what sure looks like superglue, the same as if it had been fumed.”

“Maybe he had glue on his finger and touched the coin,” she says. “And left his print that way.”

Chapter 18

Nine p.m. A hard rain slaps the street in front of Marino’s fishing shack.

Lucy is soaking wet as she turns on a wireless receiver mini-disc recorder disguised as an iPod. In exactly six minutes, Scarpetta will call Marino. Right now, he is arguing with Shandy, their every word picked up by the multidirectional mike embedded in his computer’s thumb drive.

His heavy footsteps, the refrigerator door opening, the swish of a can popped open, probably a beer.

Shandy’s angry voice sounds in Lucy’s earpiece. “…Don’t lie to me. I’m warning you. All of a sudden? All of a sudden you decide you don’t want a committed relationship? And by the way, who said I’m committed to you? The only fucking thing that ought to be committed is you—to a fucking mental hospital. Maybe the Big Chief’s fiancé can give you a discount on a room up there.”

He’s told her about Scarpetta’s engagement to Benton. Shandy’s hitting Marino where it hurts, meaning she knows where it hurts. Lucy wonders how much she’s used that against him, taunted him about it.

“You don’t own me. You don’t get to have me until it don’t suit you anymore, so maybe I’m getting rid of you first,” he yells. “You’re bad for me. Making me get on that hormone shit—it’s a damn wonder I hadn’t had a stroke or something. After barely more than a week. What happens in a month, huh? You picked out a fucking cemetery? Or maybe I’ll end up in the fucking penitentiary because I lose my mind and do something.”

“Maybe you already did something.”

“Go to hell.”

“Why would I be committed to an old, fat fuck like you, who can’t even get it up without that hormone shit?”

“Cut it out, Shandy. I’ve had it with you putting me down, you hear me? If I’m such a nothing, why are you here? I need some space, time to think. Everything’s so fucked up right now. Work’s turned to shit. I’m smoking, not going to the gym, drinking too much, doped up. Everything’s gone to hell, and all you do is get me in worse and worse trouble.”

His cell phone rings. He doesn’t answer. It rings and rings.

“Answer it!” Lucy says out loud in the heavy, steady rain.

“Yeah.” his voice sounds in her earpiece.

Thank God. He’s quiet for a moment, listening, then says to Scarpetta on the other line, “That can’t be right.”

Lucy can’t hear Scarpetta’s side of the conversation but knows what’s being said. She’s telling Marino there were no hits in NIBIN or IAFIS for the serial number of the Colt .38 and any prints or partial prints recovered from the gun and the cartridges that Bull found in her alleyway.

“What about him?” Marino asks.

He means Bull. Scarpetta can’t answer that. Bull’s prints wouldn’t be in IAFIS, because he’s never been convicted of a crime, and his being arrested several weeks ago doesn’t count. If the Colt is his but isn’t stolen or wasn’t used in a crime and then ended up back on the street, it wouldn’t be in NIBIN. She’s already told Bull it would be helpful if he were printed for exclusionary purposes, but he’s not gotten around to it. She can’t remind him again because she can’t get hold of him, and both she and Lucy have tried several times since they left Lydia Webster’s house. Bull’s mother says he went out in his boat to pick oysters. Why he would do that in this weather is baffling.

“Uh-huh, uh-huh.” Marino’s voice fills Lucy’s ear, and he is walking around again, obviously careful what he says in front of Shandy.

Scarpetta will also tell Marino about the partial print on the gold coin. Maybe that’s what she’s relaying to him right now, because he makes a sound of surprise.

Then he says, “Good to know.”

Then he falls silent again. Lucy hears him pacing. He moves closer to the computer, to the thumb drive, and a chair scrapes across the wooden floor as if he’s sitting down. Shandy is quiet, probably trying to figure out what he’s talking about and to whom.

“Okay,” he finally says. “Can we deal with this later? I’m in the middle of something.”

No. Lucy’s certain her aunt will force him to talk about whatever she wants, or at least listen. She’s not going to get off the phone without reminding him that within the past week, he started wearing an old Morgan silver dollar on a necklace. It may have no connection to the gold coin necklace that was at least held, at some point, by the dead little boy in Scarpetta’s freezer. But where did Marino get his gaudy new necklace? If she’s asking him that, he isn’t answering. He can’t. Shandy’s right there listening. And as Lucy stands in the dark, in the rain, and the rain soaks her cap and seeps in around the collar of her slicker, she thinks about what Marino did to her aunt, and that same feeling comes back. A fearless, flat feeling.

“Yeah, yeah, no problem,” Marino says. “Like a ripe apple falling from a tree.”

Lucy infers that her aunt is thanking him. What an irony, she’s thanking him. How the fuck can she thank him for anything? Lucy knows why, but it’s still revolting. Scarpetta’s thanking him for talking with Madelisa, which resulted in her confessing that she’d taken the basset hound, and then showing him a pair of shorts that had blood on them. The blood had been on the dog. Madelisa wiped it on her shorts, indicating she must have arrived on the scene very soon after someone was injured or killed, because the blood on the dog was still wet. Marino took the shorts. He let her keep the dog. His story, he told her, is that the killer stole the basset hound, probably killed it and buried it somewhere. Amazing how kind and decent he is to women he doesn’t know.

Rain is relentless cold fingers drumming the top of Lucy’s head. She walks, staying out of view, should Marino or Shandy move close to a window. It may be dark, but Lucy takes no chances. Marino is off the phone now.

“You think I’m so stupid I don’t know who the hell you were talking to and that you were making damn sure I had no idea what you’re saying? Speaking in riddles, in other words.” Shandy is shrieking. “As if I’m so stupid I fall for it. The Big Chief, that’s who!”

“It’s none of your damn business. How many times I got to tell you that? I can talk to who the hell I want.”

“Everything’s my business! You spent the night with her, you lying asshole! I saw your damn motorcycle there early the next morning! You think I’m stupid? Was it good? I know you been wanting it half your life! Was it good, you big, fat fuck!”

“I don’t know who beat it into your spoiled rich girl’s head that everything in life is your business. But hear this. It ain’t.”

After more fuck-yous and other profanities and threats, Shandy storms out and slams the door. From where she hides, Lucy watches her stride angrily underneath the fishing shack to her motorcycle, angrily ride it through Marino’s sliver of a sandy front yard, then loudly speed away toward the Ben Sawyer Bridge. Lucy waits a few minutes, listening to make sure Shandy isn’t coming back. Nothing. Just the distant sound of traffic and the loud spattering of the rain. On Marino’s front porch, she knocks on the door. He flings it open, his angry face suddenly blank, then uneasy, his expressions running through emotions like a slot machine.

“What are you doing here?” he asks, looking past her, as if worried Shandy might come back.

Lucy walks into a squalid sanctuary she knows better than he thinks. She notices his computer, the thumb drive still in it. Her fake iPod and its earpiece are tucked in a pocket of her slicker. He shuts the door, stands in front of it, looking more uncomfortable by the second as she sits on a plaid couch that smells like mildew.

“I hear you was spying on me and Shandy when we was in the morgue like you’re a damn two-legged Patriot Act.” He goes first, maybe assuming that is why she’s here. “You don’t know by now not to try shit like that on me?”

Foolishly, he tries to intimidate her when he knows damn well he’s never intimidated her, not even when she was a child. Not even when she was a teenager and he ridiculed—at times mocked and shunned—her for who and what she is.

“I already talked about it with the Doc,” Marino goes on. “There’s nothing left to say, so don’t start in on me.”

“And that’s all you did with her? Talk to her?” Lucy bends forward, slides her Glock out of her ankle holster and points it at him. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you,” she says with no emotion.

He doesn’t answer.

“One good reason,” Lucy says it again. “You and Shandy were just fighting like hell. Could hear her screaming all the way out on the street.”

She gets up from the couch, walks over to a table, and opens the drawer. She pulls out the Smith & Wesson .357 revolver she saw last night, sits back down, slides her Glock back into her ankle holster. She points Marino’s own gun at him.

“Shandy’s fingerprints are all over this place. I imagine there’s plenty of her DNA in here, too. The two of you fight, she shoots you and speeds off on her bike. Such a pathologically jealous bitch.”

She pulls back the revolver’s hammer. Marino doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t seem to care.

“One good reason,” she says.

“I don’t got a good reason,” he says. “Go ahead. I wanted her to and she wouldn’t.” He means Scarpetta. “She should have. She didn’t, so go ahead. I don’t give a shit if Shandy gets blamed. I’ll even help you out. There’s underwear in my room. Help yourself to her DNA. They find her DNA on the gun, that’s all they need. Everyone in the bar knows what she’s like. Just ask Jess. No one would be surprised.”

Then he shuts up. For a moment, the two of them are motionless. Him standing in front of the door, hands down by his sides. Lucy on the couch, the revolver pointed at his head. She doesn’t need the larger target of his chest. He is well aware of that fact.

She lowers the gun. “Sit down,” she says.

He sits in the chair near his computer. “I guess I should have known she’d tell you,” he says.

“I guess it should tell you a lot that she didn’t. Not a word to anyone. She continues to protect you. Isn’t that something?” Lucy says. “You see what you did to her wrists?”

His answer is a sudden brightening of his bloodshot eyes. Lucy’s never seen him cry.

She continues, “Rose noticed. She told me. This morning when we were in the lab, I saw for myself—the bruises on Aunt Kay’s wrists. Like I said. What are you going to do about it?”

She tries to push away images of what she imagines he did to her aunt. The idea of him seeing her, touching her, makes Lucy feel far more violated than she would if she had been the victim. She looks a this huge hands and arms, his mouth, and tries to push away what she imagines he did.

“What’s done is done,” he says. “Plain and simple. I promise she’ll never have to be around me again. None of you will. Or you can shoot me just the way you said and get away with it like you always do. Like you have before. You can get away with anything you want. Go ahead. If someone else did to her what I did, I’d kill him. He’d already be dead.”

“Pathetic coward. At least tell her you’re sorry instead of running away or committing suicide by cop.”

“What good would it do to tell her? It’s over. That’s why I find out about everything after the fact. Nobody called me to go to Hilton Head.”

“Don’t be a baby. Aunt Kay asked you to go see Madelisa Dooley. I couldn’t believe it. It makes me sick.”

“She won’t ask me nothing again. Not after you being here. I don’t want either of you asking me nothing,” Marino says. “It’s over.”

“Do you remember what you did?”

He doesn’t answer. He remembers.

“Say you’re sorry,” she says. “Tell her you weren’t so drunk that you don’t remember what you did. Tell her you remember and you’re sorry and you can’t undo it but you’re sorry. See what she does. She won’t shoot you. She won’t even send you away. She’s a better person than I am.” Lucy tightens her grip on the gun. “Why? Just tell me why. You’ve been drunk around her before. You’ve been alone with her a million times, even in hotel rooms. Why? How could you?”

He lights a cigarette, his hands shaking badly. “It’s everything. I know there’s no excuse. I’ve been half crazy. It’s everything, and I know it doesn’t matter. She came back with the ring and I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do.”

“I should never have e-mailed Dr. Self. She fucked with my head. Then Shandy. Medications. Booze. It’s like this monster moved inside of me,” Marino says. “I don’t know where it came from.”

Disgusted, Lucy gets up, tosses the revolver on the couch. She walks past him toward the door.

“Listen to me,” he says. “Shandy got me this stuff. I’m not the first guy she’s handed it out to. Last one had a hard-on for three days. She thought it was funny.”

“What stuff?” Even though she knows.

“Hormone gel. It’s been making me crazy, like I want to fuck everyone, kill everyone. Nothing’s ever enough for her. I never been with a woman who can’t get enough.”

Lucy leans against the door, crosses her arms. “Testosterone prescribed by a dirtbag proctologist in Charlotte.”

Marino looks baffled. “How did you…” His face darkens. “Oh, I get it. You’ve been in here. That fucking figures.”

“Who’s the asshole on the chopper, Marino? Who’s the jerk you almost killed in the Kick ’N Horse parking lot? The one who supposedly wants Aunt Kay dead or out of town?”

“I wish I knew.”

“I believe you do.”

“I’m telling the truth, I swear. Shandy must know him. She must be the one trying to run the Doc out of town. The jealous fucking bitch.”

“Or maybe it’s Dr. Self.”

“Hell if I know.”

“Maybe you should have checked out your jealous fucking bitch,” Lucy says. “Maybe e-mailing Dr. Self to make Aunt Kay jealous was poking a snake with a stick. But I guess you were too busy having testosterone sex and raping my aunt.”

“I didn’t.”

“What do you call it?”

“The worst thing I ever did,” Marino says.

Lucy won’t take her eyes off his. “How about that silver-dollar necklace you got on? Where’d you get it?”

“You know where.”

“Shandy ever tell you about her potato-chip daddy’s house getting burglarized not long before she moved here? Burglarized right after he died, matter of fact. Had a coin collection, some cash. All gone. Police suspect an inside job but couldn’t prove it.”

“The gold coin Bull found,” Marino says. “She’s never said nothing about a gold coin. The only coin I’ve seen is this silver dollar. How do you know Bull didn’t lose it? He’s the one who found that kid, and the coin’s got the kid’s print on it, right?”

“What if the coin was stolen from Shandy’s dead daddy?” Lucy says. “What does that tell you?”

“She didn’t kill the kid,” Marino says with a hint of doubt. “I mean, she’s never said nothing about having kids. If the coin has anything to do with her, she probably gave it to somebody. When she gave me mine, she laughed, said it was a dog tag to remind me I was one of her soldiers. Belonged to her. I didn’t know she meant it literally.”

“Getting her DNA’s a fine idea,” Lucy says.

Marino gets up and walks off. He comes back with the red panties. Puts them in a sandwich bag. Hands it to Lucy.

“Kind of unusual you don’t know where she lives,” Lucy says.

“I don’t know nothing about her. That’s the damn truth of it,” Marino says.

“I’ll tell you exactly where she lives. This same island. A cozy little place on the water. Looks romantic. Oh. I forgot to mention, when I checked it out, I happened to notice a bike was there. An old chopper with a cardboard license tag, under a cover in the carport. Nobody was home.”

“I never saw it coming. I didn’t use to be like this.”

“He’s not going to come within a million miles of Aunt Kay again. I’ve taken care of him, because I don’t trust you to do it. His chopper’s old. A piece of junk with ape-hanger handlebars. I don’t think it’s safe.”

Marino won’t look at her now. He says, “I didn’t use to be like this.”

She opens the front door.

“Why don’t you just get the hell out of our lives,” she says from his porch, in the rain. “I don’t give a shit about you anymore.”

The old brick building watches Benton with empty eyes, many of its windows broken out. The abandoned cigar company has no lights, its parking lot completely dark.

His laptop computer is balanced on his thighs as he logs in to the port’s wireless network, hijacks it, and waits inside Lucy’s black Subaru SUV, a car not generally associated with law enforcement. Periodically, he looks out the windshield. Rain slowly slides down the glass, as if the night is crying. He watches the chain-link fence around the empty shipyard across the street, watches the shapes of containers abandoned like wrecked train cars.

“No activity,” he says.

Lucy’s voice sounds in his earpiece. “Let’s hold tight as long as you can.”

The radio frequency is a secure one. Lucy’s technological skills are beyond Benton, and he’s not naïve. All he knows is she has ways of securing this and that, and scramblers, and she thinks it’s great she can spy on others and they can’t spy on her. He hopes she’s right. About that and a lot of things, including her aunt. When he asked Lucy to send her plane, he said he didn’t want Scarpetta to know.

“Why?” Lucy asked.

“Because I’ll probably have to sit in a parked car all night, watching the damn port,” he said.

It would make matters worse if she knew he was here, just a few miles from her house. She might insist on sitting here with him. To which Lucy offered that he was insane. There was no way Scarpetta would stake out the port with him. In Lucy’s words, that’s not her aunt’s job. She’s not a secret agent. She doesn’t particularly like guns, even though she certainly knows how to use them, and she prefers to take care of the victims and leave it to Lucy and Benton to take care of everybody else. What Lucy really meant was that sitting out here at the port could be dangerous, and she didn’t want Scarpetta doing it.

Funny that Lucy didn’t mention Marino. That he could have helped.

Benton sits inside the dark Subaru. It smells new—smells like leather. He watches the rain, and looks past it across the street, and monitors the laptop to make sure the Sandman hasn’t hijacked the port’s wireless network and logged on. But where would he do it? Not from this parking lot. Not from the street, because he wouldn’t dare stop his car in the middle of the street and just sit there sending yet another infernal e-mail to the infernal Dr. Self, who is probably back in New York by now inside her Central Park West penthouse apartment. It’s galling. It’s as unfair as anything could possibly be. Even if, in the end, the Sandman doesn’t get away with murder, Dr. Self most likely will, and she’s as much to blame for the murders as the Sandman is, because she sat on information, didn’t look into it, doesn’t care. Benton hates her. He wishes he didn’t. But he hates her more than he’s ever hated anybody in his life.

Rain pummels the roof of the SUV, and fog shrouds distant streetlights, and he can’t tell the horizon from the sky, the harbor from the heavens. He can’t tell anything from anything in this weather, until something moves. He sits very still, and his heart kicks as a dark figure slowly moves along the fence across the street.

“I’ve got activity.” He transmits to Lucy. “Anybody on, because I’m not seeing it.”

“Nobody’s on.” Her voice comes back into his earpiece, and she’s confirming that the Sandman has not logged on to the port’s wireless network. “What kind of activity?” she asks.

“At the fence. About three o’clock, not moving now. Holding at three o’clock.”

“I’m ten minutes away. Not even.”

“I’m getting out,” Benton says, and he slowly opens his car door, and the interior light is out. Complete darkness, and the rain sounds louder.

He reaches under his jacket and slides out his gun, and he doesn’t shut the car door all the way. He doesn’t make a sound. He knows how to do this, has had to do it more times than he’d ever want to remember. He moves like a ghost, dark and silent, through puddles, through the rain. Every other step he stops, and he’s sure the person across the street doesn’t see him. What is he doing? Just standing there by the fence, not moving. Benton gets closer, and the figure doesn’t move. Benton can barely see the shape through blowing veils of water, and he can’t hear anything but the splashing of the rain.

“You okay?” Lucy’s voice in his head.

He doesn’t answer. He stops behind a telephone pole and smells creosote. The figure at the fence moves to the left, to the one o’clock position, and he starts to cross the street.

Lucy says, “You ten-four?”

Benton doesn’t answer, and the figure is so close, he can see the dark shadow of a face, and the distinct outline of a hat, then arms and legs moving. Benton steps out and points the pistol at him.

“Don’t move.” He says it quietly in a tone that commands attention. “I’ve got a nine-mil pointed right at your head, so stand real still.”

The man, and Benton feels sure it’s a man, has turned into a statue. He doesn’t make a sound.

“Step off the road but not toward me. Step to your left. Very slowly. Now drop to your knees and put your hands on top of your head.” Then, to Lucy, he says, “I’ve got him. You can close in.”

As if she’s a stone’s throw away.

“Hold on.” Her voice is tense. “Just hold on. I’m coming.”

He knows she’s far away—too far away to help him if there’s a problem.

The man has his hands on top of his head, and he’s kneeling on the cracked, wet blacktop, and he says, “Please don’t shoot.”

“Who are you?” Benton says. “Tell me who you are.”

“Don’t shoot.”

“Who are you?” Benton raises his voice above the sound of the rain. “What are you doing here? Tell me who you are.”

“Don’t shoot.”

“Goddamn it. Tell me who you are. What are you doing at the port? Don’t make me ask you again.”

“I know who you are. I recognize who you are. My hands are on my head, so there is no need to shoot,” the voice says as rain splashes, and Benton detects an accent. “I’m here to catch a killer, just like you. Am I right, Benton Wesley? Please put away your gun. It’s Otto Poma. I’m here for the same reason as you. It’s Captain Otto Poma. Please put the gun away.”

Poe’s Tavern, a few minutes’ ride from Marino’s fishing shack. He could use a beer or two.

The street is wet and shiny black, and the wind carries the smell of the rain and the scent of the sea and the marshes. He is soothed as he rides his Roadmaster through the dark, rainy night, knowing he shouldn’t drink, but he doesn’t know how to stop himself, and anyway, why does it matter? Ever since it happened, he has a sickness in his soul, a feeling of terror. The beast within has surfaced, the monster has shown himself, and what he’s always feared is right in front of him.

Peter Rocco Marino isn’t a decent person. As is true of almost every criminal he’s caught, he has believed little in life is his fault, that he’s inherently good, brave, and well-intentioned, when the truth is quite the reverse. He’s selfish, sick, and bad. Bad, bad, bad. That’s why his wife left him. That’s why his career has gone to hell. That’s why Lucy hates him. That’s why he’s ruined the best thing he ever had. His relationship with Scarpetta is dead. He killed it. Brutalized it. Betrayed her again and again because of something she can’t help. She never wanted him, and why would she? She’s never been attracted to him. How could she be? So he punished her.

He shifts into a higher gear as he gives his bike more gas. He rides much too fast, rain painful pinpricks against his bare skin, speeding to the strip, as he calls the hangouts of Sullivan’s Island. Cars are parked wherever there is space. No bikes, only his, because of the weather. He’s chilled, his hands stiff, and he feels unbearable pain and shame, and laced with it is a venomous anger. He unstraps his useless brain bucket of a helmet and hangs it from the handlebars and locks the bike’s front fork. His rain gear swishes as he walks inside a restaurant of unpainted worn wood and ceiling fans, and framed posters of ravens and probably every Edgar Allan Poe movie ever made. The bar is crowded, and his heart bumps hard and flutters like a startled bird when he notices Shandy between two men, one of them wearing a do-rag—the man Marino almost shot the other night. She is talking to him, pressing her body against his arm.

Marino stands near the door, dripping rainwater on the scuffed floor, watching, wondering what to do as the wounds inside him swell, and his heart races, feels like horses galloping in his neck. Shandy and the man in the do-rag are drinking beer and shots of tequila and snacking on tortilla chips with chili con queso, the same thing she and Marino always order when they come here. Used to. In days past. Over and out. He didn’t use his hormone gel this morning. Threw it away with reluctance as the vile creature inside his darkness whispered mocking things. He can’t believe Shandy is so brazen as to come in here with that man, and the meaning is clear. She put him up to threatening the Doc. As bad as Shandy is, as bad as he is, as bad as they are together, Marino’s worse.

What they tried to do to the Doc is nothing like what he did.

He approaches the bar without looking in their direction, pretends he doesn’t see them, wondering why he didn’t spot Shandy’s BMW. She’s probably parked on a side street, always worried about someone dinging one of the doors. He wonders where the man with the do-rag’s chopper is and remembers what Lucy said about it. About it looking dangerous. She did something. She’ll probably do something to Marino’s bike next.

“Whatcha have, hon? Where you been, anyway?” The bartender looks maybe fifteen, the way all young people look to Marino these days.

He’s so depressed and distracted, he can’t remember her name, thinks it’s Shelly but is afraid to say. Maybe it’s Kelly. “Bud Lite.” He leans close to her. “Don’t look. But that guy over there with Shandy?”

“Yeah, they’ve been in here before.”

“Since when?” Marino asks as she slides a draft beer his way and he slides back a five.

“Two for the price of one. So you got another one coming, hon. Oh, gosh. On and off for as long as I’ve worked here, hon. The past year, I guess. I don’t like either one of ’em, and that’s ’tween you and me. Don’t ask his name. I don’t know. He’s not the only one she comes in here with. I think she’s married.”

“No shit.”

“I hope you and her are taking a time out. For good, hon.”

“I’m done with her,” Marino says, drinking his beer. “It was nothing.”

“Nothing but trouble, my guess,” Shelly or Kelly says.

He feels Shandy’s stare. She’s stopped talking to the man in the dorag, and now Marino has to wonder if she’s been having sex with him all along. Marino wonders about the stolen coins and where she gets her money. Maybe her daddy didn’t leave her anything and she felt she had to steal. Marino wonders about a lot of things and wishes he’d wondered all of them before. She sees him as he lifts his frosty mug, takes a swallow. Her glaring eyes look half crazy. He thinks about walking over to where she’s sitting, but he can’t bring himself to do it.

He knows they won’t tell him anything. He’s sure they’ll laugh at him. Shandy nudges the man in the do-rag. He looks at Marino and smirks, must think it’s real funny, sitting there feeling up Shandy and knowing that all along she’s never been Marino’s woman. Who the hell else does she sleep with?

Marino yanks off his silver-dollar necklace and drops it in his beer, and it makes a plopping sound and sinks to the bottom. He slides the mug across the bar, and it stops short of them, and he walks out, hoping he’ll be followed. The rain has let up, and the pavement is steaming under streetlights, and he sits on the wet seat of his motorcycle and waits, hoping he’ll be followed. He watches the front door of Poe’s Tavern, waiting and hoping. Maybe he can start a fight. Maybe they can finish it. He wishes his heart would slow down and his chest would stop hurting. Maybe he’ll have a heart attack. His heart ought to attack him, as bad as he is. He waits, looking at the door, looking at people on the other side of lighted windows, everybody happy except him. He waits and lights a cigarette and sits on his wet motorcycle in his wet rain gear, smoking and waiting.

He’s such a nothing, he can’t even make people angry anymore. He can’t make anybody fight him. He’s such a nothing, he’s sitting out here in the rainy dark, smoking and looking at the door, wishing Shandy or the man in the do-rag or both of them would come out and make him feel he still has something worthwhile left in him. But the door doesn’t open. They don’t care. They aren’t scared. They think Marino’s a joke. He waits and smokes. He unlocks the front fork of his bike and starts the engine.

He opens the throttle, rubber squealing, and rides fast. He leaves his bike under his fishing shack, leaves the key in the ignition because he doesn’t need his motorcycle anymore. Where he’s going, he won’t be riding motorcycles. He walks fast but not as fast as his heart is going, and in the dark he climbs the steps to his dock and he thinks about Shandy’s making fun of his old, rickety dock, saying it’s long and skinny and bent like a stick bug. He thought she was funny and clever with words when she said that the first time he brought her here, and they’d made love all night. Ten days ago. That’s all it was. He has to consider that she set him up, that it’s no coincidence she flirted with him the very night of the very day the dead little boy was found. Maybe she wanted to use Marino to get information. He let her. All because of a ring. The Doc got a ring, and Marino lost his mind. His big boots thud loudly on the pier, and its weathered wood shakes beneath the weight of him as no-see-ums swarm around him like something in a cartoon.

At the end of the pier he stops, breathing hard, eaten alive by what feels like a million invisible teeth as tears flood his eyes and his chest heaves rapidly, the way he’s seen a man’s chest heave right after he’s gotten a lethal injection, right before his face turns dusky blue and he dies. It’s so dark and overcast, the water and the sky are one, and below him bumpers thud, and water softly laps against pilings.

He cries out something that doesn’t seem to come from him as he hurls his cell phone and earpiece as hard as he can. He hurls them so far, he can’t hear them land.

Chapter 19

Y-12 National Security Complex. Scarpetta stops her rental car at a checkpoint in the midst of concrete blast barriers and fences topped with razor wire.

She rolls down her window for the second time in the past five minutes and hands over her identification badge. The guard steps inside his booth to make a phone call while another guard searches the trunk of the red Dodge Stratus that Scarpetta was unhappy to find waiting for her at Hertz when she landed in Knoxville an hour ago. She’d requested an SUV. She doesn’t drive red. She doesn’t even wear red. The guards seem more vigilant than they’ve been in the past, as if the car makes them wary, and they are already wary enough. Y-12 has the largest stockpile of enriched uranium in the country. Security is unyielding, and she never bothers the scientists here unless she has a special need that has reached, as she puts it, critical mass.

In the back of the car is the brown-paper-wrapped window from Lydia Webster’s laundry room, and a small box containing the gold coin that has the unidentified murdered little boy’s fingerprint on it. In the far reaches of the complex is a redbrick lab building that looks like all the others, but housed within it is the largest scanning electron microscope on the planet.

“You can pull over right there.” A guard points. “And he’ll be right here. You can follow him in.”

She moves on and parks, waiting for the black Tahoe driven by Dr. Franz, the director of the materials science lab. She always follows him in. No matter how many times she’s been here, she not only can’t find her way, she wouldn’t dare try. Getting lost inside a facility that manufactures nuclear weapons isn’t an option. The Tahoe rolls up and turns around, and Dr. Franz’s arm waves out his window, motioning for her to proceed. She follows him past nondescript buildings with nondescript names, then the terrain dramatically changes into woods and open fields, and finally the one-story labs known as Technology 2020. The setting is deceptively bucolic. Scarpetta and Dr. Franz get out of their vehicles. She removes the brown-paper-wrapped window from the back, where it was held safely in place with the seat belt.

“What fun things you bring us,” he says. “Last time, it was a complete door.”

“And we found a bootprint, didn’t we—that nobody thought was there.”

“There’s always a there there.” Dr. Franz’s motto.

About her age and dressed in a polo shirt and baggy jeans, he isn’t what comes to mind when one conjures up the image of a nuclear metallurgical engineer who finds it fascinating to spend his time magnifying a milled tool part or a spider spinneret, or pieces and parts of a space shuttle or a submarine. She follows him inside what would look like a normal lab, were it not for the massive metal chamber supported by four dampening pillars the diameter of trees. The VisiTech Large Chamber Scanning Electron Microscope—LC-SEM—weighs ten tons, and required a forty-ton forklift to install it. Simply put, it’s the biggest microscope on earth, and its original intended use wasn’t forensic science but failure analysis of materials such as the metals used in weapons. But technology is technology, as far as Scarpetta is concerned, and by now Y-12 is used to her shameless begging.

Dr. Franz unwraps the window. He places it and the coin on top of a three-inch-thick steel turntable, and begins positioning an electron gun the size of a small missile, and the detectors lurking behind it, lowering them as close as he can to suspect areas of sand and glue and broken glass. With a remote axis control, he slides and tilts. Hums and clicks. Stopping at end stops—or switches—that prevent precious parts from crashing into samples or one another or going over the edge. He closes the door so he can vacuum down the chamber to ten-to-the-minus-six, he explains. Then he’ll backfill the rest of it to ten-to-the-minus-two, he adds, and you couldn’t open the door if you tried, he says. Showing her. And what they basically have are the conditions of outer space, he explains. No moisture, no oxygen, just the molecules of a crime.

The sound of vacuum pumps and an electrical smell, and the clean-room begins to heat up. Scarpetta and Dr. Franz leave, shutting an outer door, back in the lab now, and a column of red, yellow, green, and white lights remind them that no human is inside the chamber, because that would be almost instant death. It would be like a space walk without a suit, Dr. Franz says.

He sits before a computer console with multiple large flat video screens, and says to Scarpetta, “Let’s see. What magnification? We can go up to two hundred thousand X.” They could, but he’s being droll.

“And a grain of sand will look like a planet, and maybe we’ll discover little people living on it,” she says.

“Exactly what I was thinking.” He clicks through layers of menus.

She sits next to him, and the big roughing vacuum pumps remind Scarpetta of an MRI scanner, and then the turbo pump kicks in and is followed by a silence that is broken at intervals when the air dryer vents in a huge, heartfelt sigh that sounds like a whale. They wait for a while, and when they get a green light, they begin to look at what the instrument sees as the electron beam strikes an area of window glass.

“Sand,” Dr. Franz says. “And what the heck?”

Mingled with the different shapes and sizes of grains of sand that look like chips and shards of stone are spheres with craters that look like microscopic meteorites and moons. An elemental analysis confirms barium, antimony, and lead in addition to the silica of sand.

“Did this case involve a shooting?” Dr. Franz says.

“Not that I know of,” Scarpetta answers, and she adds, “It’s like Rome.”

“Could be environmental or occupational particulate,” he supposes. “The highest peak, of course, is silicon. Plus traces of potassium, sodium, calcium, and don’t know why, but a trace of aluminum. I’m going to subtract out the background, which is glass.” Now he’s talking to himself.

“This is similar—very similar—to what they found in Rome.” She says it again. “The sand in Drew Martin’s eye sockets. Same thing, and I’m repeating myself because I almost can’t believe it. Certainly, I don’t understand it. What appears to be gunshot residue. And these darkly shaded areas here?” She points. “These strata?”

“The glue,” he says. “I would venture to say that the sand isn’t from there—from Rome or its surrounds. What about the sand in Drew Martin’s case? Since there was no basalt, nothing to indicate volcanic activity, such as you’d expect in that area. So he brought his own sand with him to Rome?”

“I do know it’s never been assumed the sand came from there. At least not the nearby beaches of Ostia. I don’t know what he did. Maybe the sand is symbolic, has meaning. But I’ve seen magnified sand. I’ve seen magnified dirt. And I’ve never seen this.”

Dr. Franz manipulates the contrast and magnification some more. He says, “And now it gets stranger.”

“Maybe epithelial cells. Skin?” She scrutinizes what’s on the screen. “No mention of that in Drew Martin’s case. I need to call Captain Poma. It all depends on what was deemed important. Or noticed. And no matter how sophisticated the police lab, it’s not going to have R&D-quality instruments. It’s not going to have this.” She means the LC-SEM.

“Well, I hope they didn’t use mass spec and digest the entire sample in acid. Or there won’t be anything left to retest.”

“They didn’t,” she says. “Solid-phase x-ray analysis. Raman. Any skin cells should still be in the sand over there, but as I said, I’m not aware of it. There’s nothing on the report. No one mentioned it. I need to call Captain Poma.”

“It’s already seven p.m. over there.”

“He’s here. Well, in Charleston.”

“Now I’m more confused. I thought you told me earlier he’s Carabiniere. Not Charleston PD.”

“He showed up rather unexpectedly. In Charleston last night. Don’t ask me. I’m more confused than you are.”

She’s still stung. It wasn’t a pleasant surprise when Benton appeared at her house last night and had Captain Poma with him. For an instant, she was speechless with surprise, and after coffee and soup, they left just as abruptly as they had arrived. She hasn’t seen Benton since, and she’s unhappy and hurt, and not sure what to say to him when she sees him—whenever that might be. Before she flew here this morning, she considered taking off her ring.

“DNA,” Dr. Franz is saying. “So we don’t want to screw this up with bleach. But the signal would be better if we could get rid of skin debris and oils. If that’s what this is.”

It’s like looking at constellations of stars. Do they resemble animals or even a dipper? Does the moon have a face? What is she really seeing? And she pushes Benton from her thoughts so she can concentrate.

“No bleach, and to be safe, we definitely should try DNA,” she says. “And although epithelial cells are common in GSR, that’s only when a suspect’s hands are dabbed with double-sided sticky carbon tape. So what we’re seeing, if it’s skin, doesn’t make sense unless the skin cells were transferred by the killer’s hands. Or the cells were already on the windowpane. But what would be peculiar about the latter is the glass was cleaned, wiped off, and we’re seeing fibers from that. Consistent with white cotton, and the dirty T-shirt I found in the laundry basket is white cotton, but what does that mean? Not much, really. The laundry room would be a landfill of microscopic fibers.”

“At this magnification, everything becomes a landfill.” Dr. Franz clicks the mouse, and manipulates and repositions, and the electron beam strikes an area of broken glass.

Beneath the polyurethane foam, which dried clear, cracks look like canyons. Blurred white shapes might be more epithelial cells, and lines and pores are a skin imprint from some part of the body hitting the glass. There are fragments of hair.

“Someone ran into it or punched it?” Dr. Franz says. “That’s how it was broken, maybe?”

“Not with a hand or the bottom of a foot,” Scarpetta points out. “No friction ridge detail.” She can’t stop thinking about Rome. She says, “Instead of the GSR having been transferred from someone’s hands, maybe it was in the sand.”

“You mean before he touched it?”

“Maybe. Drew Martin wasn’t shot. We know that for a fact. Yet traces of barium, antimony, lead are in the sand found in her eye sockets.” She goes through it again, trying to sort it out. “He put the sand in there and then glued her eyelids shut. So what appears to be GSR could have been on his hands and was transferred to the sand, because certainly he touched it. But what if the GSR is there because it was already there?”

“First time I’ve ever heard of anybody doing something like that. What kind of world do we live in?”

“I hope it will be the last time we hear of somebody doing something like that, and I’ve been asking the same question most of my life,” she says.

“Nothing to say it wasn’t already there,” Dr. Franz says. “In other words, in this case”—he indicates the images on the screen—“is the sand on the glue or is the glue on the sand? And was the sand on his hands or were his hands in the sand? The glue in Rome. You said they didn’t use mass spec. Did they analyze it with FTIR?”

“I don’t think so. It’s cyanoacrylate. That’s as much as I know,” she says. “If we can try FTIR and see what molecular fingerprint we get.”

“Fine.”

“On the glue from the window and also the glue on the coin?”

“Certainly.”

Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy is a simpler concept than the name implies. Chemical bonds of a molecule absorb light wavelengths and produce an annotated spectrum that is as unique as a fingerprint. At first glance, what they find is no surprise. The spectra are the same for the glue used on the window and the glue on the coin: Both are a cyanoacrylate but not one either Scarpetta or Dr. Franz recognizes. The molecular structure isn’t the ethylcyanoacrylate of everyday superglue. It’s something different.

“Two-octylcyanoacrylate,” Dr. Franz says, and the day is running away from them. It’s half past two. “I have no idea what that is except, obviously, an adhesive. And the glue in Rome? The molecular structure of that?”

“I’m not sure anyone asked,” she says.

Historic buildings softly lit, and the white steeple of Saint Michael’s pointing sharply at the moon.

From her splendid room, Dr. Self can’t distinguish the harbor and the ocean from the sky because there are no stars. It has stopped raining, but not for long.

“I love the pineapple fountain, not that you can see it from here.” She talks to the city lights beyond her window because it’s more pleasant than talking to Shandy. “Way down there at the water, below the market. And little children, so many of them underprivileged, splash in it during the summer. I will say, if you have one of those expensive condos, the noise would rather much tarnish your mood. Listen, I hear a helicopter. Do you hear it?” Dr. Self says. “The Coast Guard. And those huge planes the Air Force has. They seem like flying battleships, overhead every other minute, but then you know about those big planes. Wasting more taxpayers’ money for what?”

“I wouldn’t have told you if I’d thought you’d stop paying me,” Shandy says from her chair near a window, where she has no interest in the view.

“For more waste, more death,” Dr. Self says. “We know what happens when these boys and girls come home. We know it all too well, don’t we, Shandy?”

“Give me what we talked about and maybe I’ll leave you alone. I just want what everybody else does. There’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t give a shit about Iraq,” Shandy says. “I’m not interested in sitting here for hours talking about your politics. You want to hear real politics, come hang out at the bar.” She laughs in a not-so-nice way. “Now, that’s a thought, you at the bar. You on a big ole hog.” She rattles ice in her drink. “A Bush-whacker in Bush country.”

“Or perhaps you’re shrubs.”

“Cause we hate A-rabs and queers and don’t believe in flushing little babies down the toilet or selling their pieces and parts to medical science. We love apple pie, buffalo wings, Budweiser, and Jesus. Oh, yeah—and fucking. Give me what I came here for and I’ll shut up and go home.”

“As a psychiatrist, I’ve always said know yourself. But not so with you, my dear. I recommend you do your best not to know yourself at all.”

“One thing’s for sure,” Shandy says snidely. “Marino sure got over you when he got all over me.”

“He did exactly what I predicted. He thought with the wrong head,” Dr. Self says.

“You may be as rich and famous as Oprah, but all the power and glory in the world can’t turn on a man like I do. I’m young and sweet and know what they want, and I can keep going as long as they can and make them go a lot longer than they ever dreamed they could,” Shandy says.

“Are you talking about sex or the Kentucky Derby?”

“I’m talking about you being old,” Shandy says.

“Perhaps I should have you on my show. Such fascinating questions I could ask. What men see in you. What magical musk you must exude to keep them following you like your own rounded ass. We’ll display you just as you are right now, in black leather pants as tight as the peel on a plum, and a denim jacket with nothing under it. Of course, your boots. And the pièce de résistance—a do-rag that looks as if it’s on fire. Shopworn, to put it kindly, but it belongs to your poor friend who was just in a terrible accident. My audience would find it touching that you wear his do-rag around your neck and say you won’t take it off until he gets better. I’m reluctant to tell you that when a head is cracked open like an egg and the brain is exposed to the environment, which includes pavement, it’s fairly serious.”

Shandy drinks.

“I suspect by the end of an hour—and I don’t see a series in this, just one small segment of one show—we’ll conclude that you’re alluring and pretty with a suppleness and come-hither-ness there’s no denying,” Dr. Self says. “Likely, you can get away with your base predilections for now, but when you get as old as you think I am, gravity will make you honest. What do I say on my show? Gravity will get you. Life is inclined toward falling. Not standing or flying, indeed, barely sitting. But to fall just as hard as Marino did. When I encouraged you to seek him out after he was foolish enough to seek me out first, the potential plunge seemed rather minimal. Just whatever trouble you could cause, my dear. And just how far could Marino fall, after all, when he’s never risen above much of anything to begin with?”

“Give me the money,” Shandy says. “Or maybe I should pay you so I don’t have to listen to you anymore. No wonder your—”

“Don’t say it,” Dr. Self snaps at her but with a smile. “We’ve agreed on who we don’t discuss and what names we must never say. It’s for your own good. You mustn’t forget that part. You have much more to worry about than I do.”

“You should be glad,” Shandy says. “Truth is? I did you a favor, because now you won’t have to deal with me anymore, and you probably like me about as much as you like Dr. Phil.”

“He’s been on my show.”

“Well, get me his autograph.”

“I’m not glad,” Dr. Self says. “I wish you’d never called with your disgusting news, which you told me so I’d pay you off and help you stay out of jail. You’re a smart girl. It’s not to my advantage to have you in jail.”

“I wish I’d never called. I didn’t know you’d stop the checks because…”

“Because what for? What would I be paying for? What I was paying for doesn’t need my support anymore.”

“I shouldn’t have told you. But you always said I had to be honest.”

“If I did, I’ve wasted my words,” Dr. Self says.

“And you wonder why…?”

“I wonder why you want to annoy me by breaking our rule. There are some subjects we don’t bring up.”

“I can bring up Marino. And I sure have.” Shandy smirks. “Did I tell you? He still wants to fuck the Big Chief. That should bother you, since the two of you are about the same age.”

Shandy plows through hors d’oeuvres as if they are Kentucky Fried Chicken.

“Maybe he’d fuck you if you asked him real nice. But he’d fuck her before even me, given the choice. Can you imagine?” she says.

If bourbon were air, there would be nothing left to breathe in the room. Shandy grabbed so much in the Club Level drawing room, she had to ask the concierge for a tray while Dr. Self made a cup of hot chamomile tea and looked the other way.

“She sure must be something special,” Shandy says. “No wonder you hate her so much.”

It was metaphorical. Everything Shandy represents causes Dr. Self to look the other way, and she’d looked the other way so long, she didn’t see the collision coming.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Dr. Self says. “You’re to leave this very pretty little city and never come back. I know you’ll miss your beach house, but since I’m only being polite to call it yours, I predict you’ll get over it quickly. Before you pack up, you’ll strip it to the bone. Do you remember the stories about Princess Diana’s apartment? What happened to it after she died? Carpet and wallpaper torn out, even the light-bulbs removed, her car crushed into a cube.”

“No one’s touching my BMW or my bike.”

“You’re to start tonight. Scrub, paint, use bleach. Burn things—I don’t care. But not a drop of blood or semen or spit, not an article of clothing, not a single hair or a fiber or a morsel of food. You should go back to Charlotte where you belong. Join the Church of the Sports Bar and worship the god of money. Your erstwhile father was wiser than I. He left you nothing, and certainly I have to leave you something. I have it in my pocket. And then I’m rid of you.”

“You’re the one who said I should live here in Charleston so I could be…”

“And now I have the privilege of changing my mind.”

“You can’t make me do a fucking thing. I don’t give a shit who you are, and I’m tired of you telling me what to say. Or not to say.”

“I am who I am and can make you do whatever I please,” Dr. Self says. “Now’s a good time to be pleasant to me. You asked my help, and here I am. I’ve just told you what to do so you can get away with your sins. You should say ‘Thank you’ and ‘Whatever you wish is my command’ and ‘I’ll never do anything to upset or inconvenience you again.’”

“Then give it to me. I’m out of bourbon and out of my mind. You make me feel crazier than a shithouse rat.”

“Not so fast. We haven’t finished our little fireside chat. What did you do with Marino?”

“He’s gonzo.”

“Gonzo. Then you are well-read, after all. Fiction truly is the best fact, and gonzo journalism is truer than truth. The exception is the war, since fiction got us into it. And that led to what you did, that atrociously horrible thing you did. Amazing to contemplate,” Dr. Self says. “You’re sitting here right this very minute and in that very chair because of George W. Bush. I’m sitting here because of him, too. Giving you an audience is beneath me, and this really will be the last time I rush to your rescue.”

“I’m going to need another house. I can’t just move somewhere and not have a house,” Shandy says.

“I’m not sure I’ll ever get over the irony. I ask you to have a little fun with Marino because I wanted a little fun with the Big Chief, as you call her. I didn’t ask for the rest of it. I didn’t know the rest of it. Well, now I do. Very few people best me, and no one I’ve met is worse than you. Before you pack up, clean up, and go wherever people like you go, one last question. Was there ever even a minute when it bothered you? We’re not talking poor impulse control, my dear. Not when something so loathsome went on and on and on. How did you look at it day after day? I can’t even look at a mistreated dog.”

“Just give me what I came here for, okay?” Shandy says. “Marino’s gone.” She refrains from saying gonzo this time. “I did what you told me…”

“I didn’t tell you to do the thing that’s forced me to come to Charleston when I have infinitely better things to do. And I’m not leaving until I know you are.”

“You owe me.”

“Shall we add up what you’ve cost me over the years?”

“Yeah, you owe me because I didn’t want to keep it and you made me. I’m tired of living your past. Doing shit because it makes you feel better about your own shit. Anytime you could have taken it off my hands, but you didn’t want it, either. That’s what I finally had to figure out. You didn’t want it, either. So why should I suffer?”

“Do you realize this lovely hotel is on Meeting Street, and if my suite faced north instead of east, we could almost see the morgue?”

“She’s the one who’s a Nazi, and I’m pretty sure he fucked her, not just wanted to, but I mean did it for real. He lied to me so he could spend the night at her house. So how does that make you feel? She must be something, all right. He’s got such a thing for her, he’d bark like a dog or use a litterbox if she told him to. You owe me for having to put up with all that. It wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t pulled one of your tricks and said, ‘Shandy? There’s this big, dumb cop, and how about doing me a favor?’”

“You did yourself a favor. You got information I didn’t know you needed,” Dr. Self says. “So I made a suggestion, but you certainly didn’t take me up on it for my sake. It was an opportunity. You’ve always been so skilled at taking advantage of opportunities. In fact, I’d call you brilliant at it. Now, this wondrous revelation. Maybe it’s my reward for all you’ve cost me. She cheated? Dr. Kay Scarpetta cheated? I wonder if her fiancé knows.”

“And what about me? The asshole cheated on me. Nobody does that. All the guys I could have, and that fat fuck cheats on me?”

“Here’s what you do about it.” Dr. Self slips an envelope out of a pocket of her red silk robe. “You’re going to tell Benton Wesley.”

“You’re a piece of work.”

“It’s only fair he should know. Your cashier’s check. Before I forget.” She holds up the envelope.

“So now you’re going to play another little game with me.”

“Oh, it’s not a game, my dear. And I just happen to have Benton’s e-mail address,” Dr. Self says. “My laptop’s on the desk.”

Scarpetta’s conference room.

“Nothing unusual,” Lucy says. “Looked the same.”

“The same?” Benton asks. “The same as what?”

The four of them are gathered around a small table in what was a servants’ quarters, quite possibly occupied by a young woman named Mary, a slave set free who wouldn’t leave the family after the War. Scarpetta has gone to much trouble to know the history of her building. Right now she wishes she’d never bought it.

“I will ask again,” says Captain Poma. “Has there been a difficulty with him? Perhaps a problem with his job?”

Lucy says, “When doesn’t he have difficulty with any job?”

No one’s heard from Marino. Scarpetta has called him half a dozen times, maybe more, and he hasn’t called her back. On her way here, Lucy stopped by his fishing shack. His motorcycle was parked underneath it, but his truck was gone. He didn’t answer the door. He wasn’t there. She says she looked through a window, but Scarpetta knows better. She knows Lucy.

“Yes, I’d say so,” Scarpetta says. “I’d say he’s been unhappy. Misses Florida and is sorry he moved here, and probably doesn’t like working for me. This isn’t a good time to dwell on the trials and troubles of Marino.”

She feels Benton’s eyes on her. She makes notes on a legal pad and checks other notes she’s already made. She checks preliminary lab reports even though she knows exactly what they say.

“He hasn’t moved,” Lucy says. “Or if he did, he left all his stuff behind.”

“And you saw all this through a window?” Captain Poma says, and he’s very curious about Lucy.

He’s been watching her since everyone assembled in this room. He seems slightly amused by her, and her response is to ignore him. The way he looks at Scarpetta is the way he looked at her in Rome.

“Seems like a lot to see through a window,” he says to Scarpetta, even though he’s talking to Lucy.

“He hasn’t gone into his e-mail, either,” Lucy says. “He might suspect I’m monitoring it. Nothing between him and Dr. Self.”

“In other words,” Scarpetta says, “he’s off the radar screen. Completely.”

She gets up and pulls down window shades because it’s dark. It’s raining again, and has been since Lucy picked her up in Knoxville, when the mountains looked like they weren’t there because it was so foggy. Lucy had to divert wherever she could, flying very slowly, following rivers and finding lower elevations. It was luck, or perhaps God’s good grace, that they weren’t stranded. Search efforts have been halted, except those conducted on the ground. Lydia Webster hasn’t been found alive or dead. Her Cadillac hasn’t been seen.

“Let’s organize our thoughts,” Scarpetta says, because she doesn’t want to talk about Marino. She’s afraid Benton will sense how she feels.

Guilty and angry, and increasingly afraid. It appears Marino has pulled a disappearing stunt, got in his truck and drove away without a warning, without any effort to repair the damage he’s done. He’s never been facile with words, and he’s never made much effort to understand his complicated emotions, and this time what he needs to fix exceeds his capacity to cope. She’s tried to dismiss him, to not give a damn, but he’s like the persistent fog. Thoughts of him obscure what’s around her, and one lie becomes another. She told Benton her bruises are from the hatchback of her SUV accidentally shutting on her wrists. She hasn’t undressed in front of him.

“Let’s try to make some sense of what we know,” she says to everyone. “I would like to talk about the sand. Silica—or quartz, and limestone, and with high magnification, fragments of shells and coral, typical of sand in subtropical areas like this. And most interesting and perplexing of all, the components of gunshot residue. In fact, I’m just going to call it gunshot residue, because we can’t figure out any other explanation for barium, antimony, and lead to be present in beach sand.”

“If it’s beach sand,” Captain Poma says. “Maybe it isn’t. Dr. Maroni says the patient who came to see him claimed to have just returned from Iraq. I would expect gunshot residue in many areas of Iraq. Maybe he brought sand back from Iraq because he became demented over there, and the sand is a reminder.”

“We didn’t find gypsum, and gypsum’s common in desert sand,” Scarpetta says. “But it really depends on what area of Iraq, and I don’t believe Dr. Maroni knows the answer to that.”

“He didn’t tell me exactly where,” Benton says.

“What about his notes?” Lucy asks.

“It’s not in them.”

“Sand in different regions of Iraq has different compositions and morphology,” Scarpetta says. “It all depends on how sediment was deposited, and although a high saline content doesn’t prove the sand is from a beach, both samples we have—from Drew Martin’s body and Lydia Webster’s house—have a high saline content. In other words, salt.”

“I think what’s important is why sand is so important to him,” Benton says. “What does sand say about him? He calls himself the Sandman. Symbolic of putting people to sleep? Maybe. A type of euthanasia that might be related to the glue, to some medical component? Maybe.”

The glue. Two-octylcyanoacrylate. Surgical glue, primarily used by plastic surgeons and other medical practitioners to close small incisions or cuts, and in the military to treat friction blisters.

Scarpetta says, “The surgical glue might be what he had because of whatever it is he does and whoever he is. Not simply symbolism.”

“Is there an advantage?” Captain Poma asks. “Surgical glue instead of everyday superglue? I’m not so familiar with what plastic surgeons do.”

“Surgical glue is biodegradable,” she says. “It’s noncarcinogenic.”

“A healthy glue.” He smiles at her.

“You might say that.”

“Does he believe he’s relieving suffering? Maybe.” Benton resumes, as if ignoring them.

“You said it’s sexual,” Captain Poma points out.

He’s dressed in a dark blue suit and a black shirt and black tie and looks as if he stepped out of a Hollywood premiere or an ad for Armani. What he doesn’t look like is someone who belongs in Charleston, and Benton doesn’t seem to like him any more than he did in Rome.

“I didn’t say it was only sexual,” Benton replies. “I said there’s a sexual component. I will also say he may not be aware of it, and we don’t know if he assaults his victims sexually, only that he tortures them.”

“And I’m not sure we know that for a fact.”

“You saw the photographs he sent to Dr. Self. What do you call it when someone forces a woman to sit naked in a tub of cold water? And possibly dunks her?”

“I don’t know what I’d call it, because I wasn’t there when he did it,” Captain Poma says.

“Had you been, I suppose we wouldn’t be here, because the cases would be solved.” Benton’s eyes are like steel.

“I find it rather fantastic to think he’s relieving their suffering,” Captain Poma says to him. “Especially if your theory is correct and he tortures them. It would seem he causes suffering. Not relieves it.”

“Obviously, he causes it. But we’re not dealing with a rational mind, only an organized one. He’s calculating and deliberate. He’s intelligent and sophisticated. He understands breaking and entering and leaving no evidence. He possibly engages in cannibalism, and possibly believes he’s one with his victims, makes them part of him. That he has a significant relationship with them and is merciful.”

“The evidence.” Lucy is far more interested in that. “Do you think he knows there’s gunshot residue in the sand?”

“He might,” Benton says.

“I seriously doubt it,” Scarpetta says. “Very seriously. Even if the sand comes from some battlefield, so to speak, someplace meaningful to him, that doesn’t mean he knows the elemental composition. Why would he?”

“Point well taken. I should say it’s likely he brings the sand with him,” Benton says. “It’s very likely he brings his own tools and cutting instruments with him. Whatever he brings with him isn’t purely utilitarian. His world is rife with symbols, and he’s acting on impulses that make sense only when we understand these symbols.”

“I really don’t care about his symbols,” Lucy says. “What I care most about is he e-mailed Dr. Self. That’s the lynchpin, in my opinion. Why her? And why hijack the port’s wireless network? Why climb over the fence—we’ll assume. And use an abandoned container? Like he’s cargo?”

Lucy was her usual self. She climbed the shipyard’s fence earlier tonight and looked around because she had a hunch. Where could one hijack the port’s network without being seen? She got her answer inside a banged-up container where she discovered a table and a chair and a wireless router. Scarpetta has thought a lot about Bull, about the night he decided to smoke weed near abandoned containers and got cut up. Was the Sandman there? Did Bull get too close? She wants to ask him but hasn’t seen him since they searched the alley together and found the gun and the gold coin.

“I left everything in place,” Lucy says. “Hoping he wouldn’t know I was there. But he might. I can’t say. He’s not sent any e-mails from the port tonight, but he hasn’t for a while.”

“What about the weather?” Scarpetta asks, mindful of the time.

“Should clear by midnight. I’m stopping by the lab, then heading to the airport,” Lucy says.

She gets up. Then Captain Poma does. Benton stays in his chair, and Scarpetta meets his eyes, and her phobias return.

He says to her, “I need to talk to you a minute.”

Lucy and Captain Poma leave, and Scarpetta shuts her door.

“Maybe I should start. You showed up in Charleston with no announcement,” she says. “You didn’t call. I hadn’t heard from you in days, and then you walk in unexpectedly last night with him…”

“Kay,” he says, reaching for his briefcase and placing it on his lap. “We shouldn’t be doing this right now.”

“You’ve barely talked to me.”

“Can we…?” he starts to say.

“No, we can’t put this off until later. I can scarcely concentrate. I have to get to Rose’s apartment building, have so much to do, too much to do, and everything’s disintegrating and I know what you want to talk to me about. I can’t tell you how I feel. Maybe I really can’t. I don’t blame you if you’ve made a decision. I certainly understand.”

“I wasn’t going to suggest we put this off until later,” Benton says. “I was going to suggest we stop interrupting each other.”

This confuses her. That light in his eyes. She’s always believed what’s in his eyes is only for her, and now she’s afraid it isn’t and never was. He’s looking at her, and she looks away.

“What do you want to talk to me about, Benton?”

“Him.”

“Otto?”

“I don’t trust him. Waiting for the Sandman to show up to send more e-mails? On foot? In the rain? In the dark? Did he tell you he was coming here?”

“I suppose someone informed him of what’s been happening. A connection of the Drew Martin case with Charleston, with Hilton Head.”

“Maybe Dr. Maroni’s been talking to him,” Benton considers. “I don’t know. He’s like a phantom.” He means the captain. “All over the damn place. I don’t trust him.”

“Maybe I’m the one you don’t trust,” she says. “Maybe you should say it and get it over with.”

“I don’t trust him at all.”

“Then you shouldn’t spend so much time with him.”

“I haven’t. I don’t know what he does or where. Except I think he came to Charleston because of you. It’s obvious what he wants. To be the hero. To impress you. To make love to you. I can’t say I’d blame you. He’s handsome and charming, I’ll give him that.”

“Why are you jealous of him? He’s so small compared to you. I’ve done nothing to warrant it. You’re the one who lives up there and leaves me alone. I understand your not wanting to be in this relationship anymore. Just tell me and get it over with.” Scarpetta looks at her left hand, at the ring. “Should I take it off?” She starts to take it off.

“Don’t,” Benton says. “Please don’t. I don’t believe you want that.”

“It’s not a matter of what I want. It’s what I deserve.”

“I don’t blame men for falling in love with you. Or wanting you in bed. Do you know what happened?”

“I should give you the ring.”

“Let me tell you what happened,” Benton says. “It’s about time you knew. When your father died, he took some of you with him.”

“Please don’t be cruel.”

“Because he adored you,” Benton says. “How could he not? His beautiful little girl. His brilliant little girl. His good little girl.”

“Don’t hurt me like this.”

“I’m telling you a truth, Kay. A very important one.” The light in his eyes again.

She can’t look at him.

“From that day forward, a part of you decided it was too dangerous to notice the way someone looks at you if he adores you or wants you sexually. If he adores you and dies? You believe you can’t endure that again. Sexually wants you? Then how do you work with cops and DAs if you think they’re imagining what’s under your clothes and what they might do with it?”

“Stop it. I don’t deserve this.”

“You never did.”

“Just because I choose not to notice doesn’t mean I deserve what he did.”

“Never in a million years.”

“I don’t want to live here anymore,” she says. “I should give you back the ring. It was your great-grandmother’s.”

“And run away from home? Like you did when you had no one left but your mother and Dorothy? You ran away without going anywhere. Lost in learning and accomplishment. Running fast, too busy to feel. Now you want to run away like Marino just did.”

“I should never have let him into the house.”

“You have for twenty years. Why wouldn’t you have that night? Especially when he was so drunk and dangerous to himself. One thing you are is kind.”

“Rose told you. Maybe Lucy.”

“An e-mail from Dr. Self, indirectly. You and Marino are having an affair. I found out the rest of it from Lucy. The truth. Look at me, Kay. I’m looking at you.”

“Promise me you won’t do anything to him. And make it worse, because then you’ll be like him. This is why you’ve avoided me, didn’t tell me you were coming to Charleston. Have scarcely called me.”

“I haven’t avoided you. Where do I start? There’s so much.”

“What else?”

“We had a patient,” he says. “Dr. Self befriended her—I use the word loosely. She basically called this patient an imbecile, and from Dr. Self, it wasn’t name-calling or a joke. It was a judgment, a diagnosis. It was worse because Dr. Self said it, and the patient was going home where she wasn’t safe. She went to the first liquor store she could find. It appears she drank nearly a fifth of vodka, and she hanged herself. So I’ve been dealing with that. And so much else you don’t know about. That’s why I’ve been distant. Not talked to you much these past several days.”

He snaps open the clasps of his briefcase and lifts out his laptop.

“I’ve been very reluctant to use the hospital’s phones, their wireless Internet, been very careful on every front. Even the home front. One reason I wanted to get out of there. And you’re about to ask me what’s going on, and I’m about to tell you I don’t know. But it’s got to do with Paulo’s electronic files. The ones Lucy got into because he left them surprisingly vulnerable to anyone who might want to get into them.”

“Vulnerable if you knew where to look. Lucy isn’t exactly anyone.”

“She was also limited because she had to get into his computer remotely as opposed to having access to the actual machine.” He turns on his laptop. He inserts a CD into the drive. “Come closer.”

She moves her chair flush against his and looks at what he’s doing. Momentarily, he has a document on his screen.

“The notes we’ve already looked at,” she says, recognizing the electronic file that Lucy found.

“Not quite,” Benton says. “With all due respect to Lucy, I have access to a few bright people, too. Not as bright as she is, but they’ll do in a pinch. What you’re looking at is a file that’s been deleted and then recovered. It’s not the file you saw, the one Lucy found after tricking the system admin password out of Josh. That particular file was several copies removed from this. Several later.”

She taps the down arrow and reads. “It looks the same.”

“The text isn’t what’s different. It’s this.” He touches the file name at the top of the screen. “Do you notice the same thing I did when Josh first showed me this?”

“Josh? I hope you trust him.”

“I do, and for a good reason. He did the same thing Lucy did. Got into something he shouldn’t, and birds of a feather. Thankfully, they’re allies and he forgives her for duping him. In fact, he was impressed.”

“File name’s MSNote-ten-twenty-one-oh-six,” Scarpetta says. “From which I assume MSNotes are the initials of the patient and the notes Dr. Maroni made. And ten-twenty-one-oh-six is October twenty-first, two thousand six.”

“You just said it. You said MSNotes and the file name is MSNote.” He touches the screen again. “A file that’s been copied at least once, and inadvertently the name got changed. A typo. I don’t know how, exactly. Or maybe it was deliberate, so he didn’t keep copying over the same file. I do that sometimes if I don’t want to lose an earlier draft. What’s important is that when Josh recovered every deleted file pertaining to the patient of interest, we find the earliest draft was written two weeks ago.”

“Maybe it’s just the earliest draft he stored on that particular hard drive?” she suggests. “Or maybe he opened the file two weeks ago and saved it, which would have changed the date stamp? But I suppose that begs the question of why would he have looked at those notes before we even knew he had seen the Sandman as a patient? When Dr. Maroni left for Rome, we’d never heard of the Sandman.”

“There’s that,” Benton says. “And there’s the fabrication of the file. Because it is a fabrication. Yes, Paulo wrote those notes right before he left for Rome. He wrote them the very day Dr. Self was admitted to McLean on April twenty-seventh. In fact, several hours before she arrived at the hospital. And the reason I can say this with a reasonable degree of certainty is because Paulo may have emptied his trash, but even those deletions aren’t gone. Josh recovered them.”

He opens another file, this one a rough draft of the notes Scarpetta is familiar with, but in this version, the patient’s initials aren’t MS but WR.

“Then it would seem to me Dr. Self must have called Paulo. We assume that, anyway, because she couldn’t just show up at the hospital. Whatever she told him over the phone inspired him to begin writing these notes,” Scarpetta says.

“Another sign of fabrication,” Benton says. “Using a patient’s initials for a file name. We’re not supposed to do that. Even if you do stray from protocol and good judgment, it doesn’t make sense he changed his patient’s initials. Why? To rename him. Why? To give him an alias? Paulo knows better than to do any such thing.”

“Maybe the patient doesn’t exist,” Scarpetta says.

“Now you see what I’m leading up to,” Benton says. “I don’t think the Sandman was ever Paulo’s patient.”

Chapter 20

Ed the doorman is nowhere to be seen when Scarpetta walks into Rose’s apartment building at almost ten. It’s drizzling, and the dense fog is lifting, and clouds are rushing across the sky as the front moves out to sea.

She steps inside his office and looks around. There isn’t much on the desk: a Rolodex, a notebook with Residents on the cover, a stack of unopened mail—Ed’s and two other doormen’s—pens, a stapler, personal items such as a plaque with a clock on it, an award from a fishing club, a cell phone, a ring of keys, a wallet. She checks the wallet. Ed’s. He’s on duty tonight with what appears to be three dollars to his name.

Scarpetta walks out, looks around, still no sign of Ed. She returns to his office and thumbs through the Residents book until she finds Gianni Lupano’s apartment on the top floor. She takes the elevator, and listens outside his door. Music is playing, but not loudly, and she rings the bell, and she hears someone moving around. She rings the bell again and knocks. Footsteps and the door opens and Scarpetta is face-to-face with Ed.

“Where’s Gianni Lupano?” She walks past Ed, into the surround sound of Santana.

Wind blows through a window open wide in the living room.

Ed’s eyes are panicked as he talks frantically. “I didn’t know what to do. This is so terrible. I didn’t know what to do.”

Scarpetta looks out the open window. She looks down and can’t make out anything in the dark, just dense shrubbery and a sidewalk and the street beyond. She steps back and glances around a lavish apartment of marble and pastel-painted plaster, ornate molding, Italian leather furniture, and bold art. Shelves are filled with handsomely bound old books that some interior decorator probably bought by the yard, and an entire wall is occupied by an entertainment center too elaborate for a space this small.

“What’s happened?” she says to Ed.

“I get this call maybe twenty minutes ago.” Excitedly. “First he says, ‘Hey, Ed, you start my car?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, why do you ask?’ And I was nervous about it.”

Scarpetta notices what must be half a dozen tennis rackets in cases propped against the wall behind the couch, a stack of tennis shoes still in their boxes. On a glass coffee table with an Italian glass base is a stack of tennis magazines. On the cover of the one on top is Drew Martin, about to pound a lob.

“Nervous about what?” she asks.

“That young lady, Lucy. She started his car because she wanted to look at something, and I was afraid he somehow found out. But that wasn’t it, I don’t guess, because then he said, ‘Well, you’ve always taken such good care of it, I want you to have it.’ And I said, ‘What? What are you talking about, Mr. Lupano? I can’t take your car. Why are you trying to give away that beautiful car?’ And then he said, ‘Ed, I’ll write it down on a piece of paper so people know I gave you the car.’ So I hurried up here as fast as I could and found the door unlocked, like he wanted to make it easy for anyone to get inside. And then I found the window open.”

Walking toward it and pointing, as if Scarpetta can’t see it for herself.

She calls nine-one-one as they run down the hallway. She tells the operator someone may have jumped out a window and gives the address. On the elevator, Ed continues to talk disjointedly about searching Lupano’s apartment just to make sure, and he found the piece of paper but left it where it was, on the bed, and he kept calling out for him and he was about to call the police but Scarpetta showed up.

In the lobby, an old woman with a cane clicks her way across marble. Scarpetta and Ed rush past, and out of the building. They run through the dark around the corner, stopping directly below Lupano’s open window. It is filled with light at the top of the building. Scarpetta shoves through a tall hedge, branches snapping and scratching, and finds what she feared. The body is nude and contorted, limbs and neck at unnatural angles against the brick side of the building, blood glistening in the dark. She presses two fingers against the carotid and feels no pulse. She repositions the body flat on its back and begins CPR. When she looks up, she wipes blood off her face, off her mouth. Sirens wail, blue and red lights flashing blocks away on East Bay. She gets to her feet and pushes back through the hedge.

“Come here,” Scarpetta says to Ed. “Take a look and tell me if that’s him.”

“Is he…?”

“Just look.”

Ed pushes through the bushes, then crashes back through them.

“My God in heaven,” he says. “Oh, no. Oh, Lord.”

“Is it him?” she asks, and Ed nods yes. In the back of her mind, it bothers her that she just did mouth-to-mouth without protection. “Right before he called you about his Porsche, you were where?”

“Sitting at my desk.” Ed is scared, his eyes darting. He’s sweating and keeps wetting his lips and clearing his throat.

“Did anyone else come inside the building maybe about that time, or maybe a little before he called?”

Sirens wail as police cars and an ambulance stop on the street, red and blue light pulsing on Ed’s face. “No,” he says. Except for a few of the residents, he says, he saw no one.

Doors slam, radios chatter, diesel engines rumble. Police and EMTs get out of their vehicles.

Scarpetta says to Ed, “Your wallet’s out on the desk. Maybe you’d taken your wallet out, then you got the call? Am I right?” Then she says to a plainclothes cop, “Over there.” She points to the hedge. “Came from up there.” She points to the lighted open window on the top floor.

“You’re that new medical examiner.” The detective looks at her, doesn’t seem entirely sure.

“Yes.”

“You pronounced him?”

“That’s for the coroner to do.”

The detective starts walking toward the bushes as she confirms that the man—Lupano, it seems—is dead. “I’ll need a statement from you, so don’t go anywhere,” he calls back to her. Bushes crack and rustle as he pushes through them.

“I don’t understand what all this is about. My wallet,” Ed says.

Scarpetta moves out of the way so the EMTs can get through with their stretcher and equipment. They head to the far corner of the building so they can maneuver behind the hedge instead of breaking through it.

“Your wallet’s on your desk. Right there with the door open. Is that your habit?” she asks Ed.

“Can we talk inside?”

“Let’s give our statements to the investigator over there,” she says. “Then we’ll talk inside.”

She notices someone heading toward them on the sidewalk, a woman in a housecoat. The woman is familiar, then becomes Rose. Scarpetta intercepts her in a hurry.

“Don’t come over here,” Scarpetta says.

“As if there’s anything I haven’t seen.” Rose looks up at the lighted open window. “That’s where he lived, isn’t it?”

“Who?”

“What would you expect after what happened?” she says, coughing, taking a deep breath. “What did he have left?”

“The question is timing.”

“Maybe Lydia Webster. It’s all over the news. You and I both know she’s dead,” Rose says.

Scarpetta just listens, wondering the obvious. Why would Rose assume Lupano might be affected by what has happened to Lydia Webster? Why would Rose know he’s dead?

“He was quite full of himself when we met,” Rose says, staring toward the dark shrubbery beneath the window.

“I wasn’t aware you’d ever met him.”

“Just once. I didn’t know it was him until Ed said something. He was talking to Ed in the office when I saw him quite a long time ago. Rather rough-looking. I thought he was a maintenance person, had no idea he was Drew Martin’s coach.”

Scarpetta looks down the dark sidewalk, notices Ed is talking to the detective. Paramedics are loading the stretcher inside the ambulance as emergency lights flash and cops poke around with their flashlights.

“Drew Martin comes along only once in a lifetime. What was left for him?” Rose says. “Possibly nothing. People die when there’s nothing left for them. I don’t blame them.”

“Come on. You shouldn’t be out here in the damp air. I’ll walk you back inside,” Scarpetta says.

They round the corner of the building as Henry Hollings comes down the front steps. He doesn’t look in their direction, walking fast and with purpose. Scarpetta watches him dissolve into the darkness along the seawall, toward East Bay Street.

“He got here before the police did?” Scarpetta says.

“He lives only five minutes from here,” Rose says. “He has a quite a place on the Battery.”

Scarpetta stares in the direction Hollings headed. On the harbor’s horizon, two lighted ships look like yellow LEGOs. The weather is clearing. She can see a few stars. She doesn’t mention to Rose that the Charleston County coroner just walked past a dead body and didn’t bother to look. He didn’t pronounce him. He didn’t do anything. Inside the building, she gets on the elevator with Rose, who does a poor job disguising how much she doesn’t want Scarpetta with her.

“I’m fine,” Rose says, holding open the doors, the elevator not going anywhere. “It’s back to bed for me. I’m sure people want to talk to you out there.”

“It’s not my case.”

“People always want to talk to you.”

“After I make sure you’re safely inside your apartment.”

“Since you’re here, maybe he assumed you’d take care of it,” Rose says as the doors shut and Scarpetta presses the button for her floor.

“You mean the coroner.” Even though Scarpetta has yet to mention him or point out that he inexplicably left without doing his job.

Rose is too breathless to talk as they follow the corridor to her apartment. She stands before the door and pats Scarpetta’s arm.

“Open the door and I’ll leave,” Scarpetta says.

Rose gets out her key. She doesn’t want to open the door with Scarpetta standing there.

“Go on inside,” Scarpetta says.

Rose doesn’t. The more reluctant she is, the more stubborn Scarpetta gets. Finally, Scarpetta takes the key from her and lets them in. Two chairs have been pulled up to the window that overlooks the harbor, and between them on a table are two wineglasses and a bowl of nuts.

“The person you’ve been seeing,” Scarpetta says, inviting herself inside. “Henry Hollings.” She shuts the door and looks into Rose’s eyes. “That’s why he hurried out of here. The police called him about Lupano and he told you, then left so he could come back without anyone knowing he was already here.”

She moves to the window as if she might see him on the street. She looks down. Rose’s apartment isn’t very far from Lupano’s.

“He’s a public figure and has to be careful,” Rose says, sitting on the couch, exhausted and pale. “We’re not having an affair. His wife is dead.”

“That’s the reason he’s sneaking?” Scarpetta sits next to her. “I’m sorry. That doesn’t make sense.”

“To protect me.” A deep breath.

“From what?”

“If it got out the coroner was seeing your secretary, somebody might make something of it. Certainly, it would end up in the news.”

“I see.”

“No, you don’t,” Rose says.

“Whatever makes you happy makes me happy.”

“Until you visited him, he assumed you hated him. That hasn’t helped,” Rose says.

“Then it’s my fault for not giving him a chance,” Scarpetta says.

“I couldn’t assure him otherwise, now, could I? You’ve assumed the worst about him, just as he’s assumed the worst about you.” Rose struggles to breathe, and she’s getting worse. The cancer is destroying her right before Scarpetta’s eyes.

“It will be different now,” she says to Rose.

“He was so happy you came to see him,” Rose says, reaching for a tissue, coughing. “That’s why he was here tonight. To tell me all about it. He talked of nothing else. He likes you. He wants the two of you to work together. Not against each other.” She coughs some more, the tissue speckled with blood.

“Does he know?”

“Of course. From the start.” She gets a pained expression on her face. “In that little wineshop on East Bay. It was instant. When we met. Started talking about burgundy versus Bordeaux. As if I know. Out of the blue, he suggests we try a few. He didn’t know where I work, so it wasn’t that. He didn’t learn I work for you until later.”

“It doesn’t matter what he knew. I don’t care.”

“He loves me. I tell him not to. He says if you love someone, that’s the way it is. And who can say how long any of us will be here. That’s how Henry explains life.”

“Then I’m his friend,” Scarpetta says.

She leaves Rose, and finds Hollings talking to the detective, the two of them near the shrubbery where the body was found. The ambulance and fire truck are gone, nothing parked nearby except an unmarked car and a cruiser.

“I thought you’d ducked out on us,” the detective says as Scarpetta walks toward them.

She says to Hollings, “I was making sure Rose got safely back into her apartment.”

“Let me bring you up to speed,” Hollings says. “Body’s en route to MUSC and will be autopsied in the morning. You’re welcome to be present and participate in any way you see fit. Or not.”

“Nothing so far to indicate it’s anything other than a suicide,” the detective says. “Except it bothers me he’s got no clothes on. If he jumped, why did he take all his clothes off?”

“You might get your answer from toxicology,” Scarpetta says. “The doorman says Lupano sounded intoxicated when he called him not long before he died. I think all of us have seen enough to know that when people decide to commit suicide, they can do a number of things that seem illogical, even suspicious. By chance did you find clothes inside that might be what he took off?”

“Got a few guys up there right now. Clothes on his bed. Jeans, shirt. Nothing unusual about that part of it. No sign anybody else was in there with him when he went out the window.”

“Ed say anything about seeing a stranger come inside the building tonight?” Hollings asks her. “Or perhaps someone who showed up to visit Lupano? And I will tell you, Ed’s a real stickler about letting people in.”

“I didn’t get that far with him,” Scarpetta says. “I did ask him why he had his wallet out and in plain view on his desk. He says it was on his desk when he got the call from Lupano and rushed upstairs.”

“He’s ordered a pizza,” the detective says. “That’s what he told me, said he’d just gotten a hundred-dollar bill out of his wallet when Lupano called. Ed did order a pizza. From Mama Mia’s. Was a no-show, and the guy left. I have trouble with the part about him having a hundred-dollar bill. Did he think some pizza deliverer was going to have change?”

“Maybe you should ask him who called first.”

“That’s a good idea,” Hollings says. “Lupano’s known for his flashy lifestyle, for having expensive tastes and carrying around a lot of cash. If he came back to the building during Ed’s shift, Ed would know he’s home. He places his pizza order, then realizes all he has is three dollars and a hundred-dollar bill.”

Scarpetta’s not going to tell them that yesterday Lucy was inside Lupano’s car, looking at his GPS.

She says, “That might be what happened—Ed called Lupano for change. And by this point, Lupano’s drunk, maybe drugged, irrational. Ed’s concerned and goes upstairs.”

“Or maybe he went upstairs to get change,” Hollings says.

“Still implying Ed called him first.”

The detective walks away and says, “I’m going to ask him.”

“I have a feeling you and I have a few matters to clear up,” Hollings says to her.

She looks at the sky and thinks about flying.

“How about we find a private place to talk,” he says.

Across the street is White Point Gardens, several acres of Civil War monuments, live oak trees, and plugged cannon aimed at Fort Sumter. Scarpetta and Hollings sit on a bench.

“I know about Rose,” she says.

“I figured you might.”

“As long as you take care of her.”

“Seems you do a fine job of that. I had some of your stew earlier tonight.”

“Before you left and came back. So no one would realize you were already inside the building,” Scarpetta says.

“So you don’t mind,” he says, as if he needs her approval.

“As long as you’re good to her. Because if you’re not, I’ll do something about it.”

“I believe that.”

“I need to ask you about Lupano,” she says. “I’m wondering if you might have contacted him after I left your funeral home earlier today.”

“Might I ask why you’d wonder that?”

“Because you and I talked about him. I asked you why he might have attended Holly Webster’s funeral. I think you know what would enter my mind.”

“That I asked him about it.”

“Did you?”

“Yes.”

“It’s in the news that Lydia Webster’s missing and presumed dead,” Scarpetta says.

“He knew her. Very well. We talked for a long time. He was very upset.”

“Is Lydia why he’s kept an apartment here?”

“Kay—I hope you don’t mind if I call you that—I was well aware that Gianni attended Holly’s funeral last summer. I couldn’t let on that I was. It would have betrayed a confidence.”

“I’m growing so weary of people and their confidences.”

“I didn’t try to obstruct you. If you found out on your own…”

“I’m tired of that, too. Finding out on my own.”

“If you found out on your own he’d attended Holly’s funeral, that was fair enough. So I made the guest books available to you. I understand your frustration. But you’d do the same thing. You wouldn’t betray a confidence, now, would you?”

“Depends. That’s what I’ve about decided.”

Hollings looks at the lighted windows of the apartment building. He says, “Now I have to worry I’m somehow responsible.”

“What confidence?” Scarpetta asks. “Since we’re talking about them and you seem to have a secret.”

“That he’d met Lydia several years ago when the Family Circle Cup used to be played in Hilton Head. They had an affair, an ongoing one, which is why he kept an apartment here. Then that day in July, their punishment. He and Lydia were in her bedroom, you can fill in the rest. No one checked on Holly, and she drowned. They broke up. Her husband left her. She fell apart, completely.”

“And he started sleeping with Drew?”

“God knows how many people he’s slept with, Kay.”

“Why did he continue to keep this apartment? If his affair with Lydia was over.”

“Maybe to have a clandestine place to be with Drew. Under the guise of training. Maybe because he said the bright foliage, the weather, the ironwork, and old stucco homes reminded him of Italy. He continued to be a friend to Lydia—this is according to him. Went to see her now and then.”

“When was the last time? Did he say?”

“Several weeks ago. He left Charleston after Drew won the tournament here, then came back.”

“Maybe I’m just not putting these pieces together very well.” Scarpetta’s cell phone rings. “Why would he come back? Why didn’t he go with Drew to Rome? Or did he? She had the Italian Open and Wimbledon coming up. I’ve never understood why she suddenly decided to run off with friends instead of training for what could have been the greatest victories of her career. So she goes to Rome? Not to train for the Italian Open. But to party? I don’t understand.”

Scarpetta doesn’t answer her phone. She doesn’t even look to see who it is.

“He told me he went to New York right after she won the tournament here. Not even a month ago. Almost impossible to believe.”

Her phone stops ringing.

And Hollings says, “Gianni didn’t go with Drew, because she’d just fired him.”

“She fired him?” Scarpetta says. “Is this known?”

“It’s not.”

“Why did she fire him?” Her phone rings again.

“Because Dr. Self told her to,” Hollings says. “That’s why he went to New York. To confront her. To try to get Drew to change her mind.”

“I’d better see who this is.” Scarpetta answers her phone.

“You need to drop by on your way to the airport,” Lucy says.

“It’s not exactly on the way.”

“Another hour, hour and a half, and I think we can head out. The weather should be fine by then. You need to drop by the labs.” Lucy tells Scarpetta where to meet her, and adds, “I don’t want to talk about it on the phone.”

Scarpetta says she will. To Henry Hollings, she says, “I’m assuming Drew didn’t change her mind.”

“She wouldn’t talk to him.”

“And Dr. Self?”

“He did talk to her. In her apartment. Mind you, this is what he told me. And she told him he was bad for Drew, an unhealthy influence, and she would continue to advise her to stay away from him. He got increasingly distraught and angry as he told me all this, and now I see I should have known better. I should have come over here immediately, sat down with him. Done something.”

“What else happened with Dr. Self?” Scarpetta asks. “Drew went to New York, then left for Rome the next day. Barely twenty-four hours later, she disappeared and ended up murdered, quite possibly by the same person who murdered Lydia. And I’ve got to head to the airport. You’re welcome to come. If we have any luck, we’re going to need you anyway.”

“The airport?” He gets up from the bench. “Now?”

“I don’t want us to wait another day. Her body’s in worse shape every hour.”

They start walking.

“Now? And I’m supposed to go with you in the middle of the night, and I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Hollings puzzles.

“Heat signatures,” she says. “Infrared. Any thermal variation is going to show up better in the dark, and maggots can raise the temperature of a decomposing body as much as twenty degrees centigrade. It’s been more than two days, because when he left her house, I’m quite sure she wasn’t alive. Not based on what we found. What else happened with Dr. Self? Did Lupano tell you anything else?”

They’re almost to her car.

“He said he was extraordinarily insulted,” Hollings says. “She said very degrading things to him and wouldn’t tell him how to find Drew. After he left, he called Dr. Self again. This was supposed to be the greatest moment in his career, and she’d just wrecked it, and then the final blow. She told him Drew was staying with her, had been inside the apartment the entire time he was begging Dr. Self to undo what she’d done. I won’t be going with you. You don’t need me, and I, well, I want to check on Rose.”

Scarpetta unlocks her car as she thinks about the timing. Drew spent the night in Dr. Self’s penthouse, and the next day flew to Rome. The day after that, the seventeenth, she disappeared. The eighteenth, her body was found. The twenty-seventh, Scarpetta and Benton were in Rome investigating Drew’s murder. That same day, Dr. Self was admitted to McLean, and Dr. Maroni fabricated a file that was supposed to be notes he took when he saw the Sandman as a patient—something Benton feels sure is a lie.

Scarpetta slides behind the wheel. Hollings is a gentleman and isn’t going to leave until she starts the engine and locks her door.

She says to him, “When Lupano was inside Dr. Self’s apartment, was anybody else there?”

“Drew was.”

“I mean, anybody else Lupano knew about?”

He thinks for a moment, says, “There might have been.” He hesitates. “He said he ate at her apartment. I think it was lunch. And it seems he made a comment about Dr. Self’s chef.”

Chapter 21

The Forensic Science Laboratories.

The main building is red brick and concrete with expansive windows that are UV-protected and mirror-finished, so the world outside sees a reflection of itself, and what’s inside is protected from prying eyes and damaging rays from the sun. A smaller building isn’t finished, and the landscaping is mud. Scarpetta sits in her car and watches a big bay door roll up and wishes hers wasn’t so noisy. It adds to the unfortunate ambience of a morgue when the bay door screeches and scrapes like a drawbridge.

Inside, everything is new and pristine, brightly lighted and painted in shades of white and gray. Some labs she passes are empty rooms, while others are fully equipped. But countertops are uncluttered, work spaces clean, and she looks forward to the day when it feels like someone’s home. Of course, it’s after hours, but even during them, at most twenty people show up for work, and about half of those followed Lucy from her former labs in Florida. Eventually, she will have the finest private forensic facility in the country, and Scarpetta realizes why that makes her more unsettled than glad. Professionally, Lucy is as successful as anyone can be, but her life is sadly flawed, and so is Scarpetta’s. Neither of them adeptly manages to have or sustain personal relationships, and until now, Scarpetta has refused to see that they have this in common.

Despite Benton’s kindness, all his talk with her really did was remind her why she needed it. What he said is depressingly true. She’s run so fast for fifty years, she has little to show for it beyond an unusual ability to handle pain and stress that results in the very problem she faces. It’s much easier to just do her job and live out her days with long, busy hours and long, empty spaces. In fact, if she’s honest in examining herself, when Benton gave her the ring it didn’t make her feel happy or safe. It symbolizes what scares the hell out of her, and that is whatever he gives, he might take back or realize he didn’t mean it.

No wonder Marino finally snapped. Yes, he was drunk and hyped up on hormones, and probably Shandy and Dr. Self helped drive him to it. But if Scarpetta had taken a good look at him all these years, she probably could have saved him from himself and prevented a violation that was hers, too. She violated him, too, because she wasn’t a truthful or trustworthy friend. She didn’t tell him no until he finally went too far, and she should have told him no some twenty years ago.

I’m not in love with you, and I never will be, Marino. You’re not my type, Marino. It doesn’t mean I’m better than you, Marino. It just means I can’t.

She scripts what she should have said and demands an answer to why she didn’t. He might leave her. She might lose his constant presence, as annoying as it sometimes is. She might inflict on him that very thing she has done such a fine job evading: personal rejection and loss, and now she has both and so does he.

The elevator doors open on the second floor, and she follows an empty corridor to a series of labs that are individually sealed off by metal doors and airlocks. In an outer room, she puts on a white disposable gown, a hairnet and cap, shoe covers, gloves, and a face shield. She passes through another sealed area that decontaminates with ultraviolet light, and from there she enters a fully automated lab, where DNA is extracted and replicated—and where Lucy, also in white from head to toe, said to meet her for reasons unknown. She’s sitting near a fume hood, talking to a scientist who is covered up, too, and therefore unrecognizable at a glance.

“Aunt Kay?” Lucy says. “I’m sure you remember Aaron. Our interim director.”

The face behind the plastic shield smiles and suddenly is familiar, and the three of them sit.

“I know you’re a forensic specialist,” Scarpetta says. “But I didn’t know you had a new position.” She asks what happened to the previous lab director.

“Quit. Because of what Dr. Self put on the Internet,” Lucy says, anger in her eyes.

“Quit?” Scarpetta asks, baffled. “Just like that?”

“Thinks I’m going to die and scuttled off to take another job. Anyway, he was a jerk, and I’d been wanting to get rid of him. Kind of ironic. The bitch did me a favor. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about. We’ve got lab results.”

“Blood, saliva, epithelial cells,” Aaron says. “Start with Lydia Webster’s toothbrush and blood from the bathroom floor. We have a good idea about her DNA, mainly important so we can exclude her. Or identify her eventually.” As if there’s no doubt she’s dead. “Then there’s a different profile from the skin cells, the sand and glue recovered from the broken window in her laundry room. And the burglar-alarm keypad. The dirty T-shirt from the laundry basket. All three have her DNA, unsurprisingly. But also a profile from someone else.”

“What about Madelisa Dooley’s shorts?” Scarpetta asks. “The blood on them.”

Aaron says, “Same donor as the three I just mentioned.”

“The killer, we think,” Lucy says. “Or whoever broke into her house.”

“I think we should be careful saying that,” Scarpetta says. “There have been other people in her house, including her husband.”

“The DNA’s not his, and we’ll tell you why in a minute,” Lucy says.

Aaron says, “What we did was your idea—going beyond the usual profile matching in CODIS and opening up the search by using the DNAPrint technology platform you and Lucy have discussed—an analysis that uses paternity and sibship indices to arrive at a probability of relatedness.”

“First question,” Lucy says. “Why would her ex-husband leave blood on Madelisa Dooley’s shorts?”

“Okay,” Scarpetta agrees. “That’s a good point. And if the blood is the Sandman’s—and to be clear, I’m going to call him that—then he must have injured himself somehow.”

“We might know how,” Lucy says. “And we’re beginning to have an idea of who.”

Aaron picks up a file folder. He takes out a report and hands it to Scarpetta.

“The unidentified little boy and the Sandman,” Aaron says. “Knowing that each parent donates approximately half of his or her genetic material to their child, we can have an expectation that samples from a parent and a child are going to indicate their relationship. And in the case of the Sandman and the unidentified little boy, a very close family relationship is implicated.”

Scarpetta looks at the test results. “I’ll say the same thing I did when we got the fingerprint match,” she says. “Are we sure there’s no mistake? No contamination, for example?”

“We don’t make mistakes. Not like that,” Lucy says. “You get only one and you’re done.”

“The boy is the Sandman’s son?” Scarpetta wants to make sure.

“I’d like references and investigation, but I certainly suspect it,” Aaron replies. “At the very least, as I said, they’re closely related.”

“You mentioned his being injured,” Lucy says. “The Sandman’s blood on the shorts? It’s also on the broken crown you found in Lydia Webster’s bathtub.”

“Maybe she bit him,” Scarpetta says.

“A very good chance,” Lucy says.

“Let’s get back to the little boy,” Scarpetta says. “If we’re implying the Sandman killed his own son, I’m not sure what I think. The abuse went on for a while. The child was being looked after by someone when the Sandman was in Iraq, in Italy, if the information we have is correct.”

“Well, I can tell you about the kid’s mother,” Lucy says. “We do have that reference, unless the DNA on Shandy Snook’s underwear came from somebody else. Maybe makes more sense why she was so hot to tour the morgue and look at his body and find out whatever you might know about the case. Find out what Marino might know.”

“Have you told the police?” Scarpetta says. “And should I ask how you got her underwear?”

Aaron smiles. Scarpetta realizes why the question could be construed as funny.

“Marino,” Lucy says. “And it’s sure as hell not his DNA. We have his profile for exclusionary purposes just like we have yours, mine. The police will need more to go on than underwear found on Marino’s floor, but even if she didn’t beat her son to death, she has to know who did.”

“I have to wonder if Marino did,” Scarpetta says.

“You saw the recording of him in the morgue with her,” Lucy says. “Sure didn’t appear to me he had any idea. Besides, he may be a lot of things, but he would never protect someone who did something like that to a kid.”

There are other matches. All pointing to the Sandman and revealing another stunning fact: The two sources of DNA recovered from Drew Martin’s fingernail scrapings are from the Sandman and someone else who is a close relative.

“Male,” Aaron explains. “According to the Italian analysis, ninety-nine percent European. Maybe another son? Maybe the Sandman’s brother? Maybe his father?”

“Three sources of DNA from one family?” Scarpetta is amazed.

“And another crime,” Lucy says.

Aaron hands Scarpetta another report and says, “A match with a biological sample left in an unsolved crime no one has connected to Drew or to Lydia or to any other case.”

“From a rape in 2004,” Lucy says. “Apparently, the guy who broke into Lydia Webster’s house and probably also murdered Drew Martin raped a tourist in Venice three years ago. The DNA profile from that evidence is in the Italian database, which we decided to search. Of course, there’s no suspect to match, because to date they can’t enter the profiles of known individuals. In other words, we don’t have a name. Just semen.”

“By all means, protect the privacy of rapists and murderers,” Aaron says.

“News accounts are sketchy,” Lucy says. “Twenty-year-old student in Venice, a summer program to study art. Out at a bar late at night, walked back to her hotel near the Bridge of Sighs and was attacked. So far, that’s all we know about the case. But since it was worked by the Carabinieri, your friend the captain should have access to the information.”

“Possibly the Sandman’s first violent crime,” Scarpetta says. “At least as a civilian. Assuming it’s true this guy served in Iraq. Frequently, a first-time offender leaves evidence and then gets smart. This guy’s smart, and his MO has evolved considerably. He’s careful about evidence, is ritualistic and much more violent, and after he finishes, his victims aren’t alive to tell. Thankfully, it didn’t occur to him he might leave his DNA in surgical glue. Does Benton know about this?” she asks.

“Yes. And he knows we’ve got a problem with your gold coin,” Lucy says, just getting to that. “DNA on it and the chain are the Sandman’s, too, and that places him behind your house the night you and Bull found the gun in the alley. I might ask what that implies about Bull. The necklace could have been his. I’ve asked that question before. We don’t have Bull’s DNA to tell us.”

“That he’s the Sandman?” Scarpetta doesn’t believe it for a minute.

“I’m just saying we don’t have his DNA,” Lucy says.

“And the gun? The cartridges?” Scarpetta asks.

“Not the Sandman’s DNA on any of those swabs,” Lucy says. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. His DNA on a necklace is one thing. Leaving it on a gun is another, because he might have gotten the gun from someone else. He might have been careful leaving his DNA or his fingerprints on it because of the story he gave—that the asshole who threatened you is the one who dropped it, when we can’t swear that guy ever came near your house. It’s Bull’s word, because it was unwitnessed.”

“You’re suggesting that Bull—assuming he’s the Sandman, which I don’t believe—might have deliberately, quote, lost the gun. But didn’t mean to lose his necklace,” Scarpetta says. “That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for two reasons. Why did his necklace break? And secondly, if he didn’t know it broke and fell off until he found it, why would he draw my attention to it? Why not just tuck it into his pocket? I could add the third rather strange thought of him having a gold coin necklace to begin with that is reminiscent of the silver-dollar necklace Shandy gave Marino.”

“It sure would be nice to get Bull’s prints,” Aaron says. “It sure would be nice to swab him. It sure bothers me he seems to have disappeared.”

“That’s it for now,” Lucy says. “We’re working on cloning him. Going to create a copy of him in a petri dish so we know who it is,” she says drolly.

“I remember not so long ago waiting weeks, months for DNA.” Scarpetta rues those days, painfully reminded of how many people were brutalized and murdered because a violent offender couldn’t be identified quickly.

“Ceiling’s at three thousand feet, vis three miles,” Lucy says to Scarpetta. “We’re VFR. I’ll meet you at the airport.”

Inside Marino’s office, his bowling trophies are silhouetted against the old plaster wall, and there is an emptiness in the air.

Benton shuts the door and doesn’t turn on the light. He sits in the dark at Marino’s desk and for the first time realizes that no matter what he’s said, he’s never taken Marino seriously or been particularly inclusive. If he’s truthful about it, he’s always thought of him as Scarpetta’s sidekick—an ignorant, bigoted, crass cop who doesn’t belong in the modern world, and as a result of that and any number of other factors, is unpleasant to be around and not entirely helpful. Benton has endured him. He’s underestimated him in some departments and understood him perfectly fine in others, but failed to recognize the obvious. As he sits at Marino’s little-used desk and stares out the window at the lights of Charleston, he wishes he had paid more attention to him, to everything. What he’s needed to know is in his reach and has been.

The time in Venice is almost four o’clock in the morning. It’s no wonder Paulo Maroni left McLean, and now has left Rome.

“Pronto,” he answers his phone.

“Were you asleep?” Benton asks.

“If you cared, you wouldn’t be calling. What’s going on that you need to call me at this unseemly hour? Some development in the case, I hope?”

“Not a good one, necessarily.”

“Then what?” Dr. Maroni’s voice has an undercurrent of reluctance, or maybe it’s resignation that Benton hears.

“The patient you had.”

“I’ve told you about him.”

“You’ve told me what you wanted to tell me, Paulo.”

“What more could I help you with?” Dr. Maroni says. “In addition to what I’ve said, you’ve read my notes. I’ve been a friend and not asked you how that happened. I haven’t blamed Lucy, for example.”

“You might want to blame yourself. Do you think I haven’t figured out that you wanted us to access your patient’s file? You left it on the hospital network. You left file-sharing on, meaning anybody who could figure out where it was could get into it. For Lucy, yes, it would be no effort. For you, it was no mistake. You’re too smart for that.”

“And so you admit Lucy violated my confidential electronic files.”

“You knew we’d want to see your patient notes. So you arranged it before you left for Rome. Which was earlier than you planned, by the way. Conveniently, right after you learned that Dr. Self was about to be a patient at McLean. You allowed it. She couldn’t have been admitted at the Pavilion if you hadn’t allowed it.”

“She was manic.”

“She was calculating. Does she know?”

“Know what?”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“It’s interesting you would think I might,” Dr. Maroni says.

“I’ve talked to Dr. Self’s mother.”

“Is she still such an unpleasant woman?”

“I imagine she hasn’t changed,” Benton says.

“People like her rarely do. Sometimes they burn out as they get older. In her case, she’s likely worse. As Marilyn will be. As she already is.”

“I imagine she hasn’t changed much, either. Although her mother blames her daughter’s personality disorder on you,” Benton says.

“And we know that’s not what happens. She doesn’t have a Paulo-induced personality disorder. She came by it honestly.”

“This isn’t amusing.”

“Certainly, it isn’t.”

“Where is he?” Benton asks. “And you know exactly who I mean.”

“In those long-ago days, a person was still a minor at age sixteen. Do you understand?”

“And you were twenty-nine.”

“Twenty-two. Gladys would insult me by making me that much older. I’m sure you can understand why I had to leave,” Dr. Maroni says.

“Leave or flee? If you ask Dr. Self, it’s the latter when she describes your hasty exit of several weeks ago. You were inappropriate with her and fled to Italy. Where is he, Paulo? Don’t do this to yourself, and don’t do it to anyone else.”

“Would you believe it if I told you she was inappropriate with me?”

“It doesn’t matter. That’s not what I give a goddamn about. Where is he?” Benton says.

“Statutory rape is what they would have called it, you know. Her mother threatened it and, indeed, wanted to believe Marilyn wouldn’t have sex with a man she happened to meet during spring break. She was so beautiful and exciting, and offered her virginity, and I took it. I did love her. I did flee from her, this is true. I recognized she was toxic way back then. But I didn’t return to Italy as I led her to believe. I returned to Harvard to finish medical school, and she never knew I was still in America.”

“We’ve done DNA, Paulo.”

“After the baby was born, she still didn’t know. I wrote her letters, you see. And had them mailed from Rome.”

“Where is he, Paulo? Where’s your son?”

“I begged her not to get an abortion, because it’s against my religious beliefs. She said if she had the baby, I would have to raise it. And I did the best I could with what turned out to be a miscreant, a devil with a high IQ. He spent most of his life in Italy, and some of his time with her until he turned eighteen. He’s the one who is twenty-nine. Perhaps Gladys was playing her usual games…. Well. In many ways, he belongs to neither of us and hates both of us. Marilyn more than me, although when I saw him last, I feared for my safety. Perhaps my life. I thought he was going to attack me with a piece of ancient sculpture, but I managed to soothe him.”

“This was when?”

“Right after I got here. He was in Rome.”

“And he was in Rome when Drew Martin was murdered. At some point, he returned to Charleston. We know he was just in Hilton Head.”

“What can I say, Benton? You know the answer. The tub in the photograph is the very tub in my apartment at Piazza Navona, but then you didn’t know I live at Piazza Navona. If you had, you might have asked me questions about my apartment so near the construction site where Drew’s body was found. You might have wondered about the coincidence of my driving a black Lancia over here. He probably killed her in my apartment and transported her in my car, not too far. Perhaps a block. In fact, I’m sure he must have. So maybe I would have been better off if he had struck me in the head with that ancient sculpted foot. What he’s done is unthinkably reprehensible. But then, he’s Marilyn’s son.”

“He’s your son.”

“He’s an American citizen who didn’t want to go to a university and continued his foolishness by joining the American Air Force to be a photographer in your fascist war, where he was wounded. His foot. I believe he did it to himself after he put his friend out of his misery by shooting him in the head. But regardless, if he were unbalanced before he went, he was cognitively and psychologically unrecognizable when he came back. I admit I wasn’t the father I should have been. I sent him supplies. Tools, batteries, medical necessities. But I didn’t go to see him after it was over. I didn’t care. I admit it.”

“Where is he?”

“After he joined the Air Force, I washed my hands of him. I admit it. He amounted to nothing. After all that—after my sacrificing so much to keep him on this earth when Marilyn would have had it otherwise—he amounted to nothing. Imagine the irony. I spared his life because the church says abortion is murder, and look what he does. He kills people. He killed them over there because it was his job, and now he kills them because it’s madness.”

“And his child?”

“Marilyn and her patterns. Once she has a pattern, try to break it—told the mother to keep him just as I told Marilyn to keep our son. It probably was a mistake. Our son isn’t fit to be a father, even if he loves his son very much.”

“His little boy is dead,” Benton says. “Starved and beaten to death and left in a marsh to be eaten by maggots, crabs.”

“I’m sorry to hear it. I never met the child.”

“Such compassion you have, Paulo. Where’s your son?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must realize how serious this is. Do you want to go to prison?”

“The last time he was here, I walked him out, and on the street, where it was safe for me to say it, I told him I never wanted to see him again. There were tourists at the construction site where Drew’s body was found. There were piles of flowers and stuffed animals. I saw all this as I told him to go away and never come back, and if he didn’t honor my wishes, I would go to the police. Then I had my apartment very thoroughly cleaned. And I got rid of my car. And I called Otto to offer my assistance in the case, because it was important for me to know what the police knew.”

“I don’t believe you don’t know where he is,” Benton says. “I don’t believe you don’t know where he stays or lives or—more likely right now—hides. I don’t want to go to your wife. I’m assuming she hasn’t a clue.”

“Please leave my wife out of this. She knows nothing.”

“Maybe you know this,” Benton says. “Your dead grandson’s mother. Is she still with your son?”

“It is like what I had with Marilyn. We sometimes pay a lifelong price for enjoying sex with someone. These women? They get pregnant on purpose, you know. To keep you on a tether. It’s a strange thing. They do it and then don’t want the child because what they really wanted was you.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I’ve never met her. Marilyn tells me her name is Shandy or Sandy and she’s a whore. And stupid.”

“Is your son still with her? That’s what I asked.”

“They had the child in common. But that’s it. The same story again. The sins of the father. Events repeating themselves. Now I truly say, I wish my son had never been born.”

“Marilyn knows Shandy, obviously,” Benton says. “That brings me to Marino.”

“I wouldn’t know him or what he has to do with this.”

Benton tells him. He informs Dr. Maroni of everything except what Marino did to Scarpetta.

“So you’d like me to analyze it for you,” Dr. Maroni says. “Based on my knowing Marilyn, based on what you’ve just said. I would venture a guess that Marino made a very big mistake by sending an e-mail to Marilyn. It woke her up to possibilities, you see, that had nothing to do with why she was at McLean. Now she can get back at the one person she truly hates. Kay, of course. What better way than to torment the people she loves.”

“She’s the reason Marino met Shandy?”

“My guess. But not the entire reason for why Shandy got so interested in him. There is the boy. Marilyn doesn’t know. Or she didn’t. She would have told me. For someone to do such a thing would not appeal to Marilyn.”

“She has about as much compassion as you do,” Benton says. “She’s here, by the way.”

“You mean New York.”

“I mean Charleston. I got an anonymous e-mail with information I won’t discuss, and I traced the IP to the Charleston Place Hotel, recognized the Machine Access Code. Guess who’s staying there.”

“I warn you to be careful what you say to her. She doesn’t know about Will.”

“Will?”

“Will Rambo. When Marilyn started becoming famous, he changed his name from Willard Self to Will Rambo. He picked Rambo, a nice enough Swedish name. He’s anything but a Rambo, and that’s at least some of his problem. Will is quite small. He’s a good-looking boy but small.”

“When she got e-mails from the Sandman, she had no idea it was her son?” Benton says, and it is jarring to hear the Sandman referred to as a boy.

“She didn’t. Not consciously. As far as I know, she still doesn’t. Not consciously, but what can I say about what she knows in the deep caves of her mind? When she was admitted at McLean and told me about the e-mail, the image of Drew Martin…”

“She told you?”

“Of course.”

Benton would like to leap through the phone and grab him around the throat. He should go to prison. He should go to hell.

“As I look back, it’s tragically clear. Of course, I had a suspicion all along but never mentioned it to her. I mean, from the beginning when she called me with the referral, and Will knew she would do exactly that. He set her up for it. Of course, he had her e-mail address. Marilyn is very generous about an occasional e-mail to people she doesn’t have time to see. He started sending these rather bizarre e-mails that he knew would captivate her, because he’s just sick enough to understand her perfectly well. I’m sure he was amused when she referred him to me, and then when he called my office in Rome to make an appointment, that, of course, resulted in our having dinner, not a clinical interview. I was concerned about his mental health, but it never occurred to me he might kill someone. When I heard about the murdered tourist in Bari, I was in denial.”

“He raped a woman in Venice, too. Another tourist.”

“I’m not surprised. Let me guess. After the war began. Each time he was deployed, he got worse.”

“Then the case notes weren’t really from appointments you had with him. Obviously, he’s your son and was never a patient.”

“I fabricated the notes. I expected you to guess it.”

“Why?”

“So you would do this. Find him yourself, because I could never turn him in. I needed you to ask the questions so I could answer them, and now I have.”

“If we don’t find him quickly, Paulo, he’ll kill again. There must be something else you know. You must have a picture of him?”

“Not a recent one.”

“E-mail what you’ve got.”

“The Air Force should have what you need. Perhaps his fingerprints and his DNA. Certainly a photograph. It’s better you get such things from them.”

“And by the time I go through all those hoops,” Benton says, “it will be too goddamn late.”

“I won’t be back, by the way,” Dr. Maroni says. “I’m certain you won’t try to bring me back but will leave me alone because I have shown you respect, so you will show me some. It would be futile, anyway, Benton,” he says. “I have many friends over here.”

Chapter 22

Lucy goes through her pre-start checklist.

Landing lights, Nr switch, OEI limit, fuel valves. She checks the flight instrument indications, sets the altimeter, turns on the battery. She starts the first engine as Scarpetta emerges from the FBO and walks across the tarmac. She slides open the helicopter’s back door and sets her crime scene case and camera equipment on the floor, then opens the left front door. She steps up on the skid and climbs in.

Engine one locked into ground idle position, and Lucy fires up engine number two. The whining turbines and thud-thudding get louder, and Scarpetta buckles herself into the four-point harness. A linesman trots across the ramp, waving his marshaling wands, and Scarpetta puts her headset on.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Lucy says into her mike. “Hey!” As if the linesman can hear her. “We don’t need your help. He’s gonna be standing there for a while.” Lucy opens her door, tries to motion for him to go away. “We’re not a plane.” She says more things he can’t hear. “Don’t need your help to take off. Go on now.”

“You’re awfully tense.” Scarpetta’s voice sounds inside Lucy’s headset. “Any word from other people searching?”

“Nothing. No helicopter up in the Hilton Head area yet, still too foggy there. No luck with the search on the ground. FLIR on standby.” Lucy turns on the overhead power switch. “Need about eight minutes for it to cool. Then we’re on the go. Hey!” As if the linesman has on a headset, too, and can hear her. “Go away. We’re busy. Damn, he must be new.”

The linesman stands there, orange wands down by his side, not marshaling anyone anywhere. The tower tells Lucy, “You got the heavy C-seventeen on downwind….”

The military cargo jet is a cluster of big, bright lights and barely seems to move, hangs hugely in the air, and Lucy radios back that she’s got it. The “heavy C-seventeen” and its “heavy wingtip vortices” aren’t a factor because she wants to head toward downtown, toward the Cooper River bridge. Referring to the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge. Toward whatever she wants. Doing figure-eights if she wants. Barely above the water or the ground if she wants. Because she isn’t a plane. That’s not how she explains it in radio talk, but it’s what she means.

“I called Turkington,” she then says to Scarpetta. “Filled him in. Benton called me, so I guess you talked to him and he’s filled you in. He should be here any minute, or he’d better be. I’m not sitting here forever. We know who the asshole is.”

“We just don’t know where he is,” Scarpetta says. “I’m supposing we still have no idea where Marino is.”

“If you want my opinion, we should be looking for the Sandman, not a dead body.”

“Within the hour, everybody will be looking for him. Benton’s notified the police, local and military. Somebody’s got to look for her. That’s my job, and I intend to do it. Did you bring the cargo net? And have we heard any word from Marino? Anything at all?”

“I’ve got the cargo net.”

“The usual gear’s in baggage?”

Benton is walking toward the linesman. He hands him a tip and Lucy laughs.

“I suppose every time I ask about Marino, you’re going to ignore me,” Scarpetta says, as Benton gets closer.

“Maybe you should be truthful with the person you’re supposed to marry.” Lucy watches Benton.

“What makes you think I haven’t been?”

“I wouldn’t know what you’ve done.”

“Benton and I have talked,” Scarpetta says, looking at her. “And you’re right, I should be truthful, and I have been.”

Benton slides open the back door and gets in.

“Good. Because the more you trust someone, the more criminal it is to lie. Including by omission,” Lucy says.

The clunking and scraping sounds of Benton putting his headset on.

“I have to get over this,” Lucy says.

“I should be the one who needs to get over it,” Scarpetta says. “And we can’t talk about this now.”

“What is it we can’t talk about?” Benton’s voice in Lucy’s headset.

“Aunt Kay’s clairvoyance,” Lucy says. “She’s convinced she knows where the body is. Just in case, I’ve got the gear and chemicals for decon. And body bags in case we need to slingload. Sorry to be insensitive, but no way a decomp’s riding in the back.”

“Not clairvoyance. Just gunshot residue,” Scarpetta says. “And he wants her found.”

“Then he should have made it easier,” Lucy says, rolling up the throttles.

“What about the gunshot residue?” Benton asks.

“I have an idea. If you ask what sand around here might have traces of GSR.”

“Jesus,” Lucy says. “The guy’s going to blow away. Look at him. Just standing there with his cones like a zombie referee for the NFL. I’m glad you tipped him, Benton. Poor guy. He’s trying.”

“Yes, a tip. Only not a hundred-dollar bill,” Scarpetta says, as Lucy waits to get on the radio.

Air traffic is almost impossible, because flights have been delayed all day, and now the tower can’t keep up.

“When I went off to UVA, what did you do?” Lucy says to Scarpetta. “Sent me a hundred bucks now and then. For no reason. That’s what you always wrote at the bottom of the check.”

“It wasn’t much to do.” Scarpetta’s voice goes straight into Lucy’s head.

“Books. Food. Clothes. Computer stuff.”

Voice-activated mikes, and people talk truncated talk.

“Well,” Scarpetta’s voice says. “It was nice of you. That’s a lot of money for someone like Ed.”

“Maybe I was bribing him.” Lucy leans closer to Scarpetta to check the FLIR’s video display. “Ready and waiting,” she says. “We’re out of here as soon as you’ll let us,” as if the tower can hear her. “We’re a damn helicopter, for Christ’s sake. Don’t need the damn runway. And we don’t need to be vectored. Makes me crazy.”

“Maybe you’re too cranky to fly.” Benton’s voice.

Lucy contacts the tower again, and at last is cleared to take off to the southeast.

“Going while the going’s good,” she says, and the helicopter gets light on its skids. The linesman is marshaling as if he’s going to park them. “Maybe he should get a job as a traffic cone,” Lucy says, lifting her three-and-a-quarter-ton bird into a hover. “We’ll follow the Ashley River a little ways, then turn east, track along the shoreline toward Folly Beach.” She hovers at the intersection of two taxiways. “Un-stowing the FLIR.”

She switches from standby to on, and the display turns dark gray, splotched with bright white hot spots. The C-17 does a thunderous touch-and-go, long plumes of white fire blasting from its engines. Lighted window of the FBO. The lights on the runways. All of it surreal in infrared.

“Low and slow, and we’ll scan everything along the way. Work in a grid?” Lucy says.

Scarpetta lifts the System Control Unit out of its holder, slaves the FLIR with the searchlight, which she keeps turned off. Gray images and ones hot-white displayed on the video monitor near her left knee. They fly past the port, its different-colored containers stacked like building blocks. Cranes are perched like monster praying mantises against the night, and the helicopter moves slowly over the lights of the city, as if it’s floating over them. Ahead, the harbor is black. No stars are out, the moon a charcoal smudge behind thick clouds that are flat on top like anvils.

“Where exactly are we headed?” Benton says.

Scarpetta works the FLIR’s trim button, moving images in and out of the screen. Lucy slows to eighty knots and holds the altitude down at five hundred feet.

Scarpetta says, “Imagine what you’d find if you did a microscopic analysis of sand from Iwo Jima. As long as the sand’s been protected all these years.”

“Away from the surf,” Lucy says. “In dunes, for example.”

“Iwo Jima?” Benton’s voice says, ironically. “We flying to Japan?”

Off Scarpetta’s door are the mansions of the Battery, their lights bright white smudges in infrared. She thinks about Henry Hollings. She thinks about Rose. The lights of habitation become spaced farther apart as they near the shore of James Island and slowly fly past it.

Scarpetta says, “A beach environment that’s remained untouched since the Civil War. In a place like that, if the sand’s protected, you’re likely to find gunshot residue. I believe this is it.” To Lucy, “Almost below us.”

She slows to a near hover and descends to three hundred feet at the northernmost tip of Morris Island. It is uninhabited and accessible only by helicopter or boat unless the tide is so low one can wade from Folly Beach. She looks down at eight hundred acres of desolate conservation land that during the Civil War was the scene of heavy fighting.

“Probably not much different than it was a hundred and forty years ago,” Scarpetta says, as Lucy descends another hundred feet.

“Where the African-American regiment, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, was slaughtered,” Benton’s voice says. “That movie they made about it, what was it called?”

“You look out your side,” Lucy says to him. “Tell us if you see anything, and we’ll swoop around with the searchlight.”

“It was called Glory,” Scarpetta says. “Not the searchlight quite yet,” she adds. “It will interfere with infrared.”

The video screen displays mottled gray terrain and a rippled area that is the water, and the water glints like molten lead, flowing to the shore, breaking on the sand in scalloped white ruffles.

“I’m not seeing anything down here but the dark shapes of dunes and that damn lighthouse following us everywhere,” Scarpetta says.

“Be nice if they’d restore the beacon so people like us don’t crash into it,” Lucy says.

“Now I feel better.” Benton’s voice.

“I’m going to start working a grid. Sixty knots, two hundred feet, every inch of what’s down there,” Lucy says.

They don’t have to work the grid very long.

“Can you hover over there?” Scarpetta points to what Lucy just saw, too. “Whatever we just went past. That beach area. No, no, back that way. Distinct thermal variation.”

Lucy noses the helicopter around, and the lighthouse beyond her door is stubby and striped in infrared, and surrounded by the heaving, leaden water in the outer reaches of the harbor. Beyond, a cruise ship looks like a ghost ship with white-fire windows and a long plume from its stack.

“There. Twenty degrees to the left of that dune,” Scarpetta says. “I think I see something.”

“I see it,” Lucy says.

The image is white-hot on the screen in the midst of murky, mottled grayness. Lucy looks down, trying to position herself just right. She circles, going lower.

Scarpetta zooms in, and the shimmering white shape becomes a body, unearthly bright—as bright as a star—at the edge of a tidal creek that glints like glass.

Lucy stows the FLIR and flips a switch to turn on a searchlight as bright as ten million candles. Sea oats flatten to the ground and sand swirls as they land.

A black necktie fluttering in the wind of slowing blades.

Scarpetta looks out her window, and some distance away, in the sand, a face flashes in the strobes, white teeth grimacing in a bloated mass that isn’t recognizable as a woman or a man. Were it not for the suit and tie, she wouldn’t have a clue.

“What the hell?” Benton’s voice in her headset.

“It’s not her,” Lucy says, flipping off switches. “Don’t know about you, but I got my gun. This isn’t right.”

She turns off the battery, and doors open and they get out, the sand soft beneath their feet. The stench is overwhelming until they get upwind of it. Flashlights probe, pistols are ready. The helicopter is a hulking dragonfly on the dark beach, and the only sound is the surf. Scarpetta moves her light along and stops at wide drag marks that lead to a dune and stop short of it.

“Someone had a boat,” Lucy says, and she is moving toward the dunes. “A flat-bottom boat.”

The dunes are fringed with sea oats and other vegetation, and roll on for as far as they can see, untouched by the tides. Scarpetta thinks of the battles fought here and imagines lives lost for a cause that couldn’t have been more different from the South’s. The evils of slavery. Black Yankee soldiers wiped out. She imagines she hears their moans and whispers in the tall grass, and she tells Lucy and Benton not to stray too far. She watches their lights cut through the dark terrain like long, bright blades.

“Over here,” Lucy says from the darkness between two dunes. “Mother of God,” she says. “Aunt Kay, can you grab face masks!”

Scarpetta opens the baggage compartment and lifts out a large crime scene case. She sets it on the sand and rummages for face masks, and it must be bad for Lucy to ask.

“We can’t get both of them out of here.” Benton’s voice in the wind.

“What the fuck are we dealing with?” Lucy’s voice. “Did you hear that?”

Something flapping. Far off in the dunes.

Scarpetta moves toward their lights, and the stench gets worse. It seems to make the air thick, and her eyes burn and she hands out masks and puts one on because it’s hard to breathe. She joins Lucy and Benton in a hollow between dunes, at an elevation that makes it impossible to see it from the beach. The woman is nude and badly swollen from days of exposure. She’s infested by maggots, her face eaten away, her lips and eyes gone, her teeth exposed. In the beam of Scarpetta’s light is an implanted titanium post from where a crown used to be. Her scalp is slipping from her skull, her long hair splayed in the sand.

Lucy wades through sea oats and grass, moving toward the flapping sound that Scarpetta hears, too, and she’s not sure what to do, and she thinks of gunshot residue and the sand and this place and wonders what it means to him. He has created his own battlefield. How much more littered with the dead would it have become, had she not found this spot, because of barium, antimony, and lead that he probably knew nothing of, and she feels him. His sick spirit seems to hang in the air.

“A tent,” Lucy calls out, and they go to her.

She’s behind another dune, and the dunes are dark waves rolling away from them and tangled with undergrowth and grass, and he has made a tented home, or someone has. Aluminum poles and a tarp, and through a slit in a flap that snaps in the wind is a hovel. A mattress is neatly made with a blanket, and there’s a lantern. Lucy opens an ice chest with her foot. Inside is several inches of water, and she dips her finger in and announces the water is tepid.

“I’ve got one spine board in the back of the helicopter,” she says. “How do you want to do this, Aunt Kay?”

“We need to photograph everything. Take measurements. Get the police out here right away.” There is so much to do. “Any way we can sling two at a time?”

“Not with one spine board.”

“I want to look through everything in here,” Benton says.

“Then we’ll get them in body bags, and you’ll have to take one at a time,” Scarpetta says. “Where do you want to set them down, Lucy? Someplace discreet, can’t be the FBO where your industrious lineman is probably out there marshaling in mosquitoes. I’ll call Hollings and see who can meet you.”

Then they are silent, listening to the flapping of the makeshift tent, listening to the swishing of grass, to the soft, wet crashing of waves. The lighthouse looks like a huge, dark pawn in a game of chess, surrounded by the spreading plain of the riffled black sea. He’s out there somewhere, and it seems surreal. A soldier of misfortune, but Scarpetta feels no pity.

“Let’s do this,” she says, and she tries her phone.

Of course, she gets no signal.

“You’ll have to try him from the air,” she says to Lucy. “Maybe try Rose.”

“Rose?”

“Just try her.”

“What for?”

“I suspect she’ll know where to find him.”

They get the spine board and body bags, and plasticized sheets, and what biohazard gear they have. They start with her. She is limp because rigor mortis came and went, as if it gave up stubbornly protesting her death, and insects and tiny creatures like crabs took over. They have eaten away what was soft and wounded. Her face is swollen, her body bloated from bacterial gas, her skin marbled greenish-black in the branched pattern of her blood vessels. Her left buttock and the back of her thigh have been raggedly cut away, but there are no other obvious injuries or signs of mutilation, and no indication of what killed her. They lift her and place her in the middle of the sheet, and then into a pouch that Scarpetta zips closed.

They turn their attention to the man on the beach who has a translucent plastic retainer on his gritted teeth, and around his right wrist, a rubber band. His suit and tie are black, and his white shirt is stained dark from purge fluid and blood. Multiple narrow slits in his jacket front and back suggest he was repeatedly stabbed. Maggots infest his wounds and are a moving mass under his clothes, and in a pants pocket is a wallet that belonged to Lucious Meddick. It doesn’t appear the killer was interested in credit cards or cash.

More photographs and notes, and Scarpetta and Benton strap the woman’s pouched body—Lydia Webster’s pouched body—onto a spine board while Lucy retrieves a fifty-foot line and a net from the back of the helicopter. She hands Scarpetta her gun.

“You need this more than I do,” she says.

She climbs in and starts the engines, and blades thud, beating back air. Lights flash, and the helicopter gently lifts and noses around. Very slowly, it rises until the line gets taut and the net with its morbid burden is suspended off the sand. She flies away, and the load gently swings like a pendulum. Scarpetta and Benton head back to the tent. Were it daylight, the flies would be a droning storm and the air would be dense and loud with decay.

“He sleeps here,” Benton says. “Not necessarily all the time.”

He nudges the pillow with his foot. Beneath it is the border of the blanket, and beneath that, the mattress. A freezer bag keeps a box of matches dry, but paperback books don’t seem to mean much to him. They are soggy, the pages stuck together—the sort of obscure family sagas and romance novels one might buy in a drugstore when one wants something to read and doesn’t care what it is. Beneath this small makeshift tent is a pit where he built fires, using charcoal and the rusting grate from a grill set on top of rocks. There are root-beer cans. Scarpetta and Benton don’t touch anything, and they return to the beach where the helicopter landed, the marks from its skids deep in the sand. More stars are out, and the stench taints the air but no longer crowds it.

“At first you thought it was him. I saw it on your face,” Benton says.

“I hope he’s all right and didn’t do anything foolish,” she says. “One more thing that will be Dr. Self’s fault. Ruining what all of us had. Driving us apart. You haven’t told me how you found out.” Getting angry. Old anger and new.

“That’s her favorite thing to do. Drive people apart.”

They wait near the water, upwind from Lucious Meddick’s black cocoon, and the stench is carried away from them. Scarpetta smells the sea and hears it breathe and softly break on the shore. The horizon is black, and the lighthouse warns of nothing anymore.

A little later, in the distance, winking lights, and Lucy flies in and they turn away from blasting sand as she lands. With Lucious Meddick’s body securely in the cargo net, they lift off and carry him to Charleston. Police lights throb on the ramp, and Henry Hollings and Captain Poma stand near a windowless van.

Scarpetta walks in front of them. Anger moves her feet. She scarcely listens to a four-way conversation. Lucious Meddick’s hearse being found parked behind Hollings’s Funeral Home, keys in the ignition. How did it get there unless the killer left it—or maybe Shandy did. Bonnie and Clyde—that’s what Captain Poma calls them, then he brings up Bull. Where is he, what else might he know? Bull’s mother says he’s not home, been saying that for days. No sign of Marino, and now the police are looking for him, and Hollings says the bodies will go straight to the morgue. Not Scarpetta’s morgue. The MUSC morgue, where two forensic pathologists are waiting after working most of the night on Gianni Lupano.

“We could use you, if you’re willing,” Hollings says to Scarpetta. “You found them, so you should work it through. Only if you don’t mind.”

“The police need to get to Morris Island now and secure the scene,” she says.

“Zodiac boats are on the way. I’d better give you directions to the morgue.”

“I’ve been there before. You said the head of security is your friend,” she says. “At the Charleston Place Hotel. What’s the name?”

As they walk.

Hollings then says, “Suicide. Blunt-force trauma from a jump or a fall. Nothing to indicate foul play. Unless you can charge someone with driving a person to it. In that event, Dr. Self should be indicted. My friend at the hotel, her name’s Ruth.”

Lights are bright inside the FBO, and Scarpetta steps into the ladies’ room to wash her hands and her face and the inside of her nose. She sprays a lot of air freshener and moves into its mist, and she brushes her teeth. When she walks back out, Benton is standing there, waiting.

“You should go home,” he says.

“As if I can sleep.”

He follows her as the windowless van drives away, and Hollings is talking to Captain Poma and Lucy.

“I’ve got something I need to do,” Scarpetta says.

Benton lets her go. She walks to her SUV alone.

Ruth’s office is near the kitchen, where the hotel has had numerous problems with theft.

Shrimp, in particular. Cunning petty criminals disguised as chefs. She tells one amusing story after another, and Scarpetta listens attentively because she wants something, and the only way to get it is to play audience to the head of security’s performance. Ruth is an elegant older woman who is a captain in the National Guard but looks more like a demure librarian. In fact, she looks a little bit like Rose.

“But then, you didn’t come see me to hear all this,” Ruth says from behind a desk that is likely hotel surplus. “You want to know about Drew Martin, and probably Mr. Hollings told you the last time she stayed here, she was never in her room.”

“He did tell me that,” Scarpetta says, looking for a gun under Ruth’s paisley jacket. “Was her coach ever here?”

“He ate in the Grill now and then. Always ordered the same thing, caviar and Dom Pérignon. Never heard of her being in there, but I don’t imagine a professional tennis player would be eating rich food or drinking champagne the night before a big match. Like I said, she obviously had another life somewhere and was never here.”

“You have another famous guest staying here,” Scarpetta says.

“We have famous guests all the time.”

“I could go door to door and knock.”

“You can’t get on the secure floor without a key. There’s forty suites here. That’s a lot of doors.”

“My first question is whether she’s still here, and I assume the reservation isn’t in her name. Otherwise, I’d just call her,” Scarpetta says.

“We have twenty-four-hour-a-day room service. I’m so close to the kitchen, I can hear the carts rattle by,” Ruth says.

“She’s already up, then. Good. I wouldn’t want to wake her.” Rage. It starts behind Scarpetta’s eyes and begins working its way down.

“Coffee every morning at five. She doesn’t tip much. We’re not crazy about her,” Ruth says.

Dr. Self is in a corner suite on the hotel’s eighth floor, and Scarpetta inserts a magnetic card into the elevator and minutes later is at her door. She senses her looking through the peephole.

Dr. Self opens the door as she says, “I see someone was indiscreet. Hello, Kay.”

She wears a flashy red silk robe, loosely tied around her waist, and black silk slippers.

“What a pleasant surprise. I wonder who told you. Please.” She moves to one side to let Scarpetta in. “As fate would have it, they brought two cups and an extra pot of coffee. Let me guess how you found me here at all, and I don’t just mean this wonderful room.” Dr. Self sits on the couch and tucks her legs under her. “Shandy. It would appear my giving her what she wanted resulted in a loss of leverage. That would be her petty point of view, at any rate.”

“I haven’t met Shandy,” Scarpetta says from a wing chair near a window that offers a view of the lighted old city.

“Not in person, you mean,” Dr. Self says. “But I believe you’ve seen her. Her exclusive tour of your morgue. I think back to those unhappy days in court, Kay, and I wonder how different all of it would have been if the world had known what you’re really like. That you give tours of the morgue and turn dead bodies into spectacles. Especially the little boy you skinned and filleted. Why did you cut out his eyes? How many injuries did you need to document before you decided what killed him? His eyes? Really, Kay.”

“Who told you about the tour?”

“Shandy bragged about it. Imagine what a jury would say. Imagine what the jury in Florida would have said had they known what you’re like.”

“Their verdict didn’t hurt you,” Scarpetta says. “Nothing’s hurt you the way you manage to hurt everybody else. Did you hear that your friend Karen killed herself barely twenty-four hours after she left McLean?”

Dr. Self’s face brightens. “Then her sad story will have a fitting finale.” She meets Scarpetta’s eyes. “Don’t think I’m going to pretend. What would upset me is if you told me Karen was back in rehab drying out again. The mass of men living lives of quiet desperation. Thoreau. Benton’s part of the world. Yet you live down here. How will you manage when you’re married?” Her eyes find the ring on Scarpetta’s left hand. “Or will you go through with it? The two of you aren’t much into commitments. Well, Benton is. A different sort of commitment he deals with up there. His little experiment was a treat, and I can’t wait to talk about it.”

“The lawsuit in Florida didn’t take anything from you except money that probably was covered by your malpractice insurance. Those premiums must be high. They should be extremely high. I’m surprised any insurance company would carry you,” Scarpetta says.

“I’ve got to pack. Back to New York, back on the air. Did I tell you? A brand-new show all about the criminal mind. Don’t worry. I don’t want you on it.”

“Shandy probably killed her son,” Scarpetta says. “I wonder what you’re going to do about that.”

“I avoided her for as long as I could,” Dr. Self says. “A situation very similar to yours, Kay. I knew of her. Why do people entangle themselves in the tentacles of someone poisonous? I hear myself talk, and every comment suggests a show. It’s exhausting and exhilarating when you realize you’ll never run out of shows. Marino should have known better. He’s so simple. Have you heard from him?”

“You were the beginning and the end,” Scarpetta says. “Why couldn’t you leave him alone?”

“He contacted me first.”

“His e-mails were those of a desperately unhappy and frightened man. You were his psychiatrist.”

“Years ago. I can scarcely remember it.”

“You of all people know how he is, and you used him. You took advantage of him because you wanted to hurt me. I don’t care if you hurt me, but you shouldn’t have hurt him. Then you tried again, didn’t you? To hurt Benton. Why? To pay me back for Florida? I would think you’d have better things to do.”

“I’m at an impasse, Kay. You see, Shandy should get what she deserves, and by now Paulo has had a long talk with Benton, am I wrong? Paulo called me, of course. I’ve managed to make sense of some of the pieces.”

“To tell you the Sandman is your son,” Scarpetta says. “Paulo called to tell you that.”

“One piece is Shandy. The other piece is Will. Yet another piece is Little Will, as I’ve always called him. My Will came home from a war and walked right into another war far more brutal. Do you think that didn’t push him beyond the beyond? Not that he was normal. I’d be the first to say that not even my tools would do any good under his hood. This was about a year, year and a half ago, Kay. He walked in and found his son half starved to death and bruised and battered.”

“Shandy,” Scarpetta says.

“Will didn’t do that. No matter what he’s done now, he didn’t do that. My son would never harm a child. Shandy probably thought it was very sporting of her to brutalize that boy just because she could. He was a nuisance. She’ll tell you that. A colicky baby and a crabby little boy.”

“And she managed to hide him from the world?”

“Will was in the Air Force. She kept their son in Charlotte until her father died. Then I encouraged her to move here, and that’s when she started abusing him. Severely.”

“And she disposed of his body in a marsh? At night?”

“Her? Not hardly. I can’t imagine it. She doesn’t even own a boat.”

“How do you know a boat was used? I don’t recall that’s been established as a fact.”

“She wouldn’t know the creeks and tides, would never go out on the water at night. Little secret—she can’t swim. Obviously, she would have needed help.”

“Does your son have a boat and know the creeks and tides?”

“He used to have one, and loved to take his little boy on ‘adventures.’ Picnics. Campouts on deserted islands. Discovering never-never lands, just the two of them. So imaginative and wistful—very much a child himself, really. It seems last time he was deployed, Shandy sold a lot of his things. Quite considerate, that one. I’m not sure he even owns a car anymore. But he’s resourceful. Light and quick on his feet. And covert, no doubt. Probably learned that over there.” She means Iraq.

Scarpetta is thinking about Marino’s flat-bottom bass boat with its powerful outboard engine, bow-mount trolling motor, and oars. His boat that he hasn’t used for months and doesn’t even seem to think about anymore. Especially of late. Especially since Shandy. She would have known about the boat, even if they’d never gone out in it. She could have told Will. Maybe he borrowed it. Marino’s boat should be searched. Scarpetta wonders how she will explain all this to the police.

“Who was going to take care of Shandy’s little inconvenience? The body. What was my son supposed to do?” Dr. Self says. “That’s what happens, isn’t it? One person’s sin becomes your own. Will loved his son. But when Daddy goes marching off to war, Mommy has to be both parents. And in this instance, Mommy is a monster. I’ve always despised her.”

“You’ve supported her,” Scarpetta says. “Handsomely, I might add.”

“Let’s see. And you know that? Let me guess. Lucy’s invaded her privacy, probably knows what she has—or had—in the bank. I wouldn’t have ever known my grandson was dead if Shandy hadn’t called. I suppose the day the body was found. She wanted money. More of it. And my advice.”

“Is she and what she told you why you’re here?”

“Shandy has managed to do a rather brilliant job of blackmailing me all these years. People don’t know I have a son. They certainly don’t know I have a grandson. If these facts were known, I would be viewed as neglectful. A terrible mother. A terrible grandmother. All those things my own dear mother says about me. By the time I became famous, it was too late to go back and undo my very deliberate distancing. I had no choice but to continue it. Mommie Dearest—and I mean Shandy—kept my secret in exchange for cashier’s checks.”

“Now you intend to keep her secret safe in exchange for what?” Scarpetta says. “She abused her son to death and you want her to get away with it, in exchange for what?”

“I suppose a jury would love to see the tape of her in your morgue, in your refrigerator, looking at her dead son. The murderer inside your morgue. Imagine what a story that would make. I would say, conservatively say, that you would have no career left, Kay. With that in mind, you should thank me. My privacy ensures your own.”

“Then you don’t know me.”

“I forgot to offer you coffee. Service for two.” Smiling.

“I won’t forget what you’ve done,” Scarpetta says, getting up. “What you’ve done to Lucy, to Benton, to me. I’m not sure what you’ve done to Marino.”

“I’m not sure what he did to you. But I know enough. How is Benton handling it?” She refills her coffee. “Such a peculiar thing to consider.” She leans back into the pillows. “You know, when Marino was seeing me in Florida, his lust couldn’t have been more palpable unless he’d grabbed me and torn off my clothes. It’s oedipal and pitiful. He wants to fuck his mother—the most powerful person in his life, and forever and a day he will chase the end of his oedipal rainbow. There was no pot of gold when he had sex with you. At last, at last. Hooray for him. It’s a wonder he hasn’t killed himself.”

Scarpetta stands at the door, staring at her.

“What kind of lover is he?” Dr. Self asks. “Benton, I can see. But Marino? I haven’t heard from him in days. Have the two of you worked it out? And what does Benton say?”

“If Marino didn’t tell you, who did?” Scarpetta quietly asks.

“Marino? Oh, no. Certainly not. He didn’t tell me about your little foray. He was followed to your house from, oh, dear, what’s the name of that bar? Another one of Shandy’s thugs, this one commissioned to give you serious thoughts about relocating.”

“You did that, then. I thought so.”

“To help you.”

“Do you have so little in your life that you have to overpower people this way?”

“Charleston isn’t a good place for you, Kay.”

Scarpetta shuts the door behind her. She leaves the hotel. She walks over pavers, past a plashing fountain of horses, and into the hotel’s garage. The sun isn’t up yet, and she should call the police, but all she can think about is the misery one person can cause. The first shadow of panic touches her in a deserted level of concrete and cars, and she thinks about one remark Dr. Self made.

It’s a wonder he hasn’t killed himself.

Was she making a prediction or voicing an expectation or hinting at yet another horrible secret she knows? Now Scarpetta can think of nothing else, and she can’t call Lucy or Benton. Truth be told, they have no sympathy for him, may even hope he ate his gun or drove off a bridge, and she imagines Marino dead inside his truck at the bottom of the Cooper River.

She decides to call Rose, and gets out her cell phone, but there’s no signal, and she walks to her SUV, vaguely aware of the white Cadillac parked next to it. She notices an oval sticker on the rear bumper, recognizes the HH for Hilton Head, and she feels what is happening before she is aware of it, and turns around as Captain Poma rushes out from behind a concrete support. She feels the air move behind her, or she hears it, and he lunges, and she wheels around as something clamps her arm. For a suspended second, a face is level with hers, a young man with a buzz cut and a red, swollen ear, staring wildly. He slams against her car, and a knife clatters at her feet, and the captain is punching him and yelling.

Chapter 23

Bull holds his cap in his hands.

He is stooped over a little in the front seat, mindful that his head touches the roof if he sits up straight, which is what he’s prone to do. Bull carries himself with pride, even when he’s just been bailed out of the city jail for a crime he didn’t commit.

“I sure thank you for the ride, Dr. Kay,” he says as she parks in front of her house. “I’m sorry for your trouble.”

“Don’t keep saying that, Bull. I’m really angry right now.”

“I know you are, and I sure am sorry, because it’s nothing you did.” He opens his door and is slow working his way out of the front seat. “I tried to get the dirt off my boots, but it looks like I messed up your mat a little, so I think I best clean it or at least shake it out.”

“Don’t apologize anymore, Bull. You’ve been doing it since we left the jail, and I’m so mad I could spit, and next time something like this happens, if you don’t call me right away, I’m going to be mad at you, too.”

“Wouldn’t want that.” He shakes out his mat, and she’s getting the idea that he’s about as stubborn as she is.

It’s been a long day full of painful images, and near misses, and bad smells, and then Rose called. Scarpetta was up to her elbows in Lydia Webster’s decomposed body when Hollings appeared at the autopsy table and said he had news and she needed to hear it. How Rose found out, exactly, isn’t exactly clear, but a neighbor of hers who knows a neighbor of a neighbor of Scarpetta’s—someone she’s never met—heard a rumor that the neighbor Scarpetta has met—Mrs. Grimball—had Bull arrested for trespassing and attempted burglary.

He was hiding behind a pittosporum to the left of Scarpetta’s front porch, and Mrs. Grimball happened to spot him while she was looking out her upstairs window. It was nighttime. Scarpetta can’t blame a neighbor for being alarmed by such a sight, unless that neighbor happens to be Mrs. Grimball. Calling nine-one-one to report a prowler wasn’t enough. She had to embellish her story and claim Bull was hiding on her property, not Scarpetta’s, and the long and short of it is Bull—who has been arrested before—went to jail, where he’s been since the middle of the week, and where he’d likely still be, had Rose not interrupted an autopsy. After Scarpetta was attacked in a parking garage.

Now Will Rambo is in the city jail, not Bull.

Now Bull’s mother can relax. Doesn’t have to keep lying, saying he’s out picking oysters or just out, period, because the last thing she wants is for him to get fired again.

“I’ve thawed stew,” Scarpetta says, unlocking her front door. “There’s plenty of it, and I can only imagine what you’ve had to eat for the last few days.”

Bull follows her into the foyer, and the umbrella stand grabs her attention and she stops and feels terrible. She reaches inside it and pulls out Marino’s motorcycle key and the magazine from his Glock, then the Glock itself from a drawer. She feels so unsettled, she almost feels sick. Bull doesn’t say anything, but she can feel him wondering about what she just retrieved from the umbrella stand, why those items were in there. It’s a moment before she can talk. She locks the key, the magazine, and the pistol inside the same metal box where she keeps the bottle of chloroform.

She warms up stew and homemade bread, and sets a place at the table, and pours a big glass of peach-flavored iced tea and drops in a sprig of fresh mint. She tells Bull to sit down and eat, that she’ll be on the upstairs porch with Benton, and to call up to them if Bull needs anything. She reminds him that too much water and the daphne will curl up and die in a week and the pansies need deadheading, and he sits down and she serves him.

“I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” she says. “You know more about gardening than I do.”

“Never hurts to be reminded,” he says.

“Maybe we should plant some daphne by the front gate so Mrs. Grimball can smell its lovely fragrance. Maybe it will make her more pleasant.”

“She was trying to do the right thing.” Bull opens his napkin and tucks it into his shirt. “I shouldn’t have been hiding, but after that man on the chopper showed up in the alley with a gun, I’ve been keeping my eye out. It was a feeling I had.”

“I believe in trusting feelings.”

“I know I do. There’s a reason for them,” Bull says, tasting his tea. “And something told me to wait in the bushes that night. I was watching your door, but the funny thing about it is I should have been watching the alley. Since you told me that’s where the hearse probably was when Lucious got killed, meaning that killer was back there.”

“I’m glad you weren’t.” She thinks of Morris Island and what they found there.

“Well, I wish I had been.”

“It would have been nice if Mrs. Grimball had bothered to call the police about the hearse,” Scarpetta says. “She has you thrown in jail and doesn’t bother reporting a hearse in my alley late at night.”

“I saw him brought into lockup,” Bull says. “They locked him up, and he was fussing his ear hurt, and one of the guards asked him what happened to his ear, and he said he got bit by a dog and it’s infected and he needs a doctor. There was a lot of talk about him, about his Cadillac with a stolen tag, and I heard a policeman say that man cooked some lady on a grill.” Bull drinks his tea. “Been thinking Mrs. Grimball could’ve seen his Cadillac, and she didn’t tell about it any more than she did the hearse. Not to the police, she didn’t. Funny how people think one thing they see’s important, and something else isn’t. You might think to ask if a hearse in the alley at night means somebody died and maybe you should look into it. What if it’s somebody you know? She won’t like going to court.”

“None of us will like it.”

“Well, she won’t like it the most,” Bull says, lifting his spoon but too polite to eat while they’re talking. “She’ll think she can smart off at the judge. I’d buy me a ticket to see that. Some years back, I was working in this very garden, and I seen her throw a bucket of water on a cat hiding under her house because it just had kittens.”

“Don’t say anything more, Bull. I can’t stand it.”

She goes up the stairs, and walks through the bedroom to the small porch that overlooks the garden. Benton is talking on the phone and probably has been ever since she saw him last. He’s changed into khakis and a polo shirt, and he smells clean and his hair is damp, and behind him is a trellis of copper pipes she constructed so passionflowers could climb like a lover up to her window. Below is the flagstone patio, and then the shallow pond she fills with an old, leaky hose. Depending on the time of year, her garden is a symphony. Crepe myrtles, camellias, canna lilies, hyacinths, hydrangea, daffodils, and dahlias. She can’t plant enough pittosporum and daphne, because anything that has a lovely scent is her friend.

The sun is out, and suddenly she’s so tired, her vision is blurry.

“That was the captain,” Benton says, putting the phone down on a glass-top table.

“Are you hungry? Can I get you some tea?” she asks.

“How about I get you something?” Benton looks at her.

“Take off your glasses so I can see your eyes,” Scarpetta says. “I don’t feel like looking into your dark glasses right now. I’m so tired. I don’t know why I’m so tired. I didn’t used to get this tired.”

He takes off his glasses, folds them, and sets them on the table. “Paulo’s resigned and not coming back from Italy, and I don’t think anything’s going to happen to him. The hospital president is doing nothing but damage control because our friend Dr. Self was just on Howard Stern, talking about experiments straight out of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I hope he asks her how big her breasts are and if they’re real. Forget it. She’d tell him. She’d probably show him.”

“I guess there’s nothing about Marino.”

“Look. Give me time, Kay. And I don’t fault you. We’ll work our way past this. I want to touch you again and not think of him. There, I’ve said it. Yes, it bothers the hell out of me.” He reaches for her hand. “Because I feel partly to blame. Maybe more than partly. Nothing would have happened if I’d been here. I’m going to change that. Unless you don’t want me to.”

“Of course I do.”

“I’d be happy if Marino stays away,” Benton says. “But I don’t wish any harm to him, and I hope nothing has happened to him. I’m trying to accept that you defend him, worry about him, still care about him.”

“The plant pathologist is coming in an hour. We have spider mites.”

“And I thought what I have is a headache.”

“If something’s happened to him, especially if he did it to himself, I won’t get over it,” Scarpetta says. “Maybe my worst flaw. I forgive people I care about, and then maybe they do it all over again. Please find him.”

“Everybody’s trying to find him, Kay.”

A long silence, nothing but birds. Bull appears in the garden. He starts uncoiling the hose.

“I need to take a shower,” Scarpetta says. “I’m a disgrace, didn’t take a shower over there. Wasn’t the most private locker room, and I had nothing to change into, why you put up with me I’ll never know. Don’t worry about Dr. Self. A few months in prison would be good for her.”

“She’ll film her shows there and make more millions. Some woman inmate will become her slave and knit her a shawl.”

Bull waters a bed of pansies, and there’s a rainbow in the spray of the hose.

The phone rings again. Benton says, “Oh, God,” and answers it. He listens because he’s skilled at listening, and, if anything, he doesn’t talk enough, and Scarpetta tells him so when she feels lonely.

“No,” Benton says. “I appreciate it, but I agree there’s no reason for us to be there. I won’t speak for Kay, but I don’t think we’d do anything but get in the way.”

He ends the call and says to her. “The captain. Your knight in shining armor.”

“Don’t say that. Don’t be so cynical. He hasn’t earned your wrath. You should be grateful.”

“He’s on his way to New York. They’re going to search Dr. Self’s penthouse apartment.”

“To find what?”

“Drew was there the night before she flew to Rome. Who else was there? Possibly Dr. Self’s son. Probably the man Hollings suggested was the chef. The most mundane answer is often the right one,” Benton says. “I had the flight checked. Alitalia. Guess who was on the same flight Drew was?”

“Are you saying she was waiting for him at the Spanish Steps?”

“It wasn’t the gold-painted mime. That was a ruse, because she was waiting for Will and she didn’t want her friends to know. My theory.”

“She’d just ended it with her coach.” Scarpetta watches Bull fill the shallow pond. “After Dr. Self brainwashed her to do it. Another theory? Will wanted to meet Drew, and his mother didn’t put two and two together and realize he was the one sending the obsessive e-mails signed the Sandman. Inadvertently, she matchmade Drew with her killer.”

“One of those details we may never know,” Benton says. “People don’t tell the truth. After a while, they don’t even know it.”

Bull stoops down to deadhead pansies. He looks up at the same time Mrs. Grimball is looking down from her upstairs window. Bull pulls a leaf bag close and minds his own business. Scarpetta can see her nosy neighbor lifting a phone to her ear.

“That’s it,” Scarpetta says as she gets up, smiles, and waves.

Mrs. Grimball looks their way and slides up the window while Benton watches with no expression on his face, and Scarpetta keeps waving as if she has something urgent to say.

“He just got out of jail,” Scarpetta calls out. “And if you send him back, I’ll burn your house down.”

The window quickly shuts. Mrs. Grimball’s face disappears from the glass.

“You didn’t just say that,” Benton says.

“I’ll say whatever the hell I want,” Scarpetta says. “I live here.”

PATRICIA CORNWELL

THE LAST PRECINCT

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

The Last Precinct

A G. P. Putnam’s Sons Book / published by arrangement with the author

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Copyright © 2000 by Cornwell Enterprises, Inc.

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First edition (electronic): September 2001

TO LINDA FAIRSTEIN—

PROSECUTOR. NOVELIST. MENTOR.

BEST FRIEND.

(THIS ONE’S FOR YOU)

THE LAST PRECINCT

PROLOGUE:
AFTER THE FACT

THE COLD DUSK gives up its bruised color to complete darkness, and I am grateful that the draperies in my bedroom are heavy enough to absorb even the faintest hint of my silhouette as I move about packing my bags. Life could not be more abnormal than it is right now.

“I want a drink,” I announce as I open a dresser drawer. “I want to build a fire and have a drink and make pasta. Yellow and green broad noodles, sweet peppers, sausage. Le papparedelle del cantunzein. I’ve always wanted to take a sabbatical, go to Italy, learn Italian, really learn it. Speak it. Not just know the names of food. Or maybe France. I will go to France. Maybe I’ll go there right this minute,” I add with a double edge of helplessness and rage. “I could live in Paris. Easily.” It is my way of rejecting Virginia and everybody in it.

Richmond Police Captain Pete Marino dominates my bedroom like a thick lighthouse, his giant hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans. He doesn’t offer to help me pack the suit bag and tote bags laid open on the bed, knowing me well enough to not even think about it. Marino may look like a redneck, talk like a redneck, act like a redneck, but he is as smart as hell, sensitive and very perceptive. This very moment, for example, he realizes a simple fact: Not even twenty-four hours ago, a man named Jean-Baptiste Chandonne tracked through snow beneath a full moon and tricked his way into my house. I was already intimately familiar with Chandonne’s modus operandi, so I can safely project what he would have done to me given the chance. But I haven’t quite been able to subject myself to anatomically correct images of my own mauled dead body, and nobody could more accurately describe such a thing than I. I am a forensic pathologist with a law degree, the chief medical examiner of Virginia. I autopsied the two women Chandonne recently killed here in Richmond and reviewed the cases of seven others he murdered in Paris.

Safer for me to say what he did to those victims, which was to savagely beat them, to bite their breasts, hands and feet, and to play with their blood. He doesn’t always use the same weapon. Last night, he was armed with a chipping hammer, a peculiar tool used in masonry. It looks very much like a pickaxe. I know for a fact what a chipping hammer can do to a human body because Chandonne used a chipping hammer—the same one, I presume—on Diane Bray, his second Richmond victim, the policewoman he murdered two days ago, on Thursday.

“What day is it?” I ask Captain Marino. “Saturday, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. Saturday.”

“December eighteenth. One week before Christmas. Happy holidays.” I unzip a side pocket of the suit bag.

“Yeah, December eighteenth.”

He watches me as if I am someone who might spring into irrationality any second, his bloodshot eyes reflecting a wariness that pervades my house. Distrust is palpable in the air. I taste it like dust. I smell it like ozone. I feel it like dampness. The wet swishing of tires on the street, the discord of feet, of voices and radio chatter are a disharmony from hell as law enforcement continues its occupation of my property. I am violated. Every inch of my home is exposed, every facet of my life is laid bare. I may as well be a naked body on one of my own steel tables in the morgue. So Marino knows not to ask if he can help me pack. Oh yes, he sure as hell knows he better dare not even think about touching a damn thing, not a shoe, not a sock, not a hairbrush, not a bottle of shampoo, not the smallest item. Police have asked me to leave the sturdy stone house of dreams I built in my quiet, gated West End neighborhood. Imagine that. I am quite certain Jean-Baptiste Chandonne—Le Loup-Garou or The Werewolf, as he calls himself—is getting better treatment than I am. The law provides people like him with every human right conceivable: comfort, confidentiality, free room, free food and drink, and free medical care in the forensic ward of the Medical College of Virginia, where I am a member of the faculty.

Marino hasn’t bathed or been to bed in at least twenty-four hours. When I move past him, I smell Chandonne’s hideous body odor and am stabbed by nausea, a burning wrenching of my stomach that locks my brain and causes me to break out in a cold sweat. I straighten up and take a deep breath to dispel the olfactory hallucination as my attention is drawn beyond the windows to the slowing of a car. I have come to recognize the subtlest pause in traffic and know when it will become someone parking out front. It is a rhythm I have listened to for hours. People gawk. Neighbors rubberneck and stop in the middle of the road. I reel in an uncanny intoxication of emotions, one minute bewildered and then frightened the next. I swing from exhaustion to mania, from depression to tranquility, and beneath it all, excitement fizzes as if my blood is filled with gas.

A car door shuts out front. “Now what?” I complain. “Who this time? The FBI?” I open another drawer. “Marino, that’s it.” I gesture with a fuck-you wave of my hands. “Get them out of my house, all of them. Now.” Fury shimmers like mirages on hot blacktop. “So I can finish packing and get the hell out of here. Can’t they just leave long enough for me to get out?” My hands shake as I pick through socks. “It’s bad enough they’re in my yard.” I toss a pair of socks in the tote bag. “It’s bad enough they’re here at all.” Another pair. “They can come back when I leave.” And I throw another pair and miss, and stoop over to pick it up. “They can at least let me walk through my own house.” Another pair. “And let me get out in peace and privacy.” I put a pair back in the drawer. “Why the hell are they in my kitchen?” I change my mind and get out the socks I just put back. “Why are they in my study? I told them he didn’t go in there.”

“We gotta look around, Doc,” is what Marino has to say about it.

He sits down on the foot of my bed, and that is wrong, too. I want to tell him to get off my bed and out of my room. It is all I can do not to order him out of my house and possibly out of my life. It doesn’t matter how long I have known him or how much we have been through together.

“How’s the elbow, Doc?” He indicates the cast that immobilizes my left arm like a stovepipe.

“It’s fractured. It hurts like hell.” I shut the drawer too hard.

“Taking your medicine?”

“I’ll survive.”

He watches my every move. “You need to be taking that stuff they gave you.”

We have suddenly reversed roles. I act like the rude cop while he is logical and calm like the lawyer-physician I am supposed to be. I walk back into the cedar-lined closet and begin gathering blouses and laying them in the suit bag, making sure top buttons are buttoned, smoothing silk and polished cotton with my right hand. My left elbow throbs like a toothache, my flesh sweating and itching inside plaster. I spent most of the day in the hospital—not that getting a cast put on a fractured limb is a lengthy procedure, but doctors insisted on checking me very carefully to make sure I didn’t have other injuries. I repeatedly explained that when I fled from my house, I fell down my front steps and fractured my elbow, nothing more. Jean-Baptiste Chandonne never had a chance to touch me. I got away and am okay, I kept saying during X ray after X ray. Hospital staff held me for observation until late afternoon and detectives were in and out of the examination room. They took my clothes. My niece, Lucy, had to bring me something to wear. I have had no sleep.

The telephone pierces the air like a foil. I pick up the extension by the bed. “Dr. Scarpetta,” I announce into the handset, and my own voice saying my name reminds me of calls in the middle of the night when I answer my phone and some detective gives me very bad news about a death scene somewhere. Hearing my usual businesslike self-announcement triggers the image I have so far evaded: my savaged body on my bed, blood spattered all over the room, this room, and my assistant chief medical examiner getting the call and the look on his face as police—probably Marino—tell him I have been murdered and someone, God knows who, needs to respond to the scene. It occurs to me that no one from my office could possibly respond. I have helped Virginia design the best disaster plan of any state in the country. We can handle a major airline crash or a bombing in the coliseum or a flood, but what would we do if something happened to me? Bring in a forensic pathologist from a nearby jurisdiction, maybe Washington, I suppose. Problem is, I know almost every forensic pathologist on the East Coast and would feel terribly sorry for whoever had to deal with my dead body. It is very difficult working a case when you are acquainted with the victim. These thoughts fly through my mind like startled birds as Lucy asks me over the phone if I need anything, and I assure her I am fine, which is perfectly ridiculous.

“Well, you can’t be fine,” she replies.

“Packing,” I tell her what I am doing. “Marino’s with me and I’m packing,” I repeat myself as my eyes fix on Marino in a frozen way. His attention wanders around and it seeps into my awareness that he has never been inside my bedroom. I don’t want to imagine his fantasies. I have known him for many years and have always been aware that his respect for me is potently laced with insecurity and sexual attraction. He is a hulk of a man with a swollen beer belly, and a big disgruntled face, and his hair is colorless and has unattractively migrated from his head to other parts of his body. I listen to my niece on the phone as Marino’s eyes feel their way around my private spaces: my dressers, my closet, the open drawers, what I am packing and my breasts. When Lucy brought tennis shoes, socks and a warm-up suit to the hospital, she didn’t think to include a bra, and the best I could do when I got here was to cover up with an old, voluminous lab coat that I wear like a smock when I do odd jobs around the house.

“I guess they don’t want you in there, either,” Lucy’s voice sounds over the line.

It is a long story, but my niece is an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and when the police responded, they couldn’t exile her from my property fast enough. Maybe a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and they feared a big-shot federal agent would insert herself into the investigation. I don’t know, but she is feeling guilty because she wasn’t here for me last night and I almost got murdered, and now she isn’t here for me again. I make it clear I don’t blame her in the least. I also can’t stop wondering how different my life would be had she been home with me when Chandonne showed up—instead of out taking care of a girlfriend. Maybe Chandonne would have known I wasn’t alone and would have stayed away, or he would have been surprised by another person in the house and would have fled, or he would have put off murdering me until tomorrow or the next night or Christmas or the new millennium.

I pace as I listen to Lucy’s breathless explanations and comments over the cordless phone and catch my reflection as I go past the full-length mirror. My short blond hair is wild, my blue eyes glassy and puckered with exhaustion and stress, my brow gathered in what is a mixture of a frown and near-tears. The lab coat is dingy and stained and not the least bit chiefly. I am very pale. The craving for a drink and a cigarette are atypically strong, almost unbearable, as if almost being murdered has turned me into an instant junkie. I imagine being alone in my own home. Nothing has happened. I am enjoying a fire, a cigarette, a glass of French wine, maybe a Bordeaux because Bordeaux is less complicated than Burgundy. Bordeaux is like a fine old friend you don’t have to figure out. I dispel the fantasy with fact: It doesn’t matter what Lucy did or didn’t do. Chandonne would have come to murder me eventually, and I feel as if a terrible judgment has been waiting for me all of my life, marking my door like the Angel of Death. Bizarrely, I am still here.

CHAPTER 1

I KNOW FROM Lucy’s voice that she is scared. Rarely is my brilliant, forceful, helicopter-piloting, fitness-obsessed, federal-law-enforcement-agent niece scared.

“I feel really bad,” she continues to repeat herself over the phone as Marino maintains his position on my bed and I pace.

“You shouldn’t,” I tell her. “The police don’t want anybody here, and believe me, you don’t want to be here. I guess you’re staying with Jo and that’s good.” I say this to her as if it makes no difference to me, as if it doesn’t bother me that she is not here and I haven’t seen her all day. It does make a difference. It does bother me. But it is my old habit to give people an out. I don’t like to be rejected, especially by Lucy Farinelli, whom I have raised like a daughter.

She hesitates before answering. “Actually, I’m downtown at the Jefferson.”

I try to make sense of this. The Jefferson is the grandest hotel in the city, and I don’t know why she would go to a hotel at all, much less an elegant, expensive one. Tears sting my eyes and I force them back, clearing my throat, shoving down hurt. “Oh,” is all I say. “Well, that’s good. I guess Jo’s with you at the hotel, then.”

“No, with her family. Look, I just checked in. I’ve got a room for you. Why don’t I come get you?”

“A hotel’s probably not a good idea right now.” She thought of me and wants me with her. I feel a little better. “Anna’s asked me to stay with her. In light of everything, I think it’s best for me to go on to her house. She’s invited you, too. But I guess you’re settled.”

“How did Anna know?” Lucy inquires. “She hear about it on the news?”

Since the attempt on my life happened at a very late hour, it won’t be in the newspapers until tomorrow morning. But I expect there has been a storm of news breaks over the radio and on television. I don’t know how Anna knew, now that I think about it. Lucy says she needs to stay put but will try to drop by later tonight. We hang up.

“The media finds out you’re in a hotel, that’s all you need. They’ll be behind every bush,” Marino says with a hard frown, looking like hell. “Where’s Lucy staying?”

I repeat what she told me and almost wish I hadn’t talked to her. All it did was make me feel worse. Trapped, I feel trapped, as if I am inside a diving bell a thousand feet under the sea, detached, light-headed, the world beyond me suddenly unrecognizable and surreal. I am numb yet every nerve is on fire.

“The Jefferson?” Marino is saying. “You gotta be kidding! She win the lottery or something? She not worried about the media finding her, too? What the shit’s gotten into her?”

I resume packing. I can’t answer his questions. I am so tired of questions.

“And she ain’t at Jo’s house. Huh,” he goes on, “that’s interesting. Huh. Never thought that would last.” He yawns loudly and rubs his thick-featured, stubbly face as he watches me drape suits over a chair, continuing to pick out clothes for the office. To give Marino credit, he has tried to be even-tempered, even considerate, since I got home from the hospital. Decent behavior is difficult for him given the best of circumstances, which certainly are not the ones he finds himself in at present. He is strung out, sleep-deprived and fueled by caffeine and junk food, and I won’t allow him to smoke inside my house. It was simply a matter of time before his self-control began to erode and he stepped back into his rude, big-mouthed character. I witness the metamorphosis and am strangely relieved by it. I am desperate for things familiar, no matter how unpleasant. Marino starts talking about what Lucy did last night when she pulled up in front of the house and discovered Jean-Baptiste Chandonne and me in my snowy front yard.

“Hey, it’s not that I blame her for wanting to blow the squirrel’s brains out,” Marino gives me his commentary. “But that’s where your training’s got to come in. Don’t matter if it’s your aunt or your kid involved, you got to do what you’re trained to do, and she didn’t. She sure as hell didn’t. What she did was go ape-shit.”

“I’ve seen you go ape-shit a few times in your life,” I remind him.

“Well, it’s my personal opinion they never should have thrown her into that undercover work down there in Miami.” Lucy is assigned to the Miami field office and is here for the holidays, among other reasons. “Sometimes people get too close to the bad guys and start identifying with them. Lucy’s in a kill mode. She’s gotten trigger-happy, Doc.”

“That’s not fair.” I realize I have packed too many pairs of shoes. “Tell me what you would have done if you’d gotten to my house first instead of her.” I stop what I am doing and look at him.

“At least take a nanosecond to assess the situation before I went in there and put a gun to the asshole’s head. Shit. The guy was so fucked up he couldn’t even see what he was doing. He’s screaming bloody murder because he’s got this chemical shit you threw in his eyes. He wasn’t armed by this point. He wasn’t going to be hurting nobody. That was obvious right away. And it was obvious you was hurt, too. So if it had been me, I’d called for an ambulance, and Lucy didn’t think to even do that. She’s a wild card, Doc. And no, I didn’t want her in the house with all this going on. That’s why we interviewed her down at the station, got her statements in a neutral place to get her calmed down.”

“I don’t consider an interrogation room a neutral place,” I reply.

“Well, being inside the house where your Aunt Kay almost got whacked ain’t exactly neutral, either.”

I don’t disagree with him, but sarcasm is poisoning his tone. I begin to resent it.

“All the same, I got to tell you I’ve got a really bad feeling about her being alone in a hotel right now,” he adds, rubbing his face again, and no matter what he says to the contrary, he thinks the world of my niece and would do anything for her. He has known her since she was ten, and he introduced her to trucks and big engines and guns and all sorts of so-called manly interests that he now criticizes her for having in her life. “I might just check on the little shit after I drop you off at Anna’s. Not that anybody seems to care about my bad feelings,” he jumps back several thoughts. “Like Jay Talley. Of course, it ain’t my business. The self-centered bastard.”

“He waited with me the entire time at the hospital,” I defend Jay yet one more time, deflecting Marino’s naked jealousy. Jay is ATF’s Interpol liaison. I don’t know him very well but slept with him in Paris four days ago. “And I was there thirteen or fourteen hours,” I go on as Marino practically rolls his eyes. “I don’t call that self-centered.”

“Jesus!” Marino exclaims. “Where’d you hear that fairy tale?” His eyes burn with resentment. He despises Jay and did the first time he ever laid eyes on him in France. “I can’t believe it. He lets you think he was at the hospital all that time? He didn’t wait for you! That’s total bullshit. He took you there on his fucking white horse and came right back here. Then he called to see when you was going to be ready to check out and slithered back to the hospital and picked you up.”

“Which makes good sense.” I don’t show my dismay. “No point in sitting and doing nothing. And he never said he was there the entire time. I just assumed it.”

“Yeah, why? Because he let you assume it. He lets you think something that isn’t true, and you ain’t bothered by that? In my book, that’s known as a character flaw. It’s called lying. . . . What?” He abruptly changes his tone. Someone is in my doorway.

A uniformed officer whose nameplate reads M. I. Calloway steps inside my bedroom. “I’m sorry,” she addresses Marino right off. “Captain, I didn’t know you were back here.”

“Well, now you know.” He gives her a black look.

“Dr. Scarpetta?” Her wide eyes are like Ping-Pong balls, bouncing back and forth between Marino and me. “I need to ask you about the jar. Where the jar of the chemical, the formulin . . .”

“Formalin,” I quietly correct her.

“Right,” she says. “Exactly, I mean, where exactly was the jar when you picked it up?”

Marino remains on the bed, as if he makes himself at home on the foot of my bed every day of his life. He starts feeling for his cigarettes.

“The coffee table in the great room,” I answer Calloway. “I’ve already told everybody that.”

“Yes, ma’am, but where on the coffee table? It’s a pretty big coffee table. I’m really sorry to bother you with all this. It’s just we’re trying to reconstruct how it all happened, because later it’s only going to get harder to remember.”

Marino slowly shakes a Lucky Strike loose from the pack. “Calloway?” He doesn’t even look at her. “Since when are you a detective? Don’t seem I remember you being in A Squad.” He is the head of the Richmond Police Department’s violent crime unit known as A Squad.

“We just aren’t sure where the jar was, Captain.” Her cheeks burn.

The cops probably assumed a woman coming back here to question me would be less intrusive than a male. Perhaps her comrades sent her back here for that reason, or maybe it was simply that she got the assignment because no one else wanted to tangle with me.

“When you walk into the great room and face the coffee table, it’s the right corner of the table closest to you,” I say to her. I have been through this many times. Nothing is clear. What happened is a blur, an unreal torquing of reality.

“And that’s approximately where you were standing when you threw the chemical on him?” Calloway asks me.

“No. I was on the other side of the couch. Near the sliding glass door. He was chasing me and that’s where I ended up,” I explain.

“And after that you ran directly out of the house . . . ?” Calloway scratches through something she is writing on her small memo pad.

“Through the dining room,” I interrupt her. “Where my gun was, where I happened to have set it on the dining room table earlier in the evening. Not a good place to leave it, I admit.” My mind meanders. I feel as if I have severe jet lag. “I hit the panic alarm and went out the front door. With the gun, the Glock. But I slipped on ice and fractured my elbow. I couldn’t pull the slide back, not with just one hand.”

She writes this down, too. My story is tired and the same. If I have to tell it one more time, I might become irrational, and no cop on this planet has ever seen me irrational.

“You never fired it?” She glances up at me and wets her lips.

“I couldn’t cock it.”

“You never tried to fire it?”

“I don’t know what you mean by try. I couldn’t cock it.”

“But you tried to?”

“You need a translator or something?” Marino erupts. The ominous way he stares at M. I. Calloway reminds me of the red dot a laser sight marks on a person before a bullet follows. “The gun wasn’t cocked and she didn’t fire it, you got that?” he repeats slowly and rudely. “How many cartridges you have in the magazine?” He directs this to me. “Eighteen? It’s a Glock Seventeen, takes eighteen in the mag, one in the chamber, right?”

“I don’t know,” I tell him. “Probably not eighteen, definitely not. It’s hard to get that many rounds in it because the spring’s stiff, the spring in the magazine.”

“Right, right. You remember the last time you shot that gun?” he then asks me.

“Whenever I was at the range last. Months at least.”

“You always clean your guns after you go to the range, don’t you, Doc.” This is a statement, not an inquiry. Marino knows my habits and routines.

“Yes.” I am standing in the middle of my bedroom, blinking. I have a headache and the lights hurt my eyes.

“You looked at the gun, Calloway? I mean, you’ve examined it, right?” He fixes her in his laser sight again. “So what’s the deal?” He flaps a hand at her as if she is a stupid nuisance. “Tell me what you found.”

She hesitates. I sense she doesn’t want to give out information in front of me. Marino’s question hangs heavy like moisture about to precipitate. I decide on two skirts, one navy blue, one gray, and drape them over the chair.

“There are fourteen rounds in the magazine,” Calloway tells him in a robotic military tone. “There wasn’t one in the chamber. It wasn’t cocked. And it looks clean.”

“Well, well. Then it wasn’t cocked and she didn’t shoot it. And it was a dark and stormy night and three Indians sat around a campfire. We want to go round and round, or can we fucking move along?” He is sweating and his body odor rises with his heat.

“Look, there’s nothing new to add,” I say, suddenly on the verge of tears, cold and trembling and smelling Chandonne’s awful stench again.

“And why was it you had the jar in your home? And what exactly was in it? That stuff you use in the morgue, right?” Calloway positions herself to take Marino out of her sight line.

“Formalin. A ten percent dilution of formaldehyde known as formalin,” I say. “It’s used in the morgue to fix tissue, yes. Sections of organs. Skin, in this case.”

I dashed a caustic chemical into the eyes of another human being. I maimed him. Maybe I permanently blinded him. I imagine him strapped to a bed on the ninth-floor prison ward of the Medical College of Virginia. I saved my own life and feel no satisfaction in that fact. All I feel is ruined.

“So you had human tissue in your house. The skin. A tattoo. From that unidentified body at the port? The one in the cargo container?” The sound of Calloway’s voice, of her pen, of pages flipping, reminds me of reporters. “I don’t mean to be dense, but why would you have something like that at your house?”

I go on to explain that we have had a very difficult time identifying the body from the port. We had nothing beyond a tattoo, really, and last week I drove to Petersburg and had an experienced tattoo artist look at the tattoo from my case. I came directly home afterward, which is why the tattoo in its jar of formalin happened to be in my house last night. “Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have something like that in my house,” I add.

“You kept it at your house for a week?” she asks with a dubious expression.

“A lot was happening. Kim Luong was murdered. My niece was almost killed in a shoot-out in Miami. I was called out of the country, to Lyon, France. Interpol wanted to see me, wanted to talk about seven women he”—I mean Chandonne—“probably murdered in Paris and the suspicion that the dead man in the cargo container might be Thomas Chandonne, the brother, the killer’s brother, both of them sons of this Chandonne criminal cartel that half of law enforcement in the universe has been trying to bring down forever. Then Deputy Police Chief Diane Bray was murdered. Should I have returned the tattoo to the morgue?” My head pounds. “Yes, I certainly should have. But I was distracted. I just forgot.” I almost snap at her.

“You just forgot,” Officer Calloway repeats while Marino listens with gathering fury, trying to let her do her job and despising her at the same time. “Dr. Scarpetta, do you have other body parts in your house?” Calloway then asks.

A stabbing pain penetrates my right eye. I am getting a migraine.

“What kind of fucking question is that?” Marino raises his voice another decibel.

“I just didn’t want us walking in on anything else like body fluids or other chemicals or . . .”

“No, no.” I shake my head and turn my attention to a stack of neatly folded slacks and polo shirts. “Just slides.”

“Slides?”

“For histology,” I vaguely explain.

“For what?”

“Calloway, you’re done.” Marino’s words crack like a gavel as he rises from the bed.

“I just want to make sure we don’t need to worry about any other hazards,” she says to him, and her hot cheeks and the flash in her eyes belie her subordination. She hates Marino. A lot of people do.

“The only hazard you gotta worry about is the one you’re looking at,” Marino snaps at her. “How ’bout giving the Doc a little privacy, a little reprieve from dumb-ass questions?”

Calloway is an unattractive chinless woman with thick hips and narrow shoulders, her body tense with anger and embarrassment. She spins around and walks out of my bedroom, her footsteps absorbed by the Persian runner in the hallway.

“What’s she think? You collect trophies or something?” Marino says to me. “You bring home souvenirs like fucking Jeffrey Dahmer? Jesus Christ.”

“I can’t take any more of this.” I tuck perfectly folded polo shirts into the tote bag.

“You’re gonna have to take it, Doc. But you don’t have to take any more of it today.” He wearily sits back down on the foot of my bed.

“Keep your detectives off me,” I warn him. “I don’t want to see another cop in my face. I’m not the one who did something wrong.”

“If they got anything else, they’ll run it through me. This is my investigation, even if people like Calloway ain’t figured that out yet. But I also ain’t the one you got to worry about. It’s like take a number in the deli line, there’s so many people who insist they got to talk to you.”

I stack slacks on top of the polo shirts, and then reverse the order, placing the shirts on top so they don’t wrinkle.

“Course, nowhere near as many people as the ones who want to talk to him.” He means Chandonne. “All these profilers and forensic psychiatrists and the media and shit,” Marino goes through the Who’s Who list.

I stop packing. I have no intention of picking through lingerie while Marino watches. I refuse to sort through toiletries with him witness to it all. “I need a few minutes alone,” I tell him.

He stares at me, his eyes red, his face flushed the deep color of wine. Even his balding head is red, and he is disheveled in his jeans and a sweatshirt, his belly nine months pregnant, his Red Wing boots huge and dirty. I can see his mind working. He doesn’t want to leave me alone and seems to be weighing concerns that he will not share with me. A paranoid thought rises like dark smoke in my mind. He doesn’t trust me. Maybe he thinks I am suicidal.

“Marino, please. Can you just stand outside and keep people away while I finish up in here? Go to my car and get my crime scene case out of the trunk. If I get called out on something . . . well, I need to have it. The key’s in the kitchen desk drawer, the top right—where I keep all my keys. Please. And I need my car, by the way. I guess I’ll just take my car and you can leave the scene case in it.” Confusion eddies.

He hesitates. “You can’t take your car.”

“Damn it!” I blurt out. “Don’t tell me they’ve got to go through my car, too. This is insane.”

“Look. The first time your alarm went off last night, it was because someone tried to break into your garage.”

“What do you mean, someone?” I retort as migraine pain sears my temples and blurs my vision. “We know exactly who. He forced my garage door open because he wanted the alarm to go off. He wanted the police to show up. So it wouldn’t seem odd if the police came back a little later because a neighbor reported a prowler on my property, supposedly.”

It was Jean-Baptiste Chandonne who came back. He impersonated the police. I still can’t believe I fell for it.

“We ain’t got all the answers yet,” Marino replies.

“Why is it I keep getting this feeling you don’t believe me?”

“You need to get to Anna’s and sleep.”

“He didn’t touch my car,” I assert. “He never got inside my garage. I don’t want anyone touching my car. I want to take it tonight. Just leave the scene case inside the trunk.”

“Not tonight.”

Marino walks out and shuts the door behind him. I am desperate for a drink to override the electrical spikes in my central nervous system, but what do I do? Walk out to the bar and tell the cops to get the hell out of my way while I find the Scotch? Knowing that liquor probably won’t help my headache doesn’t have an impact. I am so miserable in my own skin, I don’t care what is good or not good for me right now. In the bathroom I dig through more drawers and spill several lipsticks on the floor. They roll between the toilet and the tub. I am unsteady as I bend over to retrieve them, groping awkwardly with my right arm, all of this made more difficult because I am left-handed. I stop to ponder the perfumes neatly arranged on the vanity and gently pick up the small gold metal bottle of Hermès 24 Faubourg. It is cool in my hand. I lift the spray nozzle to my nose and the spicy, erotic scent that Benton Wesley loved fills my eyes with tears and my heart feels as if it will fatally fly out of rhythm. I have not used the perfume in more than a year, not once since Benton was murdered. Now I have been murdered, I tell him in my throbbing mind. And I am still here, Benton, I am still here. You were a psychological profiler for the FBI, an expert in dissecting the psyches of monsters and interpreting and predicting their behavior. You would have seen this coming, wouldn’t you? You would have predicted it, prevented it. Why weren’t you here, Benton? I would be all right if you had been here.

I realize someone is knocking on my bedroom door. “Just a minute,” I call out, clearing my throat and wiping my eyes. I splash cold water on my face and tuck the Hermès perfume into the tote bag. I go to the door, expecting Marino. Instead, Jay Talley walks in wearing ATF battle dress and a day’s growth of beard that turns his dark beauty sinister. He is one of the handsomest men I have ever known, his body exquisitely sculpted, sensuality exuding from his pores like musk.

“Just checking on you before you head out.” His eyes burn into mine. They seem to feel and explore me the way his hands and mouth did four days ago in France.

“What can I tell you?” I let him into my bedroom and am suddenly self-conscious about the way I look. I don’t want him to see me like this. “I have to leave my own house. It’s almost Christmas. My arm hurts. My head hurts. Other than that, I’m fine.”

“I’ll drive you to Dr. Zenner’s. I would like to, Kay.”

It vaguely penetrates that he knows where I am staying tonight. Marino promised my whereabouts would be secret. Jay shuts the door and takes my hand, and all I can think about is that he didn’t wait at the hospital for me and now he wants to drive me someplace else.

“Let me help you through this. I care about you,” he says to me.

“No one seemed to care very much last night,” I reply as I recall that when he drove me home from the hospital and I thanked him for waiting, for being there for me, he never once even intimated that he hadn’t been there. “You and all your IRTs out there and the bastard just walks right up to my front door,” I go on. “You fly all the way here from Paris to lead a goddamn International Response Team in your big-game hunt for this guy, and what a joke. What a bad movie—all these big cops with all their gear and assault rifles and the monster just strolls right up to my house.”

Jay’s eyes have begun wandering over areas of my anatomy as if they are rest stops he is entitled to revisit. It shocks and repulses me that he can think about my body at a time like this. In Paris I thought I was falling in love with him. As I stand here with him in my bedroom and he is openly interested in what is under my old lab coat, I realize I don’t love him in the least.

“You’re just upset. God, why wouldn’t you be? I’m concerned about you. I’m here for you.” He tries to touch me and I move away.

“We had an afternoon.” I have told him this before, but now I mean it. “A few hours. An encounter, Jay.”

“A mistake?” Hurt sharpens his voice. Dark anger flashes in his eyes.

“Don’t try to turn an afternoon into a life, into something of permanent meaning. It isn’t there. I’m sorry. For God’s sake.” My indignation rises. “Don’t want anything from me right now.” I walk away from him, gesturing with my one good arm. “What are you doing? What the hell are you doing?”

He raises a hand and hangs his head, warding off my blows, acknowledging his mistake. I am not sure if he is sincere. “I don’t know what I’m doing. Being stupid, that’s what,” he says. “I don’t mean to want anything. Stupid, I’m stupid because of how I feel about you. Don’t hold it against me. Please.” He casts me an intense look and opens the door. “I’m here for you, Kay. Je t’aime.” I realize Jay has a way of saying good-bye that makes me feel I might never see him again. An atavistic panic thrills my deepest psyche and I resist the temptation to call after him, to apologize, to promise we will have dinner or drinks soon. I shut my eyes and rub my temples, briefly leaning against the bedpost. I tell myself I don’t know what I am doing right now and should not do anything.

Marino is in the hallway, an unlit cigarette clamped in the corner of his mouth, and I can feel him trying to read me and what might have just happened while Jay was inside my bedroom with the door shut. My gaze lingers on the empty hallway, halfway hoping Jay will reappear and dreading it at the same time. Marino grabs my bags and cops fall silent as I approach. They avoid looking in my direction as they move about my great room, duty belts creaking, equipment they manipulate clicking and clacking. An investigator takes photographs of the coffee table, the flash gun popping bright white. Someone else is videotaping while a crime scene technician sets up an alternative light source called a Luma-Lite that can detect fingerprints, drugs and body fluids not visible to the unaided eye. My downtown office has a Luma-Lite I routinely use on bodies at scenes and in the morgue. To see a Luma-Lite inside my house gives me a feeling that is indescribable.

Dark dusting powder smudges furniture and walls, and the colorful Persian rug is pulled back, exposing antique French oak underneath. An endtable lamp is unplugged and on the floor. The sectional sofa has craters where cushions used to be, the air oily and acrid with the residual odor of formalin. Off the great room and near the front door is the dining room and through the open doorway I am greeted with the sight of a brown paper bag sealed with yellow evidence tape, dated, initialed and labeled clothing Scarpetta. Inside it are the slacks, sweater, socks, shoes, bra and panties I was wearing last night, clothes taken from me in the hospital. That bag and other evidence and flashlights and equipment are on top of my favorite red Jarrah Wood dining room table, as if it is a workbench. Cops have draped coats over chairs, and wet, dirty footprints are everywhere. My mouth is dry, my joints weak with shame and rage.

“Yo Marino!” a cop barks. “Righter’s looking for you.”

Buford Righter is the city commonwealth’s attorney. I look around for Jay. He is nowhere to be seen.

“Tell him to take a number and wait in line.” Marino sticks to his deli-line allusion.

He lights the cigarette as I open the front door, and cold air bites my face and makes my eyes water. “Did you get my crime scene case?” I ask him.

“It’s in the truck.” He says this like a condescending husband who has been asked to fetch his wife’s pocketbook.

“Why’s Righter calling?” I want to know.

“Bunch of fucking voyeurs,” he mutters.

Marino’s truck is on the street out front and two massive tires have chewed tracks into my snowy churned-up lawn. Buford Righter and I have worked many cases together over the years and it stings that he did not ask me directly if he could come to my house. He has not, for that matter, contacted me to see how I am and let me know he is glad I am alive.

“You ask me, people just want to see your joint,” Marino says. “So they give these excuses about needing to check this and that.”

Slush seeps into my shoes as I carefully make my way along the driveway.

“You got no idea how many people ask me what your house is like. You’d think you was Lady Di or something. Plus, Righter’s got his nose in everything, can’t stand to be left out of the loop. Biggest fucking case since Jack the Ripper. Righter’s bugging the hell out of us.”

Flash guns suddenly explode in bright white stutters and I almost slip. I swear out loud. Photographers have gotten past the neighborhood guard gate. Three of them hurry toward me in a blaze of flashes as I struggle with one arm to climb into the truck’s high front seat.

“Hey!” Marino yells at the nearest offender, a woman. “Goddamn bitch!” He lunges, trying to block her camera, and her feet go out from under her. She sits down hard on the slick street, camera equipment thudding and scattering.

“Fuckhead!” she screams at him. “Fuckhead!”

“Get in the truck! Get in the truck!” Marino yells at me.

“Motherfucker!”

My heart drills my ribs.

“I’m going to sue you, motherfucker!”

More flashes and I shut my coat in the door and have to open it again and shut it again while Marino shoves my bags in back and jumps into the driver’s seat, the engine turning over and rumbling like a yacht. The photographer is trying to get up, and it occurs to me I ought to make sure she isn’t injured. “We should see if she’s hurt,” I say, staring out the side window.

“Hell no. Fuck no.” The truck lurches onto the street, fishtails and accelerates.

“Who are they?” Adrenaline pumps. Blue dots float before my eyes.

“Assholes. That’s who.” He snatches up the hand mike. “Unit nine,” he announces over the air.

“Unit nine,” the dispatcher comes back.

“I don’t need pictures of me, my house . . .” I raise my voice. Every cell in my body lights up to protest the unfairness of it all.

“Ten-five unit three-twenty, ask him to call me on my portable.” Marino holds the mike against his mouth. Unit three-twenty gets back to him right away, the portable phone vibrating like a huge insect. Marino flips it open and talks. “Somehow the media’s gotten in the neighborhood. Photographers. I’m thinking they parked somewhere in Windsor Farms, came in on foot over the fence, through that open grassy area behind the guard booth. Send units to look for any cars parked where they shouldn’t be and tow ’em. They step foot on the Doc’s property, arrest ’em.” He ends the call, flipping the phone shut as if he is Captain Kirk and has just ordered the Enterprise to attack.

We slow down at the guard booth and Joe steps out. He is an old man who has always been proud to wear his brown Pinkerton’s uniform, and he is very nice, polite and protective, but I would not want to depend on him or his colleagues for more than nuisance control. It shouldn’t surprise me a bit that Chandonne got inside my neighborhood or that now the media has. Joe’s slack, wrinkled face turns uneasy when he notices me sitting inside the truck.

“Hey, man,” Marino gruffly says through the open window, “how’d the photographers get in here?”

“What?” Joe instantly goes into protect mode, eyes narrowing as he stares down the slick, empty street, sodium vapor lights casting yellow auras high up on poles.

“In front of the Doc’s house. At least three of ’em.”

“They didn’t come through here,” Joe declares. He ducks back inside the booth and grabs the phone.

We drive off. “We can do but so much, Doc,” Marino says to me. “You may as well duck your head in the sand because there’s gonna be pictures and shit all over the place.”

I stare out the window at lovely Georgian homes glowing with holiday festivity.

“Bad news is, your security risk just went up another mile.” He is preaching to me, telling me what I already know and have no interest in dwelling on right now. “Because now half the world’s gonna see your big fancy house and know exactly where you live. Problem is, and what worries the hell out of me, is stuff like this brings out other squirrels. Gives ’em ideas. They start imagining you as a victim and get off on it, like those assholes who go to the courthouse, cruising for rape cases to sit in on.”

He eases to a stop at the intersection of Canterbury Road and West Cary Street, and headlights sweep over us as a compact dark-colored sedan turns in and slows. I recognize the narrow, insipid face of Buford Righter looking over at Marino’s truck. Righter and Marino roll down their windows.

“You leaving . . . ?” Righter starts to say when his eyes shoot past Marino and land on me in surprise. I have the unnerving sense that I am the last person he wants to see. “Sorry for your trouble,” Righter weirdly says to me, as if what is happening in my life is nothing more than trouble, an inconvenience, an unpleasantness.

“Yeah, heading out.” Marino sucks on the cigarette, not the least bit helpful. He has already expressed his opinion about Righter’s showing up at my house. It is unnecessary, and even if he truly thinks it is so important to eyeball the crime scene himself, why didn’t he do it earlier when I was at the hospital?

Righter pulls his overcoat more tightly around his neck, light from street lamps glinting off his glasses. He nods and says to me, “Take care. Glad you’re okay,” deciding to acknowledge my so-called trouble. “This is real hard on all of us.” A thought catches before it is out in words. Whatever he was going to say next is gone, retracted, struck from the record. “I’ll be talking to you,” he promises Marino.

Windows go up. We drive off.

“Give me a cigarette,” I tell Marino. “I’m assuming he didn’t come to my house earlier today,” I then say.

“Yeah, actually he did. About ten o’clock this morning.” He offers me the pack of unfiltered Lucky Strikes and flame spits out of a lighter he holds my way.

Anger coils through my entrails, and the back of my neck is hot, the pressure in my head almost unbearable. Fear stirs inside me like a waking beast. I turn mean, punching in the lighter on the dash, ungraciously leaving Marino’s arm extended with the Bic lighter flaming. “Thanks for telling me,” I sharply reply. “You mind my asking who the hell else has been in my house? And how many times? And how long they stayed and what they touched?”

“Hey, don’t take it out on me,” he warns.

I know the tone. He is about to lose his patience with me and my mess. We are like weather systems about to collide, and I don’t want that. The last thing I need right now is a war with Marino. I touch the tip of the cigarette to bright orange coils and inhale deeply, the punch of pure tobacco spinning me. We drive several minutes in flinty silence, and when I finally speak, I sound numb, my feverish brain glazing over like the streets, depression a heavy pain spreading along my ribs. “I know you’re just doing what has to be done. I appreciate it,” I force the words. “Even if I’m not showing it.”

“You don’t got to explain nothing.” He sucks on the cigarette, both of us shooting streams of smoke toward our partially open windows. “I know exactly what you feel,” he adds.

“You couldn’t possibly.” Resentment seeps up my throat like bile. “I don’t even know.”

“I understand a lot more than you give me credit for,” he says. “Someday you’ll see that, Doc. No way you can see shit right now, and I’m telling you it ain’t gonna get no better in days and weeks to come. That’s the way it works. The real damage hasn’t even hit. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen it, seen what happens to people when they’re victimized.”

I absolutely do not want to hear a single word of this.

“Damn good thing you’re going where you are,” he says. “Exactly what the doctor ordered, in more ways than one.”

“I’m not staying with Anna because it’s what the doctor ordered,” I reply testily. “I’m staying with her because she’s my friend.”

“Look, you’re a victim and you got to deal with it, and you need help dealing with it. Don’t matter you’re a doctor-lawyer–Indian chief.” Marino will not shut up, in part because he is looking for a fight. He wants a focus for his anger. I can see what is coming, and anger crawls up my neck and heats up the roots of my hair. “Being a victim’s the great equalizer,” Marino, the world’s authority, goes on.

I draw out the words slowly. “I am not a victim.” My voice wavers around its edges like fire. “There’s a difference between being victimized and being a victim. I’m not a sideshow for character disorders.” My tone sears. “I haven’t become what he wanted to turn me into”—of course, I mean Chandonne—“even if he’d had his way, I wouldn’t be what he tried to project onto me. I would just be dead. Not changed. Not something less than I am. Just dead.”

I feel Marino recoil in his dark, loud space on the other side of his huge, manly truck. He doesn’t understand what I mean or feel and probably never will. He reacts as if I slapped him across the face or kneed him in the groin.

“I’m talking reality.” He strikes back. “One of us has to.”

“Reality is, I’m alive.”

“Yeah. A fuckin’ goddamn miracle.”

“I should have known you would do this.” I get quiet and cold. “So predictable. People blame the prey not the predator, criticize the injured not the asshole who did it.” I tremble in the dark. “Goddamn you. Goddamn you, Marino.”

“I still can’t believe you opened your door!” he shouts. What happened to me makes him feel powerless.

“And where were you guys?” I again remind him of an unpleasant fact. “It might have been nice if at least one or two of you could have kept an eye on my property. Since you were so concerned that he might come after me.”

“I talked to you on the phone, remember?” He attacks from another angle. “You said you was fine. I told you to sit tight, that we’d found where the son of a bitch was hiding, that we knew he was out somewhere, probably looking for another woman to beat and bite the shit out of. And what do you do, Doc-tor Law Enforcement? You open your fucking door when someone knocks! At fucking midnight!”

I thought the person was the police. He said he was the police.

“Why?” Marino is yelling now, pounding the steering wheel like an out-of-control child. “Huh? Why? Goddamn it, tell me!”

We knew for days who the killer is, that he is the spiritual and physical freak Chandonne. We knew he is French and where his organized crime family lives in Paris. The person outside my door did not have even a hint of a French accent.

Police.

I didn’t call the police, I said through the shut door.

Ma’am, we’ve gotten a call about a suspicious person on your property. Are you all right?

He had no accent. I never expected him to speak without an accent. It never occurred to me, not once. Were I to relive last night, it still would not occur to me. The police had just been at my house when the alarm went off. It didn’t seem the least bit suspicious that they would be back. I incorrectly assumed they were keeping a close eye on my property. It was so quick. I opened the door and the porch light was off and I smelled that dirty, wet animal smell in the deep, frigid night.

“Yo! Anybody home?” Marino yells, poking my shoulder hard.

“Don’t touch me!” I come to with a start, and gasp and jerk away from him and the truck swerves. The ensuing silence turns the air heavy like water a hundred feet deep, and awful images swim back into my blackest thoughts. A forgotten ash is so long I can’t steer it to the ashtray in time. I brush off my lap. “You can turn at Stonypoint Shopping Center, if you want,” I say to Marino. “It’s quicker.”

CHAPTER 2

DR. ANNA ZENNER’S imposing greek revival house soars up-lit into the night on the southern bank of the James River. Her mansion, as the neighbors call it, has large Corinthian columns and is a local example of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington’s belief that the new nation’s architecture should express the grandeur and dignity of the ancient world. Anna is from the ancient world, a German of the first order. I believe she is from Germany. Now that I think about it, I do not recall her ever telling me where she was born.

White holiday lights wink from trees, and candles in Anna’s many windows glow warmly, reminding me of Christmases in Miami during the late fifties, when I was a child. On the rare occasion when my father’s leukemia was in remission, he loved to drive us through Coral Gables to gawk at houses he called villas, as if somehow his ability to show us such places made him part of that world. I remember fantasizing about the privileged people who lived inside those homes with their graceful walls and Bentleys and their feasts of steak or shrimp seven days a week. No one who lived like that could possibly be poor or sick or regarded as trash by people who did not like Italians or Catholics or immigrants called Scarpetta.

It is an unusual name of a lineage I really don’t know much about. The Scarpettas have lived in this country for two generations, or so my mother claims, but I don’t know who these other Scarpettas are. I have never met them. I have been told we are traced back to Verona, that my ancestors were farmers and railway workers. I do know for a fact that I have only one sibling, a younger sister named Dorothy. She was briefly married to a Brazilian twice her age who supposedly fathered Lucy. I say supposedly, because when it comes to Dorothy, only DNA would convince me of who she happened to be in bed with on the occasion my niece was conceived. My sister’s fourth marriage was to a Farinelli, and after that Lucy stopped changing her name. Except for my mother, I am the only Scarpetta left, as far as I know.

Marino brakes at formidable black iron gates and his big arm stretches out to stab an intercom button. An electronic buzz and a loud click, and the gates slowly open like a raven’s wings. I don’t know why Anna left her homeland for Virginia and never married. I have never asked her why she set up a psychiatric practice in this modest southern city when she could have gone anywhere. I don’t know why I am suddenly wondering about her life. Thoughts are odd misfires. I carefully get out of Marino’s truck and step down on granite pavers. It is as if I am having software problems. All sorts of files are being opened and closed unprovoked, and system messages are flashing. I am not sure of Anna’s exact age, only that she is in her mid-seventies. As far as I know, she has never told me where she went to college or medical school. We have shared opinions and information for years, but rarely our vulnerabilities and intimate facts.

It suddenly bothers me considerably that I know so little about Anna, and I feel ashamed as I make my way up her neatly swept front steps, one at a time, sliding my good hand along the frigid iron railing. She opens the front door and her keen face softens. She looks at my thick, crooked cast and blue sling, and meets my eyes. “Kay, I am so glad to see you,” she says, greeting me the same way she always does.

“How’ya doin’, Dr. Zenner!” Marino announces. His enthusiasm is overblown as he goes out of his way to show how popular and charming he is and how little I matter to him. “Something sure smells mmm-mmm-good. You cooking for me again?”

“Not tonight, Captain.” Anna has no interest in him or his bluster. She kisses both of my cheeks, careful of my injury and not hugging me hard, but I feel her heart in the light touch of her fingers. Marino sets my bags inside the foyer on a splendid silk rug beneath a crystal chandelier that sparkles like ice forming in space.

“You can take some soup with you,” she tells Marino. “There is plenty. Very healthy. No fat.”

“If it don’t got fat, it’s against my religion. I’m gonna head out.” He avoids looking at me.

“Where is Lucy?” Anna helps me off with my coat, and I struggle to pull the sleeve over the cast, and then am dismayed to realize I still have my old lab coat on. “You have no autographs on it,” she says to me, because no one has signed my plaster and no one ever will. Anna has an arid, elitist sense of humor. She can be very funny without so much as a hint of a smile, and if one is not attentive and quick-witted, he will completely miss the joke.

“Your joint ain’t nice enough so she’s at the Jefferson,” Marino ironically comments.

Anna goes inside the hall closet to hang up my coat. My nervous energy is dissipating fast. Depression tightens its grip on my chest and increases pressure around my heart. Marino continues to pretend I don’t exist.

“Of course, she can stay here. She is always welcome and I would very much like to see her,” Anna says to me. Her German accent has not softened over the decades. She still talks in square meals, going to awkward angles to get a thought from her brain to her tongue and rarely using contractions. I have always believed she prefers German and speaks English because she has no choice.

Through the open doorway I watch Marino leave. “Why did you move here, Anna?” Now I am talking in non sequiturs.

“Here? You mean this house?” She studies me.

“Richmond. Why Richmond?”

“That is easy. Love.” She says this flatly with no trace of feeling one way or another about it.

The temperature has dropped as the night deepens, and Marino’s big, booted feet crunch through crusty snow.

“What love?” I ask her.

“A person who proved to be a waste of time.”

Marino kicks the running board to knock snow loose before climbing inside his throbbing truck, engine rumbling like the bowels of a great ship, exhaust rushing out. He senses I am looking and puts on a bigger act of pretending he is unaware or doesn’t care as he pulls his door shut and shoves his behemoth into gear. Snow spits out from huge tires as he drives off. Anna shuts the front door while I stand before it, lost in a vortex of spiraling thoughts and feelings.

“We must get you settled,” she says to me, touching my arm and motioning for me to follow her.

I come to. “He’s angry with me.”

“If he were not angry about something—or rude—I would think he is ill.”

“He’s angry at me because I almost got murdered.” I sound very tired. “Everybody’s angry with me.”

“You are exhausted.” She pauses in the entrance hallway to hear what I have to say.

“I’m supposed to apologize because someone tried to kill me?” The protests tumble out. “I asked for it? I did something wrong? So I opened my door. I wasn’t perfect, but I’m here, aren’t I? I’m alive, aren’t I? We’re all alive and well, aren’t we? Why is everybody angry with me?”

“Everybody isn’t,” Anna replies.

“Why is it my fault?”

“Do you think it is your fault?” She studies me with an expression that can only be described as radiological. Anna sees right through to my bones.

“Of course not,” I reply. “I know it’s not my fault.”

She deadbolts the door, then sets the alarm and takes me into the kitchen. I try to remember the last time I ate or what day of the week it is. Then it glimmers. Saturday. I have already asked that several times now. Twenty hours have passed since I almost died. The table is set for two, and a large pot of soup simmers on the stove. I smell baking bread and am suddenly nauseous and starved at the same time, and despite all this, a detail registers. If Anna was expecting Lucy, why isn’t the table set for three?

“When will Lucy go back to Miami?” Anna seems to read my thoughts as she lifts the lid off the pot and stirs with a long wooden spoon. “What would you like? Scotch?”

“A strong one.”

She pulls the cork out of a bottle of Glenmorangie Sherry Wood Finish single malt whisky and pours its precious rosy essence over ice in cut crystal tumblers.

“I don’t know when Lucy will go back. Have no idea, really.” I begin to fill in the blanks for her. “ATF was involved in a takedown in Miami that turned bad, very bad. There was a shooting. Lucy . . . ”

“Yes, yes, Kay, I know that part.” Anna hands me my drink. She can sound impatient even when she is very calm. “It was all over the news. And I called you. Remember? We talked about Lucy.”

“Oh, that’s right,” I mutter.

Anna takes the chair across from me, elbows on the table, leaning into our conversation. She is an amazingly intense, fit woman, tall and firm, a Leni Riefenstahl enlightened beyond her time and undaunted by the years. Her blue warm-up suit turns her eyes the same startling shade of cornflowers, and her silver hair is pulled back in a neat ponytail held by a black velvet band. I don’t know for a fact that she had a face-lift or any other cosmetic work, but I suspect modern medicine has something to do with the way she looks. Anna could easily pass for a woman in her fifties.

“I assume Lucy came to stay with you while the incident is investigated,” she comments. “I can only imagine the red tape.”

The takedown had gone about as badly as one could. Lucy killed two members of an international gun smuggling cartel that we now believe is connected to Chandonne’s crime family. She inadvertently wounded Jo, a DEA agent who at the time was her lover. Red tape is not the word for it.

“But I’m not sure you know the part about Jo,” I tell Anna. “Her HIDTA partner.”

“I do not know what HIDTA is.”

“High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. A squad made up of different law enforcement agencies working violent crimes. ATF, DEA, FBI, Miami-Dade,” I tell her. “When the takedown went to hell two weeks ago, Jo got shot in the leg. It turned out the bullet was fired from Lucy’s own gun.”

Anna listens, sipping Scotch.

“So Lucy accidentally shot Jo, and then, of course, what comes out next is their personal relationship,” I continue. “Which has been very strained. I don’t know what’s going on with them now, to tell you the truth. But Lucy is here. I guess she’ll stay through the holidays, and then who knows?”

“I did not know she and Janet had broken up,” Anna observes.

“Quite a while ago.”

“I am very sorry.” She is sincerely bothered by the news. “I liked Janet very much.”

I look down at my soup. It has been a long time since Janet was a topic of conversation. Lucy never says a word about her. I realize I miss Janet very much and still think she was a very stabilizing, mature influence on my niece. If I am honest, I really don’t like Jo. I am not sure why. Maybe, I consider as I reach for my drink, it is simply because she isn’t Janet.

“And Jo’s in Richmond?” Anna digs for more of the story.

“Ironically, she’s from here, even though that’s not how she and Lucy ended up together. They met in Miami through work. Jo will be recovering for a while, staying in Richmond with her parents, I guess. Don’t ask me how that’s going to work. They’re fundamentalist Christians and not exactly supportive of their daughter’s lifestyle.”

“Lucy never picks anything easy,” Anna says, and she is right. “Shootings and more shootings. What is it with her and shooting people? Thank goodness she did not kill again.”

The weight in my chest presses down harder. My blood seems to have turned into a heavy metal.

“What is it with her and killing?” Anna pushes. “What happened this time worries me. If what I’ve heard on TV is to be believed.”

“I haven’t turned on TV. I don’t know what they’re saying.” I sip my drink and think about cigarettes again. I have quit so many times in my life.

“She almost killed him, that Frenchman, Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. She had the gun pointed at him but you stopped her.” Anna’s eyes bore through my skull, probing for secrets. “You tell me.”

I describe to her what happened. Lucy had gone to the Medical College of Virginia to bring Jo home from the hospital, and when they pulled up to my house after midnight, Chandonne and I were in the front yard. The Lucy I conjure up in my memory seems a stranger, a violent person I don’t know, her face unrecognizably twisted by rage as she pointed the pistol at him, finger on the trigger, and I pleaded with her not to shoot. She was screaming at him, cursing him as I called out to her, no, no, Lucy, no! Chandonne was in unspeakable pain, blind and thrashing, rubbing snow into his chemically burned eyes, howling and begging for someone to help him. At this point, Anna interrupts my story.

“Was he speaking French?” she asks.

The question catches me off guard. I try to remember. “I think so.”

“Then you understand French.”

I pause again. “Well, I took it in high school. I just know it seemed at the time he was screaming for me to help him. I seemed to understand what he was saying.”

“Did you try to help him?”

“I was trying to save his life, trying to stop Lucy from killing him.”

“But that was for Lucy, not for him. You weren’t really trying to save his life. You were trying to stop Lucy from ruining her own.”

Thoughts collide, canceling each other out. I don’t reply.

“She wanted to kill him,” Anna goes on. “This was clearly her intention.”

I nod, staring off, reliving it. Lucy, Lucy. I repeatedly called out her name, trying to shatter the homicidal spell she was under. Lucy. I crawled closer to her in the snowy front yard. Put the gun down. Lucy, you don’t want to do this. Please. Put the gun down. Chandonne rolled and writhed, making the horrible sounds of a wounded animal, and Lucy was on her knees, in combat position, gun shaking in both hands as she pointed it at his head. Then feet and legs were all around us. ATF agents and police in dark battle dress clutching rifles and pistols had swarmed into my yard. Not one of them knew what to do as I begged my niece not to kill Chandonne in cold blood. There’s been enough killing, I pled with Lucy as I pulled myself within inches of her, my left arm fractured and useless. Don’t do this. Don’t do this, please. We love you.

“You are quite certain it was Lucy’s intention to kill him, even though it wasn’t self-defense?” Anna asks again.

“Yes,” I reply. “I’m certain.”

“Then should we reconsider that perhaps it was not necessary for her to kill those men down in Miami?”

“That was totally different, Anna,” I reply. “And I can’t blame Lucy for the way she reacted when she saw him in front of my house—saw him and me on the ground in the snow, not even ten feet from each other. She knew about the other cases here, the murders of Kim Luong and Diane Bray. She knew damn well why he had come to my house, what he planned for me. How would you feel if you had been Lucy?”

“I cannot imagine.”

“That’s right,” I reply. “I don’t think anyone can imagine something like that until it happens. I know if I were the one driving up and it was Lucy in the yard, and he had tried to murder her, then . . .” I pause, analyzing, not really able to complete the thought.

“You would have killed him,” Anna finishes what she must suspect I was going to say.

“Well, I might have.”

“Even though he was no threat? He was in terrible pain, blind and helpless?”

“It’s hard to know the other person is helpless, Anna. What did I know outside in the snow, in the dark, with a broken arm, terrorized?”

“Ah. But you knew enough to talk Lucy out of killing him.” She gets up and I watch as she unhooks a ladle from the iron rack of pots and pans suspended overhead and fills big earthenware bowls, steam rising in aromatic clouds. She sets the soup on the table, giving me time to think about what she just said. “Have you ever considered that your life reads like one of your more complicated death certificates.” Anna then says. “Due to, due to, due to, due to.” She motions with her hands, conducting her own orchestra of emphasis. “Where you find yourself now is due to this and that and due to on and on, and it all goes back to the original injury. Your father’s death.”

I search to remember what I have told her about my past.

“You are who you are in life because you became a student of death at a very young age,” she continues. “Most of your childhood you lived with your father’s dying.”

The soup is chicken vegetable and I detect bay leaves and sherry. I am not sure I can eat. Anna slips mitts over her hands and slides sourdough rolls out of the oven. She serves hot bread on small plates with butter and honey. “It seems to be your karma to return to the scene, so to speak, over and over,” she analyzes. “The scene of your father’s death, of that original loss. As if somehow you will undo it. But all you do is repeat it. The oldest pattern in human nature. I see it daily.”

“This isn’t about my father.” I pick up my spoon. “This isn’t about my childhood, and to tell you the truth, the last thing I care about right now is my childhood.”

“It is about not feeling.” She pulls out her chair and sits back down. “About learning not to feel because it was too painful to feel.” The soup is too hot to eat and she idly stirs it with a heavy, engraved silver spoon. “When you were a child, you could not live with the impending doom in your house, the fear, the grief, the anger. You shut down.”

“Sometimes you have to do that.”

“It is never good to do that.” She shakes her head.

“Sometimes it’s survival to do that,” I disagree.

“Shutting down is denial. When you deny the past, you will repeat it. You are living proof. Your life has been one loss after another ever since that original loss. Ironically, you have turned loss into a profession, the doctor who hears the dead, the doctor who sits at the bedside of the dead. Your divorce from Tony. Mark’s death. Then last year, Benton’s murder. Then Lucy in a shoot-out and you almost lose her. And now, finally, you. This terrible man comes to your house and you almost lost you. Losses and more losses.”

The pain from Benton’s murder is frighteningly fresh. I fear it will always be fresh, that I will never escape the hollowness, the echo of empty rooms in my soul and the anguish in my heart. I am outraged all over again as I think of the police in my house unwittingly touching items that belonged to Benton, brushing past his paintings, tracking mud over the fine rug in the dining room he gave me for Christmas one year. No one knowing. No one caring.

“A pattern like this,” Anna comments, “if it isn’t arrested, takes on an unstoppable energy and sucks everything into its black hole.”

I tell her my life is not in a black hole. I don’t deny there is a pattern. I would have to be as dense as dirt not to see it. But on one point I am in adamant disagreement. “It bothers me considerably to hear you imply I brought him to my door,” I tell her, referring again to Chandonne, whom I can scarcely bear to call by name. “That somehow I set everything into motion to bring a killer to my house. If that’s what I hear you saying. If that is what you’re saying.”

“It is what I am asking.” She butters a roll. “It is what I am asking you, Kay,” she somberly repeats.

“Anna, how in God’s name can you think I would somehow bring about my own murder?”

“Because you would not be the first or last person to do something like that. It is not conscious.”

“Not me. Not subconsciously or unconsciously,” I claim.

“There is much self-fulfilled prophecy here. You. Then Lucy. She almost became what she fights. Be careful who you choose for an enemy because that is who you become most like,” Anna tosses Nietzsche’s quote up into the air. She serves up words she has heard me say in the past.

“I didn’t will him to come to my house,” I repeat slowly and flatly. I continue to avoid saying Chandonne’s name because I don’t want to give him the power of being a real person to me.

“How did he know where you live?” Anna continues her questioning.

“It’s been in the news numerous times over the years, unfortunately,” I conjecture. “I don’t know how he knew.”

“What? He went to the library and looked up your address on microfilm? This creature so hideously deformed who rarely went out in the light of day? This dog-faced congenital anomaly, almost every inch of his face, his body covered with long lanugo hair, pale baby-fine hair? He went to the public library?” She lets the absurdity of this hover over us.

“I don’t know how he knew,” I repeat. “Where he was hiding isn’t far from my house.” I am getting upset. “Don’t blame me. No one has a right to blame me for what he did. Why are you blaming me?”

“We create our own worlds. We destroy our own worlds. It is that simple, Kay,” she answers me.

“I can’t believe you think for a minute I wanted him coming after me. I, of all people.” An image of Kim Luong flashes. I remember fractured facial bones crunching beneath my latex-gloved fingers. I remember the pungent sweet odor of coagulating blood in the airless, hot storeroom where Chandonne dragged her dying body so he could release his frenzied lust, beating and biting and smearing her blood. “Those women didn’t bring this upon themselves, either,” I say with emotion.

“I did not know those women,” Anna says. “I cannot speak to what they did or did not do.”

An image of Diane Bray flashes, her arrogant beauty savaged, destroyed and crudely displayed on the bare mattress inside her bedroom. She was completely unrecognizable by the time he finished with her, seeming to hate her more completely than he did Kim Luong—more completely than the women we believe he murdered in Paris before he came to Richmond. I wonder out loud to Anna if Chandonne recognized himself in Bray and it excited his self-hate to its highest level. Diane Bray was cunning and cold. She was cruel and abused power as readily as she breathed air.

“You had every good reason to hate her,” is Anna’s reply.

This stops me in my mental tracks. I don’t respond right away. I try to remember if I have ever said I hate someone, or worse, if I have actually been guilty of it. To hate another person is wrong. It is never right. Hate is a crime of the spirit that leads to crimes of the flesh. Hate is what brings so many of my patients to my door. I tell Anna that I didn’t hate Diane Bray, even though she made it her mission to overpower me and almost succeeded in getting me fired. Bray was pathologically jealous and ambitious. But no, I tell Anna, I didn’t hate Diane Bray. She was evil, I conclude. But she didn’t deserve what he did to her. Certainly, she didn’t invite it.

“You don’t think so?” Anna questions all of it. “You do not think he did to her, symbolically, what she was doing to you? Obsession. Forcing her way into your life when you were vulnerable. Attacking, degrading, destroying—an overpowering that aroused her, perhaps even sexually. What is it you have told me so many times? People die the way they lived.”

“Many of them do.”

“Did she?”

“Symbolically, as you put it?” I reply. “Maybe.”

“And you, Kay? Did you almost die the way you lived?”

“I didn’t die, Anna.”

“But you almost did,” she says again. “And before he came to your door, you had almost given up. You almost stopped living when Benton did.”

Tears touch my eyes.

“What do you think might have happened to you had Diane Bray not died?” Anna then asks.

Bray ran the Richmond police department and fooled people who mattered. In a very short time, she made a name for herself throughout Virginia, and ironically, her narcissism, her lust for power and recognition, it appears, may be what lured Chandonne to her. I wonder if he stalked her first. I wonder if he stalked me, and suppose the answer to both questions is that he must have.

“Do you think you’d still be the chief medical examiner if Diane Bray were alive?” Anna’s stare is unwavering.

“I wouldn’t have let her win.” I taste my soup and my stomach flops. “I don’t care how diabolical she was, I wouldn’t have allowed it. My life is up to me. It was never up to her. My life is mine to make or ruin.”

“Perhaps you are glad she is dead,” Anna says.

“The world’s better off without her.” I push the place mat and everything on it well away from me. “That’s the truth. The world is better off without people like her. The world would be better off without him.”

“Better off without Chandonne?”

I nod.

“Then perhaps you wish Lucy had killed him after all?” she quietly suggests, and Anna has a way of demanding truth without being aggressive or judging. “Maybe you would pull the switch, as they say?”

“No.” I shake my head. “No, I would not pull the switch on anyone. I can’t eat. I’m sorry you went to so much trouble. I hope I’m not coming down with something.”

“We have talked enough for now.” Anna is suddenly the parent deciding it is time for bed. “Tomorrow is Sunday, a good day to stay in and be quiet and rest. I am clearing my calendar, canceling all my appointments for Monday. And then I’ll cancel Tuesday and Wednesday and the rest of the week, if need be.”

I try to object but she won’t hear it.

“The good thing about being my age is I can do whatever the hell I want,” she adds. “I am on call for emergencies. But that is all. And right now, you are my biggest emergency, Kay.”

“I’m not an emergency.” I get up from the table.

Anna helps me with my luggage and takes me down a long hallway that leads to the west wing of her majestic home. The guest room where I am to stay for an undetermined period of time is dominated by a large yew wood bed that, like much of the furniture in her house, is pale gold Biedermeier. Her decor is restrained, with straight and simple lines, but cumulus down-filled duvets and pillows and heavy draperies that flow in champagne silk waterfalls to the hardwood floor hint at her true nature. Anna’s motivation in life is the comfort of others, to heal and to banish pain and celebrate pure beauty.

“What else do you need?” She hangs up my clothes.

I help put away other items in dresser drawers and realize I am trembling again.

“Do you need something to sleep?” She lines up my shoes on the closet floor.

Taking an Ativan or some other sedative is a tempting proposition that I resist. “I’ve always been afraid to make it a habit,” I vaguely respond. “You can see how I am with cigarettes. I can’t be trusted.”

Anna looks at me. “It is very important you get sleep, Kay. No better friend to depression.”

I am not sure what she is saying, but I know what she means. I am depressed. I am probably going to be depressed, and sleep deprivation makes everything so much worse. Throughout my life, insomnia has flared up like arthritis, and when I became a physician I had to resist the easy habit of indulging in one’s own candy store. Prescription drugs have always been there. I have always stayed away from them.

Anna leaves me and I sit up in bed with the lights off, staring into the dark, halfway believing that when morning comes, I will find what has happened is just another one of my bad dreams, another horror that crept out from my deeper layers when I was not quite conscious. My rational voice probes my interior like a flashlight but dispels nothing. I can’t illuminate any meaning to my almost being mutilated and killed and how that fact will affect the rest of my life. I can’t feel it. I can’t make sense of it. God, help me. I turn over on my side and shut my eyes. Now I lay me down to sleep, my mother used to pray with me, but I always thought the words were really more for my father in his sickbed down the hall. Sometimes when my mother would leave my room I would insert masculine pronouns into the verses. If he should die before he wakes, I pray the Lord his soul to take, and I would cry myself to sleep.

CHAPTER 3

I WAKE UP the following morning to voices in the house and have the unsettling sensation that the telephone rang all night. I am not sure if I dreamed it. For an awful moment I have no idea where I am, then it comes to me in a sick, fearful wave. I work my way up against pillows and am still for a moment. I can tell through drawn curtains that the sun is aloof again, offering nothing but gray.

I help myself to a thick terry-cloth robe hanging on the back of the bathroom door and put on a pair of socks before venturing out to see who else is in the house. I hope the visitor is Lucy, and it is. She and Anna are in the kitchen. Small snowflakes sprinkle down past expansive windows overlooking the backyard and the flat pewter river. Bare trees etched darkly against the day move slightly in the wind, and wood smoke rises from the house of the nearest neighbor. Lucy has on a faded warm-up suit left over from when she took computer and robotics courses at MIT. It appears she has styled her short auburn hair with her fingers, and she seems unusually grim and has a glassy-eyed, bloodshot look that I associate with too much booze the night before.

“Did you just get here?” I hug her good morning.

“Actually, last night,” she replies, squeezing me tight. “I couldn’t resist. Thought I’d drop by and we’d have a slumber party. But you were down for the count. It’s my fault for getting here so late.”

“Oh no.” I go hollow inside. “You should have gotten me up. Why didn’t you?”

“No way. How’s the arm?”

“It doesn’t hurt as much.” This is not at all true. “You checked out of the Jefferson?”

“Nope, still there.” Lucy’s expression is unreadable. She drops to the floor and pulls off her warm-up pants, revealing bright spandex running tights underneath.

“I am afraid your niece was a bad influence,” Anna says. “She brought over a very nice bottle of Veuve Cliquot and we stayed up much too late. I would not let her drive back downtown.”

I feel a twinge of hurt, or maybe it is jealousy. “Champagne? Are we celebrating something?” I inquire.

Anna replies with a slight shrug. She is preoccupied. I sense she carries very heavy thoughts that she does not want to set down before me, and I wonder if the phone really did ring last night. Lucy unzips her jacket, revealing more bright blue and black nylon that fits her strong, athletic body like paint.

“Yeah. Celebrating,” Lucy says, bitterness lacing her voice. “ATF’s put me on admin leave.”

I can’t believe I heard her right. Administrative leave is the same thing as being suspended. It is the first step in being fired. I glance at Anna for any sign that she already knows about this, but she seems just as surprised as I am.

“They’ve put me on the beach.” ATF slang for suspension. “I’ll get a letter in the next week or so that will cite all my transgressions.” Lucy acts blasé but I know her too well to be fooled. Anger is about all I have seen boiling out of her over recent months and years, and it is there now, molten beneath her many complex layers. “They’ll give me all the reasons I should be terminated and I get to appeal. Unless I decide to just fuck it and quit. Which I might. I don’t need them.”

“Why? What on earth happened? Not because of him.” I mean Chandonne.

With rare exception, when an agent has been in a shooting or some other critical incident, the routine is to immediately involve him in peer support and reassign him to a less stressful job, such as arson investigation instead of the dangerous undercover work Lucy was doing in Miami. If the individual is emotionally unable to cope, he might even be granted traumatic leave time. But administrative leave is another matter. It is punishment, plain and simple.

Lucy looks up at me from her seat on the floor, legs straight out, hands planted behind her back. “It’s the old damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” she retorts. “If I’d shot him, I’d have hell to pay. I didn’t shoot him and I have hell to pay.”

“You were in a shoot-out in Miami, then very soon after you come to Richmond and almost shot someone else.” Anna states the truth. It doesn’t matter if the someone else is a serial killer who broke into my house. Lucy has a history of resorting to force that predates even the incident in Miami. Her troubled past presses down heavily in Anna’s kitchen like a low-pressure front.

“I’m the first to admit it,” Lucy replies. “All of us wanted to blow him away. You don’t think Marino did?” She meets my eyes. “You don’t think every cop, every agent who showed up at your house didn’t want to pull the trigger? They think I’m some kind of soldier of fortune, some psycho who gets off on killing people. At least, that’s what they’re hinting at.”

“You do need time off,” Anna says bluntly. “Maybe it is about that and nothing more.”

“That’s not what this is about. Come on, if one of the guys had done what I did in Miami, he’d be a hero. If one of the guys almost killed Chandonne, the suits in D.C. would be applauding his restraint, not nailing him for almost doing something. How can you punish someone for almost doing something? In fact, how can you even prove someone almost did something?”

“Well, they’ll have to prove it,” the lawyer, the investigator in me tells her. At the same time I am reminded that Chandonne almost did something to me. He didn’t actually do it, no matter his intention, and his eventual legal defense will make a big issue of this fact.

“They can do whatever they want,” Lucy replies, as hurt and outrage swell. “They can fire me. Or bring me back in and park my butt at a desk in some little windowless room somewhere in South Dakota or Alaska. Or bury me in some chicken-shit department like audio-visual.”

“Kay, you haven’t had coffee yet.” Anna attempts to dispel the mounting tension.

“So maybe that’s my problem. Maybe that’s why nothing’s making any sense this morning.” I head to the drip machine near the sink. “Anybody else?”

There are no other takers. I pour a cup as Lucy leans into deep stretches, and it is always amazing to watch her move, liquid and supple, her muscles calling attention to themselves without deliberation or fanfare. Having started life pudgy and slow, she has spent years engineering herself into a machine that will respond the way she demands, very much like the helicopters she flies. Maybe it is her Brazilian blood that adds the dark fire to her beauty, but Lucy is electrifying. People fix their eyes on her wherever she goes, and her reaction is a shrug, at most.

“I don’t know how you can go out and run in weather like this,” Anna says to her.

“I like pain.” Lucy snaps on her butt pack, a pistol inside it.

“We need to talk more about this, figure out what you’re going to do.” Caffeine defibrillates my slow heart and jolts me back into a clear head.

“After I run, I’m going to work out in the gym,” Lucy tells us. “I’ll be gone for a while.”

“Pain and more pain,” Anna muses.

All I can think of when I look at my niece is how extraordinary she is and how much unfairness life has dealt her. She never knew her biological father, and then Benton came along and was the father she never had, and she lost him, too. Her mother is a self-centered woman who is too competitive with Lucy to love her, if my sister, Dorothy, is capable of loving anyone, and I really don’t believe she is. Lucy is possibly the most intelligent, intricate person I know. It has not earned her many fans. She has always been irrepressible and as I watch her spring out of the kitchen like an Olympic runner, armed and dangerous, I am reminded of when she began the first grade at age four and a half and flunked conduct.

“How do you flunk conduct?” I asked Dorothy when she called me in a rage to complain about the horrible hardship of being Lucy’s mother.

“She talks all the time and interrupts the other students and is always raising her hand to answer questions!” Dorothy blurted over the phone. “Do you know what her teacher wrote on her report card? Here! Let me read it to you! Lucy does not work and play well with others. She is a show-off and a know-it-all and is constantly taking things apart, such as the pencil sharpener and doorknobs.”

Lucy is gay. That is probably most unfair of all because she can’t outgrow it or get over it. Homosexuality is unfair because it creates unfairness. For that reason, it broke my heart when I found out this part of my niece’s life. I desperately don’t want her to suffer. I also force myself to admit that I have managed to ignore the obvious up until now. ATF isn’t going to be generous or forgiving, and Lucy has probably known this for a while. Administration in D.C. won’t look at all she has accomplished, but will focus on her through the distorting lens of prejudice and jealousy.

“It’ll be a witch hunt,” I say after Lucy has left the house.

Anna cracks eggs into a bowl.

“They want her gone, Anna.”

She drops shells into the sink and opens the refrigerator, pulling out a carton of milk, glancing at the expiration date. “There are those who think she is a hero,” she says.

“Law enforcement tolerates women. It doesn’t celebrate them and punishes those who become heroes. That’s the dirty little secret no one wants to talk about,” I say.

Anna vigorously whips eggs with a fork.

“It’s our same story,” I continue. “We went to medical school in a day when we had to apologize for taking men’s slots. In some cases, we were shunned, sabotaged. I had three other women in my first-year medical school class. How many did you have?”

“It was different in Vienna.”

“Vienna?” My thoughts evaporate.

“Where I was trained,” she informs me.

“Oh.” I experience guilt again as I learn another detail I don’t know about my good friend.

“When I came here, everything you are saying about how it is for women was exactly like that.” Anna’s mouth is set in a hard line as she pours egg batter into a cast-iron skillet. “I remember what it was like when I moved to Virginia. How I was treated.”

“Believe me, I know all about it.”

“I was thirty years ahead of you, Kay. You really don’t know all about it.”

Eggs steam and bubble. I lean against the counter, drinking black coffee, wishing I had been awake when Lucy came in last night, aching because I didn’t talk to her. I had to find out her news like this, almost as a by the way. “Did she talk to you?” I ask Anna. “About what she just told us?”

She folds the eggs over and over. “Looking back on it, I think she showed up with champagne because she wanted to tell you. Rather an inappropriate effect, considering her news.” She pops multi-grain English muffins out of the toaster. “It is easy to assume that psychiatrists have such deep conversations with everyone, when in truth, people rarely tell me their true feelings, even when they pay me by the hour.” She carries our plates to the table. “Mostly, people tell me what they think. That is the problem. People think too much.”

“They won’t be blatant.” I am preoccupied with ATF again as Anna and I sit across from each other. “Their attack will be covert, like the FBI. And in truth, the FBI ran her off for the same reason. She was their rising star, a computer wizard, a helicopter pilot, the first female member of the Hostage Rescue Team.” I rush through Lucy’s resume as Anna’s expression turns increasingly skeptical. We both know it is unnecessary for me to recite all this. She has known Lucy since Lucy was a child. “Then the gay card was played.” I can’t stop. “Well, she left them for ATF and here we go again. On and on, history repeated. Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Because you are consuming yourself with Lucy’s problems when your own loom larger than Mont Blanc.”

My attention wanders out the window. A blue jay helps himself to the bird feeder, feathers ruffling, sunflower seeds falling and peppering the snowy earth like lead shot. Pale fingers of sunlight probe the overcast morning. I nervously turn my coffee cup in small circles on the table. My elbow throbs slowly and deeply as we eat. Whatever my problems are, I resist talking about them, as if to voice them will somehow give them life—as if they don’t have life already. Anna doesn’t push. We are quiet. Silverware clinks against plates and snow drifts down more thickly, frosting shrubbery and trees and hovering foggily over the river. I return to my room and take a long, hot bath, my cast propped on the side of the tub. I am dressing with difficulty, realizing that I am not likely to ever master tying shoes with one hand, when the doorbell rings. Moments later, Anna knocks and asks me if I am decent.

Thoughts bloom darkly and roll like storms. I am not expecting company. “Who is it?” I call out.

“Buford Righter,” she says.

CHAPTER 4

BEHIND HIS BACK, the city commonweath’s attorney is called many things: Easy Righter (he is weak), Righter Wrong (wishy-washy), Fighter Righter (anything but), Booford (scared of his own shadow). Always proper, always appropriate, Righter is always the Virginia gentleman he was trained to be in the Caroline County horse country of his roots. No one loves him. No one hates him. He is neither feared nor respected. Righter has no fire. I can’t recall ever seeing him emotional, no matter how cruel or heart-wrenching the case. Worse, he is squeamish when it comes to the details I bring to the forum, preferring to focus on points of law and not the appalling human messiness left by its violations.

His avoidance of the morgue has resulted in his not being as well versed in forensic science and medicine as he ought to be. In fact, he is the only seasoned prosecutor I know who doesn’t seem to mind stipulating cause of death. In other words, he allows the paper record to speak for the medical examiner in the courtroom. This is a travesty. To me it constitutes malpractice. When the medical examiner isn’t in the courtroom, then, in a sense, neither is the body, and jurors don’t envision the victim or what he went through during the process of dying violently. Clinical words on protocols simply don’t evoke the terror or the suffering, and for this reason, it is usually the defense, not the prosecution, who wants to stipulate cause of death.

“Buford, how are you?” I hold out my hand and he glances at my cast and my sling, and down at my untied shoelaces and my shirttail hanging out. He has never seen me in anything less than a suit and in a setting that befits my professional rank, and his brow knits into an expression that is supposed to evince genteel compassion and understanding, the humility and caring of those handpicked by God to rule the rest of us lesser creatures. His type abounds among the first families of Virginia, a privileged, dusty people who have refined the skill of disguising their elitism and arrogance beneath a heavy aura of burden, as if it is so damn hard to be them.

“The question is, how are you?” he says, sitting back down in Anna’s handsome oval living room with its vaulted ceiling and view of the river.

“I really don’t know how to answer that, Buford.” I choose a rocking chair. “Every time someone asks, my mind reboots.” Anna must have just gotten the fire going and has vanished, and I have the uneasy sensation that her absence is about more than her being politely unobtrusive.

“No small wonder. Don’t even know how you’re able to function after what you’ve been through.” Righter speaks with a syrupy Virginia drawl. “Sure am sorry to barge in like this, Kay, but something’s come up, something unexpected. Nice place, isn’t it?” He continues to survey his surroundings. “She build or was it already here?”

I don’t know or care.

“You two are pretty close, I gather,” he adds.

I am not sure if he is making small talk or fishing. “She’s been a good friend,” I reply.

“I know she thinks the world of you. All of which is to say,” he goes on, “that you couldn’t be in better hands right now, in my opinion.”

I resent his implying that I am in anybody’s hands, as if I am a patient on a ward, and I say so.

“Oh, I see.” He continues his scan of oil paintings on pale rose walls, of art glass and sculptures and European furniture. “Then you don’t have a professional relationship? Never have?”

“Not literally,” I reply testily. “I have never had an appointment.”

“She ever prescribe medications for you?” he blandly goes on.

“Not that I recall.”

“Well, can’t believe it’s almost Christmas.” Righter sighs, his attention wandering back in from the river, back to me.

To use a Lucy term, he looks dorky in Bavarian button-up heavy green wool pants tucked into fleece-lined rubber boots with big tread. He wears a plaid Burberry-type wool sweater buttoned up to his chin, as if he can’t decide whether he will climb a mountain or play golf in Scotland this day.

“Well,” he says, “let me tell you why I’m here. Marino called a couple hours ago. There’s been an unanticipated development in the Chandonne case.”

The stab of betrayal is instant. Marino has told me nothing. He hasn’t even bothered to see how I am doing this morning.

“I’ll give you a summation as best I can.” Righter crosses his legs and demurely places his hands in his lap, a thin wedding band and University of Virginia class ring glinting in lamplight. “Kay, I’m sure you’re aware the news of what happened at your house and the subsequent apprehension of Chandonne has been broadcast all over. I mean all over. I’m sure you’ve followed it and can appreciate the magnitude of what I’m about to say.”

Fear is a fascinating emotion. I have studied it endlessly and often tell people the best example of how it works is to recall the reaction of another driver you have pulled in front of and almost hit. Panic instantly turns to rage and the other person lays on the horn, makes obscene gestures or, these days, shoots you. I go through the progression completely, flawlessly, shrill fear turning to fury. “I’ve not followed the news deliberately and certainly won’t appreciate the magnitude of it,” I reply. “I never appreciate having my privacy violated.”

“The murders of Kim Luong and Diane Bray created a lot of attention, but nothing like this—the murder attempt on you,” he continues. “I’m supposing, then, you didn’t see The Washington Post this morning?”

I just stare at him, seething.

“Front-page photo of Chandonne in the stretcher being carried into the E.R., his hairy shoulders sticking out of the sheets like some sort of long-haired dog. Of course, his face was covered by bandages, but you certainly could get the sense of how grotesque he is. And the tabloids. You can imagine. Werewolf in Richmond, Beauty and the Beast, that sort of thing.” Disdain creeps around the edges of his voice, as if sensationalism is obscene, and I am subjected to an unwanted image of him making love to his wife. I can envision him fucking with his socks on. I suspect he would consider sex an indignity, the primitive judge of biology overruling his higher self. I have heard rumors. In the men’s room, he won’t use the urinals or toilets in front of anybody. He is a compulsive hand-washer. All of this is buzzing through my mind as he continues to sit so properly and disclose the wilting public exposure Chandonne has caused me.

“Do you know if photographs of my house have shown up anywhere?” I have to ask. “There were photographers when I came out of my driveway last night.”

“Well, I do know there have been some helicopters flying over this morning. Someone told me that,” he replies, making me instantly suspicious that he has been back at my house again and witnessed this for himself. “Taking aerial shots.” He stares out at snow drifting down. “I guess the weather’s put a stop to it. The guard gate’s been turning away quite a few cars. The press, the curious. In an unexpected way, a damn good thing you’re staying with Dr. Zenner. Funny how things work out.” He pauses, staring off toward the river again. A flock of Canada geese circles, as if waiting for instructions from the tower. “Normally, what I’d recommend is you don’t return to your house until after the trial. . . .”

“Until after the trial?” I interrupt.

“That would be if the trial were here,” he leads up to his next revelation, which I automatically assume is a reference to a change of venue.

“You’re saying, the trial will probably be moved out of Richmond,” I interpolate. “And what do you mean by normally?”

“That’s what I’m getting to. Marino got a call from the Manhattan D.A.’s office.”

“This morning? This is the new development?” I am baffled. “What does New York have to do with anything?”

“This was a few hours ago,” he goes on. “The head of the sex crimes division, a woman named Jaime Berger—a weird name, spelled J-A-I-M-E but pronounced Jamie. You may have heard of her. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if you two know each other.”

“We’ve never met,” I reply. “But I’ve heard of her.”

“Friday, December fifth, two years ago,” Righter goes on, “the body of a twenty-eight-year-old black female was found in New York, an apartment in the area of Second Avenue and Seventy-seventh Street, Upper East Side. Apparently a woman who was a television meteorologist, uh, did the weather, on CNBC. Don’t know if you heard about the case?”

I begin to make connections against my will.

“When she didn’t show up at the studio early that morning, the morning of the fifth, and didn’t answer the phone, someone checked on her. The victim”—Righter pulls a tiny leather notebook out of his back pants pocket and flips through pages—“name of Susan Pless. Well, her body’s back in her bedroom on the rug by the bed. Clothes ripped off from the waist up, face and head so badly beaten it looks like she was in a plane crash.” He glances up at me. “And that’s a quote, the plane crash part—supposedly how Berger described it to Marino. What was the word you used to use? Remember that case where the drunk teenagers were racing in a pickup truck and one of them decides to hang halfway out his window and has the misfortune of encountering a tree?”

“Bogging,” I dully reply as I take in what he is saying. “Face caved in from severe impact, such as you might find in plane crashes or in cases where people have jumped or fallen from high places and hit face first. Two years ago?” My thoughts spin. “How can that be?”

“I won’t go into all the gory detail.” He is flipping more pages in his notebook. “But there were bite marks, including on the hands and feet, and a lot of strange, long pale hairs adhering to blood that at first were presumed to be animal hairs. Maybe a long-haired Angora cat or something.” He looks up at me. “You’re getting the drift.”

All along we have assumed Chandonne’s trip to Richmond was his first to the United States. We have no logical reason for this assumption beyond our painting him as a Quasimodo of sorts who spent his life hidden in the basement of his powerful family’s Paris home. We also assumed he sailed to Richmond from Antwerp at the same time his brother’s dead body was headed our way. Are we wrong about that, too? I toss this out to Righter.

“You know what Interpol conjectured, at any rate,” he comments.

“That he was aboard the Sirius under an alias,” I recall, “a man named Pascal who was immediately taken to the airport when the ship came to port here in Richmond in early December. Supposedly a family emergency required him to fly back to Europe.” I repeat information Jay Talley presented while I was in Lyon at Interpol last week. “But no one ever actually saw him board the plane, so it’s been assumed Pascal was really Chandonne and he never flew anywhere but stayed here and started killing. But if this guy readily travels in and out of the U.S., no telling how long he’s been in the States or when he got here or anything. So much for theories.”

“Well, I suppose a lot of them may end up revised before it’s all over. No disrespect to Interpol or anyone else intended.” Righter recrosses his legs and seems strangely pleased.

“Has he been located? This Pascal person?”

Righter doesn’t know, but he speculates that whoever the real Pascal is—assuming he exists—he is probably just one more rotten apple involved with the Chandonne family’s criminal cartel. “Another guy with an alias, possibly even an associate of the dead guy in the cargo container,” Righter speculates. “The brother, I guess. Thomas Chandonne, who we certainly know was involved in the family business.”

“I’m assuming Berger heard the news about Chandonne’s being caught, heard about his murders and called us,” I say.

“Recognized the MO, that’s right. Says the case of Susan Pless has always haunted her. Berger’s in a hellfire hurry to compare DNA. Apparently got seminal fluid and they’ve got a profile on it, have had it for two years now.”

“So the seminal fluid in Susan’s case was analyzed.” I ponder this, somewhat surprised because typically overworked, financially stressed labs do not analyze DNA evidence until there is a suspect for comparison—especially if there isn’t an extensive databank to run the profile through in hopes of a cold hit. In 1997, New York’s databank wasn’t even in existence yet. “Does this mean they had a suspect originally?” I ask.

“I think they had one guy in mind who didn’t pan out,” Righter replies. “All I know is they did get a profile and we’re getting Chandonne’s DNA up there to the M.E.’s office immediately—in fact, the sample’s on its way, even as we speak. To state the obvious, we’ve got to know if it’s a match before Chandonne’s arraigned here in Richmond. Got to cut that off at the pass, and the good news is we’re given the gift of at least a few extra days because of his medical condition, because of the chemical burns to his eyes.” He says this as if I had nothing to do with it. “Kind of like the golden hour you always talk about, that brief period of time you’ve got to save someone who’s been in an awful accident or whatever. This is our golden hour. We’ll get the DNA compared and see if Chandonne is in fact the person who killed the woman in New York two years ago.”

Righter has an annoying habit of repeating things I have said, as if being anecdotal somehow lets him off the hook for remaining ignorant about matters that count. “What about bite marks?” I ask. “Was there any information on those? Chandonne has very unusual dentition.”

“You know, Kay,” he says, “I really didn’t get into those sorts of details.”

Of course, he would not have. I push for the truth, for the real reason he has come to see me this morning. “And what if the DNA points to Chandonne? You want to know before the arraignment here? Why?” It is a rhetorical question. I think I know why. “You don’t want him arraigned here. You intend to turn him over to New York and let him be tried up there first.”

He avoids my eyes.

“Why in the world would you do that, Buford?” I go on as I become convinced that this is exactly what he has decided. “So you can wash your hands of him? Ship him up to Riker’s Island and be rid of him? And bring no justice to the cases here? Let’s just be honest, Buford, if they get a first-degree murder conviction in Manhattan, you won’t bother to try him here, now will you?”

He gives me one of his sincere looks. “Everyone in the community has always respected you so much,” he startles me by saying.

“Has always?” Alarm shoots through me like cold water. “As in not anymore?”

“I’m just telling you I understand how you feel—that you and these other poor women deserve him punished to the full extent of the . . .”

“So I guess the bastard just gets away with what he tried to do to me,” I hotly cut him off. Beneath all this is pain. The pain of rejection. The pain of abandonment. “I guess he just gets away with what he did to these other poor women, as you put it. Am I right?”

“They have the death penalty in New York,” he replies.

“Oh for God’s sake,” I exclaim in disgust. I fix on him intensely, hotly, like the focus of the magnifying glass I used in childhood experiments to burn holes in paper and dead leaves. “And when have they ever imposed it?” He knows the answer is never. No one ever gets the needle in Manhattan.

“And there’s no guarantee it would be imposed in Virginia, either,” Righter reasonably answers. “The defendant isn’t an American citizen. He has a bizarre disease or deformity or whatever it is. We’re not even certain he speaks English.”

“He certainly spoke English when he came to my house.”

“He might get off on insanity, for all we know.”

“I guess that depends on the skill of the prosecutor, Buford.”

Righter blinks. His jaw muscles bunch. He looks like a Hollywood parody of an accountant—all buttoned up tight and in tiny glasses—who has just been subjected to an offensive smell.

“Have you talked to Berger?” I ask him. “You must have. You couldn’t have come up with this on your own. You two have made a deal.”

“We’ve conferred. There’s pressure, Kay. Certainly you’ve got to appreciate that. For one thing, he’s French. You got any idea how the French would react if we tried to execute one of their native sons here in Virginia?”

“Good God,” I blurt out. “This isn’t about capital punishment. This is about punishment, period. You know how I feel about capital punishment, Buford. I’m against it. I’m more against it the older I get. But he should be held responsible for what he did here in Virginia, damn it.”

Righter says nothing, looking out the window again.

“So you and Berger agreed if the DNA matches, Manhattan can have Chandonne,” I offer my summation.

“Think about it. This is the best we could hope for in terms of change of venue, so to speak.” Righter gives me his eyes again. “And you know damn well the case could never be tried here in Richmond with all the publicity and whatnot. We’d probably all get sent out to some rural courthouse a million miles from here, and how would you like to be put through that for weeks, possibly months, on end?”

“That’s right.” I get up and jab logs with the poker, heat pressing against my face, sparks exploding up the chimney like a flock of spooked starlings. “God forbid that we should be inconvenienced.” I jab hard with my good arm, as if I am trying to kill the fire. I sit back down, flushed and suddenly on the verge of tears. I know all about post-traumatic stress syndrome and accept that I am suffering from it. I am anxious and startle easily. A little while ago I turned on a local classical music station and Pachelbel overwhelmed me with grief and I began to sob. I know the symptoms. I swallow hard and steady myself. Righter watches me in silence, with a tired look of sad nobility, as if he is Robert E. Lee remembering a painful battle.

“What will happen to me?” I ask. “Or do I just go on with my life now as if I never worked these God-awful murders—as if I never autopsied his victims or escaped with my life when he forced his way into my house? What will my role in this be, Buford, supposing he’s tried in New York?”

“That will be up to Ms. Berger,” he replies.

“Free lunches.” It is a term I use when referring to victims who never see justice. In the scenario Righter is suggesting, I, for example, would be a free lunch because Chandonne will never go to trial in New York for what he intended to do to me in Richmond. More unconscionably, he will not be given so much as a slap on the hand for the murders he committed here, either. “You’ve just thrown this entire city to the wolves,” I tell him.

He realizes the double entendre the same moment I do. I see it in his eyes. Richmond has already been thrown to one wolf, Chandonne, whose modus operandi when he began killing in France was to leave notes signed Le Loup-Garou, the werewolf. Now justice for this city’s victims will be in the hands of strangers, or more to the point, there will be no justice. Anything can happen. Anything will.

“What if France wants to extradite him?” I challenge Righter. “What if New York allows it?”

“We could cite what ifs until the moon turns blue,” he says.

I stare at him with open disdain.

“Don’t take this personally, Kay.” Righter gives me that pious, sad look again. “Don’t turn this into your personal war. We just want the bastard out of commission. Doesn’t matter who accomplishes that.”

I get up from my chair. “Well, it does matter. It sure as hell does,” I tell him. “You’re a coward, Buford.” I turn my back on him and walk out of the room.

Minutes later, from behind the shut door in my wing of the house, I hear Anna showing Righter out. Obviously, he lingered long enough to talk to her, and I wonder what he might have said about me. I sit on the edge of my bed, utterly lost. I can’t remember ever feeling this lonely, this frightened, and am relieved when I hear Anna coming down the hall. She knocks lightly on my door.

“Come in,” I say in an unsteady voice.

She stands in the doorway looking at me. I feel like a child, powerless, hopeless, foolish. “I insulted Righter,” I tell her. “Doesn’t matter if what I said was true. I called him a coward.”

“He thinks you are unstable right now,” she replies. “He is concerned. He is also ein Mann ohne Rückgrat. A man without backbone, as we say where I come from.” She smiles a little.

“Anna, I’m not unstable.”

“Why are we in here when we can be enjoying the fire?” she says.

She intends to talk to me. “Okay,” I concede, “you win.”

CHAPTER 5

I HAVE NEVER been Anna’s patient. For that matter, I have never had psychotherapy of any sort, which is not to say I have never needed it. Certainly I have. I don’t know anybody who can’t benefit from good counsel. It is simply that I am so private and don’t trust people easily and for good reason. There is no such thing as absolute discretion. I am a doctor. I know other doctors. Doctors talk to each other and to their family and friends. They tell secrets that they swear upon Hippocrates they will never utter to another soul. Anna switches off lamps. The late morning is overcast and as dark as dusk, and rose-painted walls catch firelight and make the living room irresistibly cozy. I am suddenly self-conscious. Anna has set the stage for my unveiling. I pick the rocker and she pulls an ottoman close and perches on the edge of it, facing me like a great bird hunched over its nest.

“You will not get through this if you remain silent.” She is brutally direct.

Grief rises in my throat and I try to swallow it.

“You are traumatized,” Anna goes on. “Kay, you are not made of steel. Not even you can endure so much and just keep going as if nothing has happened. So many times I called you after Benton was killed, and you would not find time for me. Why? Because you did not want to talk.”

I can’t hide my emotions this time. Tears slide down my face and drop in my lap like blood.

“I have always told my patients when they do not face their problems, they are headed for a day of reckoning.” Anna sits forward, intensely leaning into the words she fires straight at my heart. “This is your day of reckoning.” She points at me, staring. “Now you will talk to me, Kay Scarpetta.”

I blearily look down at my lap. My slacks are speckled with tears and I make the inane connection that the drops are perfectly round because they fell at a ninety-degree angle. “I can never get away from it,” I say in despair under my breath.

“Get away from what?” This has snagged Anna’s interest.

“What I do. Everything reminds me of something from my work. I don’t talk about it.”

“I want you to talk about it now,” she tells me.

“It’s foolish.”

She waits, the patient fisherman, knowing I am nudging the hook. Then I take it. I give Anna examples I find embarrassing, if not ridiculous. I tell her I never drink tomato juice or V8 or Bloody Marys on the rocks because when the ice begins to melt, it looks like coagulating blood separating from serum. I stopped eating liver in medical school, and the idea of considering any sort of organ as something for my palate is impossible. I recall a morning on Hilton Head Island when Benton and I were walking on the beach, and the receding surf had left areas of crinkled gray sand that looked remarkably like the lining of the stomach. My thoughts twist and turn where they will, and a trip to France unfolds for the first time in years. On one of the rare occasions when Benton and I ever really got away from our work, we toured the Grands Vins de Bourgogne and were received by the revered domains of Drouhin and Dugat, and tasted from casks of Chambertin, Montrachet, Musigny and Vosne-Romanée. “I remember being moved in ways I can’t say,” I share memories I did not know I still had. “The light of early spring changing on the slopes and the gnarled reach of cut-back winter vines, all holding up their hands in the same way, offering the best they have, their essence, to us. And so often we don’t touch their character, don’t take the time to find the harmony in subtle tones, the symphony fine wines play on your tongue if you let them.” My voice drifts off. Anna silently waits for me to come back. “Like my being asked only about my cases,” I go on. “Only asked about the horrors I see, when there is so much else to me. I am not some goddamn cheap thrill with a screw cap.”

“You feel lonely,” Anna softly observes. “And misunderstood. Perhaps as dehumanized as your dead patients.”

I do not answer her but continue my analogies, describing when Benton and I traveled by train across France for several weeks, ending in Bordeaux, and the rooftops got redder toward the south. The first touch of spring shimmered an unreal green on trees, and veins of water and the bigger arteries aspired toward the sea, just as all blood vessels in the body begin and end at the heart. “I’m constantly struck by the symmetry in nature, the way creeks and tributaries from the air look like the circulatory system, and rocks remind me of old scattered bones,” I say. “And the brain starts out smooth and becomes convoluted and crevassed with time, much as mountains develop distinction over thousands of years. We are subjected to the same laws of physics. Yet we aren’t. The brain, for example, doesn’t look like what it does. On gross examination, it’s about as exciting as a mushroom.”

Anna is nodding. She asks if I shared any of these reflections with Benton. I say, no. She wants to know why I didn’t feel inclined to share what seem like harmless perceptions with him, my lover, and I tell her I need to think about this for a minute. I am not sure of the answer.

“No.” She prods me. “Do not think. Feel it.”

I ponder.

“No. Feel it, Kay. Feel it.” She touches her hand over her heart.

“I have to think. I’ve gotten where I am in life by thinking,” I reply defensively, snapping to, coming out of uncommon space I have just been in. I am back in her living room now and understand everything that has happened to me.

“You have gotten where you are in life by knowing,” she says. “And knowing is perceiving. Thinking is how we process what we perceive, and thinking often masks the truth. Why did you not wish to share your more poetic side with Benton?”

“Because I don’t really acknowledge that side. It’s a useless side. To compare the brain to a mushroom in court would get you nowhere, for example,” I reply.

“Ah.” Anna nods again. “You make analogies in court all the time. That is why you are such an effective witness. You evoke images so the common person can understand. Why did you not tell Benton the associations you are just now telling me?”

I stop rocking and reposition my broken arm, resting the cast in my lap. I turn away from Anna and look out at the river, feeling suddenly evasive like Buford Righter. Dozens of Canada geese have congregated around an old sycamore tree. They sit in the grass like dark, long-necked gourds, and puff and flap and peck for food. “I don’t want to go through that looking glass,” I tell her. “It isn’t just that I didn’t want to tell Benton. I don’t want to tell anyone. I don’t want to tell it at all. And by not repeating involuntary images and associations, I don’t, well, I don’t . . .”

Anna nods again, deeply this time. “By not acknowledging them, you don’t invite your imagination into your work,” she finishes my thought.

“I have to be clinical, objective. You of all people should understand.”

She studies me before replying. “Is it that? Or might it be that you are avoiding the unbearable suffering you most certainly would invite if you allowed your imagination to get involved in your cases?” She leans closer, resting her elbows on her knees, gesturing. “What if, for example”—she pauses dramatically—“you could take the facts of science and medicine and use your imagination to reconstruct in detail the last minutes of Diane Bray’s life? What if you could conjure it up like the footage of a film and watch—watch her being attacked, watch her hemorrhage, watch her being bitten and beaten? Watch her die?”

“That would be unspeakably awful,” I barely reply.

“How powerful if a jury could see a film like that,” she says.

Nervous impulses boil beneath my skin like thousands of minnows.

“But if you went through that looking glass, as you refer to it,” she goes on, “then where might it end?” She throws her hands up. “Ah. Maybe it would not end, and you would be forced to watch the footage of Benton’s murder.”

I shut my eyes. I resist her. No. Please, Lord, don’t make me see that. A flash of Benton in the dark, a gun trained on him and the ratcheting sound, the snap of steel as they handcuff him. Taunts. They would taunt him, Mister FBI, you’re so smart, what are we gonna do next, Mister Profiler? Can you read our minds, figure us out, predict? Huh? He wouldn’t answer them. He would ask them nothing as they forced him into a small neighborhood grocery store on the western fringes of the University of Pennsylvania that had closed at five in the afternoon. Benton was going to die. They would torment and torture him, and that was the part he would center on—how to short-circuit the pain and degradation he knew they would inflict if they had time. Darkness and the spurt of a match. His face wavering in the light of a small flame that trembles with each stir of air as those two psychopathic assholes move about in the plenum of a shitty little Pakistani grocery store they torched after he was dead.

My eyelids fly open. Anna is talking to me. Cold sweat crawls down my sides like insects. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

“Very, very painful.” Her face melts with compassion. “I cannot imagine.”

Benton walks into my mind. He wears his favorite khakis, and his running shoes, Saucony running shoes. Sauconys were the only brand he would wear and I used to call him a fussbudget because he was so particular if he really liked something. And he has on the old UVA sweatshirt Lucy gave him, dark blue with bright orange letters, and over the years it has gotten very faded and soft. He cut off the sleeves because they were too short, and I have always liked how he looks in that old, worn-out sweatshirt, with his silver hair, his clean profile, the mysteries behind his intense, dark eyes. His hands lightly curl around the armrests of his chair. He has the fingers of a pianist, long and slender and expressive when he talks, and always gentle when they touch me, which is less and less with time. I am saying all this out loud to Anna, speaking in the present tense about a man who has been dead for more than a year.

“What secrets do you think he kept from you?” Anna asks. “What mysteries did you see in his eyes?”

“Oh God. Mostly about work.” My breath trembles, my heart flying away in fear. “He kept many details to himself. Details about what he saw in certain cases, things he felt were so awful no one else should be subjected to them.”

“Even you? Is there anything you have not seen?”

“Their pain,” I speak quietly. “I don’t have to see their terror. I don’t have to hear their screams.”

“But you reconstruct it.”

“Not the same thing. No, not the same. Many of the killers Benton dealt with liked to photograph, audiotape and in some instances videotape what they did to their victims. Benton had to watch. He had to listen. I always knew. He’d come home looking gray. He wouldn’t talk much during dinner, wouldn’t eat much, and on those nights he drank more than usual.”

“But he wouldn’t tell you . . .”

“Never,” I interrupt with feeling. “Never. That was his Indian Burial Ground and no one was allowed to step there. I taught at a death investigation school in Saint Louis. This was early in my career, before I moved here, when I was still a deputy chief in Miami. I was doing a class on drowning and decided since I was already there, I’d go ahead and attend the entire weeklong school. One afternoon, a forensic psychiatrist taught a class on sexual homicide. He showed slides of living victims. A woman was bound to a chair and her assailant had tightly tied rope around one of her breasts and inserted needles in the nipple. I can still see her eyes. They were dark pools filled with hell, and her mouth was wide open as she screamed. And I saw videotapes,” I go on in a monotone. “A woman, abducted, bound, tortured and about to be shot in the head. She keeps whimpering for her mother. Begging, crying. I think she was in a basement, the footage dark, grainy. The sound of the gun going off. And silence.”

Anna says nothing. The fire snaps and pops.

“I was the only woman in a room of about sixty cops,” I add.

“Even worse, then, because the victims were women and you were the only woman,” Anna says.

Anger touches me as I remember the way some of the men stared at the slides, at the videotapes. “The sexual mutilation was arousing to some of them,” I say. “I could see it in their faces, sense it. Same thing with some of the profilers, Benton’s colleagues in the unit. They’d describe the way Bundy would rape a woman from the rear as he strangled her. Eyes bulging, tongue protruding. He would climax as she died. And these men Benton worked with enjoyed the telling a bit too much. Do you have any idea what that’s like?” I fix a stare on her that is as sharp as nails. “To see a dead body, to see photographs, videos, of someone brutalized, of someone suffering and terrified and realize that the people around you are secretly enjoying it? That they find it sexy?”

“Do you think Benton found it sexy?” Anna asks.

“No. He witnessed such things weekly, maybe even daily. Sexy, never. He had to hear their screams.” I have begun to ramble. “Had to hear them crying and begging. Those poor people didn’t know. Even if they had, they couldn’t have helped it.”

“Didn’t know? What didn’t these poor people know?”

“That sexual sadists are only more aroused by crying. By begging. By fear,” I reply.

“Do you think Benton cried or begged when his killers abducted him and took him to that dark building?” Anna is about to score.

“I’ve seen his autopsy report.” I slip into my clinical hiding place. “There’s really nothing in it to tell me definitively what happened before death. He was badly burned in the fire. So much tissue burned away, it wasn’t possible to see, for example, if he still had a blood pressure when they cut him.”

“He had a gunshot wound to his head, too, did he not?” Anna asks.

“Yes.”

“Which do you think came first?”

I stare mutely at her. I have not reconstructed what led up to his death. I have never been able to bring myself to do that.

“Envision it, Kay,” Anna tells me. “You know, do you not? You have worked too many deaths not to know what happened.”

My mind is dark, as dark as the inside of that grocery store in Philadelphia.

“He did something, didn’t he?” She pushes, leaning into me, on the very edge of the ottoman. “He won, didn’t he?”

“Won?” I clear my throat. “Won!” I exclaim. “They cut his face off and burned him up and you say he won?”

She waits for me to make the connection. When I offer her nothing further, she gets up and walks to the fire, lightly touching my shoulder as she passes. She tosses on another log and looks at me and says, “Kay, let me ask you. Why would they shoot him after the fact?”

I rub my eyes and sigh.

“Cutting off the face was part of the MO,” she goes on. “What Newton Joyce liked to do to his victims.” She refers to the evil male partner of the evil Carrie Grethen—a psychopathic pair that made Bonnie and Clyde seem like a Saturday morning cartoon from my youth. “Excise their faces and store them in the freezer as souvenirs, and because Joyce’s face was so homely, so scarred by acne,” Anna goes on, “he stole what he envied, beauty. Yes?”

“Yes, I suppose. As much we can go with any such theory about why people do what they do.”

“And it was important that Joyce do the excisions carefully and not damage the faces. Which is why he did not shoot his victims, certainly not in the head. He did not want to risk causing damage to the face, the scalp. And shooting is too easy.” Anna shrugs. “Quick. Maybe merciful. Far better to be shot than to have your throat cut. So why did Newton Joyce and Carrie Grethen shoot Benton?”

Anna stands over me. I look up at her. “He said something,” I answer slowly, finally. “He must have.”

“Yes.” Anna sits back down. “Yes, yes.” She encourages me with her hands, as if directing traffic to move across the next intersection. “What, what? Tell me, Kay.”

I reply that I don’t know what Benton said to Newton Joyce and Carrie Grethen. But he said something or did something that caused one or the other to lose control of the game. It was an impulse, an involuntary reaction when one of them pushed the gun to Benton’s head and pulled the trigger. Boom. And the fun was over. Benton felt nothing, was cognizant of nothing after that. No matter what they did to him after that, it didn’t matter. He was dead or dying. Unconscious. He never felt the knife. Maybe he never saw it.

“You knew Benton so well,” Anna says. “You knew his killers, or at least you knew Carrie Grethen—you’d had experiences with her in the past. What do you think Benton said and to whom did he say it? Who shot him?”

“I can’t . . .”

“You can.”

I look at her.

“Who lost control?” She pushes me farther than I ever thought I could go.

“She did.” I pull this up from the deep. “Carrie did. Because it was personal. She’d been around Benton from the old days, from the start, when she was at Quantico, at the Engineering Research Facility.”

“Where she also met Lucy long years ago, maybe ten years ago.”

“Yes, Benton knew her, knew Carrie, knew her probably as well as you can know any reptilian mind like hers,” I add.

“What did he say to her?” Anna’s eyes are riveted to me.

“Something about Lucy, probably,” I say. “Something about Lucy that would insult Carrie. He insulted Carrie, taunted her about Lucy, that’s what I believe.” I have a direct shunt from my subconscious to my tongue. I don’t even have to think.

“Carrie and Lucy were lovers at Quantico,” Anna adds another piece. “Both working on the artificial intelligence computer in the Engineering Research Facility.”

“Lucy was an intern, just a teenager, a kid, and Carrie seduced her. They were working on the computer system together. I got Lucy that internship,” I bitterly add. “I did. Me, her influential, powerful aunt.”

“Didn’t lead to quite what you intended, did it?” Anna suggests.

“Carrie used her. . . .”

“Made Lucy gay?”

“No, I wouldn’t go that far,” I say. “You don’t make people gay.”

“Made Benton dead? Can you go that far?”

“I don’t know, Anna.”

“A volatile past, a personal history. Yes. Benton said something about Lucy, and Carrie lost control and shot him just like that,” Anna summarizes. “He did not die the way they planned.” She sounds triumphant. “He did not.”

I rock quietly, looking out at a gray morning that has become full of bluster. The wind exerts itself in fierce gusts that fling dead branches and vines across Anna’s backyard, reminding me of the angry tree hurling apples at Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Then Anna gets up with no announcement, as if an appointment is up. She leaves me to go about other business in her house. We have talked enough for now. I decide to retreat to the kitchen, and that is where Lucy finds me around noon after her workout. I am opening a can of whole tomatoes when she walks in, the early stages of a marinara sauce simmering on the stove.

“Need some help?” She looks at sweet onions, peppers and mushrooms on the cutting board. “Kind of hard getting around with only one hand.”

“Pull up a stool,” I tell her. “You can be impressed with my fending for myself.” I exaggerate bravado as I finish opening the can with no help, and she smiles as she moves a bar stool from the other side of the counter and sits. She is still in her running clothes and has a look in her eye, a secret light, reminding me of the river catching the sun very early in the morning. I steady an onion with two fingers of my immobilized left hand and begin to slice.

“Remember our game?” I lay the onion slices flat and begin to chop. “When you were ten? Or can’t you remember back that far? I certainly will never forget,” I say in a tone meant to remind Lucy what an impossible brat she was as a child. “Bet you have no idea how many times I would have put you on admin leave, given the choice.” I dare to push that painful truth. Maybe I am feeling bold because of my naked talk with Anna, which has left me unnerved and at the same time exhilarated.

“I wasn’t that bad.” Lucy’s eyes dance because she loves to hear what a little terror she was when she was a child and would come stay with me.

I drop handfuls of chopped sweet onions in the sauce and stir. “Truth Serum. Remember that game?” I ask her. “I’d come home, usually from work, and I could tell by the look on your face that you’d been up to something. So I’d sit you in that big red chair in the living room, remember? It was by the fireplace in my old house in Windsor Farms. And I’d bring you a glass of juice and tell you it was truth serum. And you’d drink it and confess.”

“Like the time I formatted your computer while you were gone.” She is laughing hard.

“Ten damn years old and you format my hard drive. I about had a heart attack,” I recall.

“Hey, but I did back up all your files first. I just wanted to give you a bad moment.” She is really enjoying this.

“Well, I almost sent you home.” I wipe the fingertips of my left hand with a dishtowel, careful that my cast doesn’t smell like onions as I experience a wave of sweet sadness. I don’t really remember why Lucy came to stay with me on her first visit to Richmond, but I was not the child-rearing type and was new in the job and under tremendous pressure. There was some sort of crisis with Dorothy. Maybe she ran off and got married again, or maybe I was a sucker. Lucy adored me and I wasn’t accustomed to being adored. Whenever I would visit her in Miami, she would follow me all over the house, everywhere I went, tenaciously moving with my feet like a soccer ball.

“You weren’t going to send me home.” Lucy is challenging me, but I catch the doubt in her eyes. The fear of not being wanted is based on fact in her life.

“Only because I felt inadequate to take care of you,” I reply, leaning against the sink. “Not because I wasn’t crazy about you, little rat fink that you were.” She laughs again. “But no, I wouldn’t have sent you home. Both of us would have been devastated. I couldn’t.” I shake my head. “Thank God for our little game. It was about the only way I could get to what was going on inside of you or what mischief you had engaged in while I was off somewhere, at work, whatever. So do I need to pour you juice or a glass of wine, or are you going to just go on and tell me what’s happening with you? I wasn’t born yesterday, Lucy. You aren’t staying in a hotel for the heck of it. You’re up to something.”

“I’m not the first woman they’ve run off,” she starts in.

“You would be the best woman they’ve run off,” I answer.

“Remember Teun McGovern?”

“I’ll remember her for the rest of my life.” Teun—pronounced Tee-Un—McGovern was Lucy’s ATF supervisor in Philadelphia, an extraordinary woman who was wonderful to me when Benton was killed. “Please don’t tell me something’s happened to Teun,” I worry.

“She quit about six months ago,” Lucy replies. “Seems ATF wanted her to move to L.A. and be the SAC of that field division. The worst assignment on God’s earth. Nobody wants L.A.”

A SAC is a special agent in charge, and very few women in federal law enforcement end up running entire field divisions. Lucy goes on to tell me McGovern’s answer was to resign and start a private investigative business of sorts. “The Last Precinct,” she says, getting more animated by the moment. “Pretty cool name, right? Based in New York. Teun’s rounding up arson investigators, bomb guys, cops, lawyers, all kinds of people to help out, and in less than six months she’s already got clients. It’s sort of turned into a secret society. There’s a real buzz on the street. When shit hits, call The Last Precinct—where you go when there’s nowhere left.”

I stir the simmering tomato sauce and taste a little. “Obviously you’ve been keeping up with Teun since you left Philadelphia.” I drip in a few teaspoons of olive oil. “Darn. I guess this will be all right, but not for the salad dressing.” I hold up the bottle and frown. “You press olive oil with the pits still in, it’s like squeezing oranges with the rind still on and you get what you deserve.”

“Why is it I don’t assume Anna is an aficionado of things Italian?” Lucy dryly comments.

“We’ll just have to educate her. Grocery list.” I nod at a notepad and pen by the phone. “First item, extra virgin olive oil Italian integrate style—pitted before pressed. Mission Olives Supremo is a nice one, if you can find it. Not a trace of bitterness.”

Lucy makes notes. “Teun and I have stayed in touch,” she informs me.

“You’re somehow involved in what she’s doing?” I know this is where the conversation is headed.

“You could say that.”

“Crushed garlic. In the refrigerated section, in little jars. I’m going to be lazy.” I pick up a bowl of lean ground beef that I have thoroughly cooked and patted free of grease. “Not a good time for me to crush garlic myself.” I stir the beef into the sauce. “How involved?” I go into the refrigerator and open drawers. Anna doesn’t have fresh herbs, of course.

Lucy sighs. “God, Aunt Kay. I’m not sure you want to hear it.”

Until very recently, my niece and I have talked little and not in depth. We have seen each other seldom over the past year. She moved to Miami, and both of us retreated behind bunkers after Benton’s death. I try to read the stories hiding in Lucy’s eyes and instantly begin to entertain possibilities. I am suspicious about her relationship with McGovern and was last year when all of us were called out to a catastrophic arson scene in Warrenton, Virginia, a homicide disguised by fire that turned out to be the first of several masterminded by Carrie Grethen.

“Fresh oregano, basil and parsley,” I dictate the grocery list. “And a small wedge of Parmesan Reggiano. Lucy, just tell me the truth.” I look for spices. McGovern is about my age and single—or at least she was single last time I saw her. I shut a cupboard door and face my niece. “Are you and Teun involved?”

“We weren’t that way.”

“Weren’t?”

“Actually, you’re one to talk,” Lucy says without rancor. “What about you and Jay?”

“He doesn’t work for me,” I reply. “I certainly don’t work for him. I don’t want to talk about him, either. We’re talking about you.”

“I hate it when you dismiss me, Aunt Kay,” she quietly says.

“I’m not dismissing you,” I offer as an apology. “I just worry when people who work together get too personal. I believe in boundaries.”

“You worked with Benton.” She points out another of my exceptions to my own rules.

I tap the spoon on the side of the pot. “I’ve done a lot of things in life that I tell you not to do. I tell you not to do them because I made the mistake first.”

“Did you ever moonlight?” Lucy stretches her lower back and rolls her shoulders.

I frown. “Moonlight? Not that I recall.”

“Okay. Truth serum time. I’m a felonious moonlighter and Teun’s biggest backer—the major stockholder for The Last Precinct. There. The whole truth. You’re going to hear it.”

“Let’s go sit.” I direct us to the table and we pull out chairs.

“It all began accidentally,” Lucy begins. “A couple years ago, I created a search engine for my own use. Meanwhile, all I was hearing about was the fortunes people were making on Internet technology. So I said what the hell and sold the search engine for three quarters of a million dollars.”

I am not shocked. Lucy’s earning possibilities have been limited only by the profession she chose.

“Then I got another idea when we seized a bunch of computers during a raid,” she continues. “I was helping restore deleted e-mail and it got me thinking about how vulnerable all of us are to having the ghosts of our electronic communications conjured up to haunt us. So I figured out a way to scramble e-mail. Shred it, figuratively speaking. Now there are a number of software packages for that sort of thing. I made a hell of a lot of money off that brainstorm.”

There is nothing diplomatic about my next question. Does ATF know she invented technology that might foil law enforcement efforts to restore the e-mail of the bad guys? Lucy replies that someone was going to come up with the technology, and the privacy of law-abiding people needs to be protected, too. ATF doesn’t know about her entrepreneurial activities or that she has been investing in Internet inventions and stocks. Until this moment, only her financial adviser and Teun McGovern are privy to the fact that Lucy is a multimillionaire who has her own helicopter on order.

“So that’s how Teun was able to start up her own business in a prohibitively expensive city like New York,” I figure.

“Exactly,” Lucy says. “And it’s why I’m not going to fight ATF, or at least one good reason. If I do battle with them, then the truth about what I’ve been up to on my own time would probably come out. Internal Affairs, the Inspector General’s Office, everyone would dig. They’d find more nails to drive into my reputation as they hang me on their bureaucratic, bullshit cross. Why the hell would I want to do that to myself?”

“If you don’t fight injustice, others will suffer from it, Lucy. And maybe those people won’t have millions of dollars, a helicopter and a company in New York to fall back on as they try to start a new life.”

“That’s exactly what The Last Precinct is all about,” she replies. “Fighting injustice. I’ll fight it in my own way.”

“Legally, your moonlighting is not within the scope of the case it appears ATF is making against you, Lucy,” the lawyer in me speaks.

“Making money on the side speaks to my veracity, supposedly, though, doesn’t it?” she plays the other side.

“Has ATF accused you of lacking veracity? Have they called you dishonest?”

“Well, no. That won’t be in any letter from them. For sure. But truth is, Aunt Kay, I broke the rules. You aren’t supposed to make money from another source while you’re employed by ATF, the FBI or any other federal law enforcement agency. I don’t agree with that prohibition. It’s not fair. Cops get to moonlight. We don’t. Maybe I’ve always known my days with the feds are numbered.” She gets up from the table. “So I took care of my future. Maybe I was just sick of everything. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life taking orders from other people.”

“If you want to leave ATF, make it your choice, not theirs.”

“It is my choice,” she says with a trace of anger. “Guess I’d better get to the store.”

I walk her to the door, arm in arm. “Thank you,” I tell her. “It means everything to me that you let me know.”

“I’m going to teach you how to fly helicopters.” She puts on her coat.

“May as well,” I say. “I’ve been in a lot of unfamiliar airspace today. I guess a little more isn’t going to matter.”

CHAPTER 6

THE RUDE JOKE for years has been that Virginians go to New York for art and New York comes to Virginia for garbage. Mayor Giuliani almost started another civil war when he made that snipe during his much-publicized war with Jim Gilmore, Virginia’s governor at the time, over Manhattan’s right to ship megatons of northern trash to our southern landfills. I can only imagine the reaction when word gets out that now we have to go to New York for justice, too.

As long as I have been the chief medical examiner of Virginia, Jaime Berger has been the head of the sex crimes unit for the district attorney’s office in Manhattan. Although we have never met, we are often mentioned together. It is said that I am the most famous female forensic pathologist in the country and she is the most famous female prosecutor. Until now, the only reaction I might have had to such a claim is that I don’t want to be famous and don’t trust people who are, and female should not be an adjective. Nobody talks about successful men in terms of a male doctor or male president or male CEO.

Over the past few days, I have spent hours on Anna’s computer researching Berger on the Internet. I resisted being impressed but can’t help it. I didn’t know, for example, that she is a Rhodes scholar or that after Clinton was elected she was short-listed for attorney general and, according to Time magazine, was privately relieved when Janet Reno was appointed instead. Berger didn’t want to give up prosecuting cases. Supposedly, she has turned down judgeships and staggering offers from private law firms for the same reason, and is so admired by her peers that they established a public service scholarship in her name at Harvard, where she spent her undergraduate years. Strangely, very little is said about her personal life except that she plays tennis—extremely well, of course. She works out with a trainer three mornings a week at a New York athletic club and runs three or four miles a day. Her favorite restaurant is Primola. I take some comfort in the fact that she likes Italian food.

It is now Wednesday, early evening, and Lucy and I are Christmas shopping. I have browsed and purchased as much as I can stomach, my mind poisoned by worries, my arm itching like mad inside its plaster cocoon, my craving for tobacco akin to lust. Lucy is somewhere inside Regency Mall taking care of her own list, and I search for a spot where I might evade the churning herd. Thousands of people have waited until three days before Christmas to find thoughtful, special gifts for those significant people in their lives. Voices and constant motion combine in a steady roar that shorts out thoughts and normal conversation, and piped-in holiday music jars my already vibrating nerves out of phase. I face plate glass in front of Sea Dream Leather, my back to discordant people who, like unskilled fingers on a piano, rush and stop and force without joy. Pressing my cell phone tight against my ear, I yield to a new addiction. I check my voice mail for what must be the tenth time today. It has become my slender, secret connection to my former existence. Tapping into my messages is the only way I can go home.

There are four calls. Rose, my secretary, checked in to see how I am holding up. My mother left a long complaint about life. AT&T customer service tried to reach me about a billing question, and my deputy chief, Jack Fielding, needs to talk to me. I call him right away.

“I can hardly hear you,” his scratchy voice sounds in one ear, my hand covering the other. In the background, one of his children is crying.

“I’m not in a good place to talk,” I tell him.

“Me, either. My ex is here. Joy to the world.”

“What’s up?” I say to him.

“Some New York prosecutor just called me.”

Jolted, I will myself to sound calm, almost indifferent, when I ask him this person’s name. He tells me Jaime Berger reached him at home several hours ago. She wanted to know if he assisted in the autopsies I performed on Kim Luong and Diane Bray. “That’s interesting,” I comment. “Isn’t your number unlisted?”

“Righter gave it to her,” he informs me.

Paranoia heats up. The wound of betrayal flares. Righter gave her Jack’s number and not mine? “Why didn’t he tell her to call me?” I ask.

Jack pauses as another child adds to the upset chorus in his house. “I don’t know. I told her I didn’t officially assist. You did the posts. I’m not listed on the protocols as a witness. Said she really needs to speak to you.”

“What was her response when you told her that?” I ask.

“Started asking me questions, obviously has copies of the reports.”

Righter again. Copies of the medical examiner’s initial report of investigation and the autopsy protocols go to the commonwealth’s attorney’s office. I feel dizzy. It now seems that two prosecutors have spurned me, and fear and bewilderment gather like an army of fiery ants, teaming over my interior world, stinging my very psyche. What is happening is uncanny and cruel. It is beyond anything I have ever imagined in my most unsettled moments. Jack’s voice sounds distant through static that seems a projection of the chaos in my mind. I make out that Berger was a very cool customer and sounded as if she was on a car phone, and then something about special prosecutors. “I thought they were only brought in for the president or Waco or whatever,” he says as the cell suddenly clears and he yells—to his ex-wife, I assume—“Can you take them in the other room? I’m on the phone! Jesus,” he blurts out to me, “don’t ever have kids.”

“What do you mean, special prosecutor?” I inquire. “What special prosecutor?”

Jack pauses. “I guess I’m assuming they’re bringing her here to try the case because Fighter-Righter doesn’t want to,” he replies with sudden nervousness. In fact, he sounds evasive.

“It appears they had a case in New York.” I am careful what I say. “That’s why she’s involved, or so I’m told.”

“You mean a case like ours?”

“Two years ago.”

“No shit? News to me. Okay. She didn’t say anything about that. Just wants to know about the ones here,” Jack tells me.

“How many for the morning, so far?” I inquire about our case load for tomorrow.

“Five so far. Including a weirdo one that’s going to be a pain in the butt. Young white male—maybe Hispanic—found inside a motel room. Looks like the room was torched. No ID. A needle stuck in his arm, so we don’t know if he’s a drug OD or smoke inhalation.”

“Let’s not talk about it over a cell phone,” I cut him off, looking around me. “We’ll talk about it in the morning. I’ll take care of him.”

A long, surprised pause is followed by, “You sure? Because I . . .”

“I’m sure, Jack.” I have not been to the office at all this week. “See you then.”

I am supposed to meet Lucy in front of Waldenbooks at seven-thirty, and I venture back out into the churning herd. I have no sooner parked myself at the appointed spot when I notice a familiar, big, sour-looking man riding up the escalator. Marino bites into a soft pretzel and licks his fingers as he stares at the teenage girl one step above him. Her tight jeans and sweater leave no mysteries about her curves, dips and elevations, and even from this distance, I can tell Marino is mapping her routes and imagining what it would be like to travel them.

I watch him carried along crowded steps of steel, heavily involved with the pretzel, chewing with his mouth open, lusting. Faded, baggy blue jeans ride below his swollen gut, and his big hands look like baseball mitts protruding from the sleeves of a red NASCAR windbreaker. A NASCAR cap covers his balding head and he wears ridiculous Elvis-size wire-rim glasses. His fleshy face is furrowed by discontent and has the slack, flushed look of chronic dissipation, and I am startled by an awareness of how miserable he is in his own body, of how much he wars against flesh that by now fails him with a vengeance. Marino reminds me of someone who has taken terrible care of his car, driving it hard, letting it rust and fall apart, and then violently hating it. I imagine Marino slamming down the hood and kicking the tires.

We worked our first case together shortly after I moved here from Miami, and he was surly and condescending and positively boorish from the start. I was certain that by accepting the chief medical examiner’s position in Virginia I had made the biggest mistake of my life. In Miami, I had earned the respect of law enforcement and the medical and scientific community. The press treated me reasonably well and I enjoyed a rise to minor stardom that gave me confidence and reassurance. Gender did not seem an issue until I met Peter Rocco Marino, begotten of hardworking Italian stock in New Jersey, a former New York cop, now divorced from his childhood sweetheart, father of a son he never talks about.

He is like the harsh lighting in dressing rooms. I was relatively comfortable with myself until I saw my reflection in him. This minute, I am unsettled enough to accept that the flaws he holds up to me are probably true. He notices me against the glass storefront, tucking my phone back into my satchel, shopping bags at my feet, and I wave at him. He takes his time maneuvering his bulk through prepossessed people who right now aren’t thinking about murderers or trials or New York prosecutors.

“What are you doing here?” he asks me as if I am trespassing.

“Buying your Christmas present,” I say. He takes another bite of pretzel. It appears he has purchased nothing but the pretzel. “And you?” I inquire.

“Came to sit on Santa’s lap and get my picture took.”

“Don’t let me stop you.”

“I paged Lucy. She told me where in this zoo you was probably at. I thought you might need someone to carry your bags, being that you’re a little shorthanded at the moment. How you gonna do autopsies with that thing on?” He indicates my cast.

I know why he is here. I detect the distant roar of information headed my way like an avalanche. I sigh. Slowly but surely I am surrendering to the fact that my life is only going to get worse. “Okay, Marino, now what?” I ask him. “What’s happened now?”

“Doc, it’s going to be in the paper tomorrow.” He bends over to pick up my bags. “Righter called me a little while ago. The DNA matches. Looks like Wolfman whacked that weather lady in New York two years ago, and apparently the asshole’s decided he’s feeling up to leaving MCV and ain’t fighting extradition to the Big Apple—just happy as a clam to get the hell out of Virginia. Kind of a weird coincidence the son of a bitch decides to leave town the same day as Bray’s memorial service.”

“What memorial service?” Thoughts crash into each other from all directions.

“At Saint Bridget’s.”

I also didn’t know Bray was Catholic and just happened to attend the church where I am a member. An eerie feeling tickles up my spine. No matter what world I occupy, it seemed her mission was to break into it and eclipse me. That she might even have attempted this at my own unassuming church reminds me of how utterly ruthless and arrogant she was.

“So Chandonne is transported out of Richmond on the same day we’re supposed to say good-bye to the last woman he snuffed,” Marino talks on, scanning every shopper bobbing past. “Don’t think for a minute the timing’s a coincidence. Every move he makes, the press will be there in droves. So he’ll outshine Bray, steal her thunder, ’cause the media’s gonna be a hell of a lot more interested in what he’s doing than in who shows up to pay their respects to one of his victims. If anybody shows up to pay respects. I know I ain’t, not after all the shit she did to make my life happy. And oh yeah, Berger’s on her way here even as we speak. I guess with a name like that she probably ain’t into Christmas,” he adds.

We spot Lucy at the same moment a gang of loud, turbulent boys do. They have the latest funky hair and cargo jeans falling off their tiny loins and do exaggerated double-takes, lusting after my niece, who is wearing black tights, scuffed Army boots and an antique flight jacket she rescued from a vintage clothing shop somewhere. Marino gives her admirers a look that would kill if glaring with hatred in one’s heart could penetrate skin and perforate vital organs. The boys weave and bounce, shuffling in huge leather basketball shoes, reminding me of puppies that haven’t grown into their paws yet.

“What’d you buy me?” Marino asks Lucy.

“A year’s supply of maca root.”

“What the hell’s maca root?”

“Next time you go bowling with some really hot woman, you’ll appreciate my little gift,” she says.

“You didn’t really get him that.” I halfway believe her.

Marino snorts. Lucy laughs, seeming much too jovial for someone about to be fired, millionaire or not. Outside in the parking lot, the air is damp and very cold. Headlights dazzle the dark, and everywhere I look I find cars and people in a hurry. Silver wreaths shimmer from light posts, and drivers circle like sharks, looking for spaces close to mall entrances, as if walking several hundred feet is the worst thing that can happen to a person.

“I hate this time of year. I wish I were Jewish,” Lucy comments, ironically as if she were privy to Marino’s earlier allusion to Berger’s ethnicity.

“Was Berger a D.A. when you started out in New York?” I ask him as he places my packages inside Lucy’s ancient green Suburban.

“Just getting started.” He shuts the tailgate. “I never met her.”

“What did you hear about her?” I ask.

“Really hot-looking with big tits.”

“Marino, you’re so highly evolved,” Lucy says.

“Hey.” He jerks his head in parting. “Don’t ask me something if you don’t want to know the answer.”

I watch his shadowy bulk move through a confusion of headlights and shoppers and shadows. The sky is milky in the light of an imperfect moon, and snow drifts down in slow, small flakes. Lucy backs out of her parking place and eases into a line of cars. Dangling from her key chain is a silver medallion engraved with the logo for Whirly-Girls, a seemingly frivolous name for a very serious international association of female helicopter pilots. Lucy, who joins nothing, is an ardent member, and I am grateful that in spite of everything else gone wrong, at least her Christmas present is safely tucked inside one of my bags. Months ago, I conspired with Schwarzchild’s Jewelers to have a Whirly-Girls necklace made for Lucy in gold. The timing is perfect, especially in light of late-breaking revelations about her plans in life. “Just what exactly will you do with your own helicopter? You’re really getting one?” I ask. In part, I want to steer the conversation away from New York and Berger. I am still chafed by what Jack had to say over the phone, and a shadow has fallen across my psyche. Something else bothers me and I am not quite sure what.

“A Bell four-oh-seven, yup, I’m getting it.” Lucy dips into an endless stream of red taillights flowing sluggishly along Parham Road. “What do I plan to do with it? Fly it, that’s what. And use it in the business.”

“About this new business, what’s next?”

“Well, Teun’s living in New York. So that’s where my new headquarters will be.”

“Tell me more about Teun,” I prompt her. “Does she have family? Where will she spend Christmas?”

Lucy stares straight ahead as she drives, always the serious pilot. “Let me go back, give you a little history, Aunt Kay. When she heard about the shootout in Miami, she contacted me. Then I went to New York the other week and had a rather bad time.”

How well I remember. Lucy vanished, sending me into a panic. I tracked her down by phone in Greenwich Village, where she was at Rubyfruit on Hudson, a favorite hangout in the Village. Lucy was upset. She was drinking. I thought she was angry and hurt because of problems with Jo. Now the story is changing right before my eyes. Lucy has been financially involved with Teun McGovern since last summer, but it wasn’t until this incident in New York last week that Lucy made the decision to change her entire life. “Ann asks me if there’s someone she can call,” Lucy explains. “I wasn’t exactly in a frame of mind to get myself back to my hotel.”

“Ann?”

“A former cop. She owns the bar.”

“Oh, that’s right.”

“I admit I was pretty whacked, and I told Ann to try Teun,” Lucy says. “Next thing I know, Teun’s walking into the bar. She pumped me full of coffee and we stayed up all night talking. Mostly about my personal situation with Jo, with ATF, with everything. I haven’t been happy.” Lucy glances over at me. “I think I’ve been ready for a change for a long, long time. That night I made a decision. The decision had already been made even before this other thing happened.” This other meaning Chandonne’s trying to kill me. “Thank God Teun was there for me.” Lucy doesn’t mean at the bar. She is talking about McGovern’s being there for her in general, and I feel happiness radiating from some space deep within Lucy’s core. Common psychology dictates that other people and jobs can’t make you happy. You have to make yourself happy. This is not entirely true. McGovern and The Last Precinct seem to make Lucy happy.

“And you had already been involved in The Last Precinct for some time?” I encourage her to continue the story. “Since last summer? Is that when the idea first came up?”

“It started out as a joke in the old days, in Philly, when Teun and I were driven nuts by bureaucrats with lobotomies, by people getting in the way, by watching how innocent victims get ground up in the system. We came up with this fantasy organization which I dubbed The Last Precinct. We’d say, Where do you go when there’s nowhere to go?” Her smile is forced and I sense that all of her upbeat news is about to get questionable shadings. Lucy is going to tell me something I don’t want to hear. “You realize this means I need to move to New York,” she says. “Soon.”

Righter has surrendered the case to New York and now Lucy is moving to New York. I turn up the heat and pull my coat more tightly around me.

“I think Teun’s found me an apartment on the Upper East Side. Maybe a five-minute jog from the park. On Sixty-seventh and Lexington,” she says.

“That was quick,” I comment. “And close to where Susan Pless was murdered,” I add, as if this is an ominous sign. “Why that part of town? Is Teun’s office near there?”

“A few blocks. She’s just a couple doors down from the nineteenth precinct, apparently knows a bunch of NYPD guys who work that tour.”

“And Teun had never heard of Susan Pless, of that murder? How strange to think she ended up just several streets from there.” Negativity carries me along. I can’t help it.

“She knows about the murder because we’ve discussed what’s going on with you,” Lucy replies. “Before that, she’d never heard of the case. Neither had I. I guess the preoccupation of our neighborhood is the East Side Rapist, which is something we’ve gotten involved in, as a matter of fact. They’ve had these rapes going on for some five years, same guy, likes blondes in their thirties to early forties, usually they’ve had a few drinks, have just left a bar and he grabs them as they’re going into their apartments. New York’s first John Doe DNA. We got his DNA but not an identity.” All roads seem to lead back to Jaime Berger. The East Side Rapist would most certainly be a high-priority case for her office. “I’m going to dye my hair blond and start walking home from bars late,” Lucy wryly says, and I believe she would do that.

I want to tell Lucy that the direction she has chosen is exciting and I am thrilled for her, but the words won’t come. She has lived many places that aren’t close to Richmond, but for some reason, this time it feels as if she is finally leaving home for good, that she is grown. Suddenly, I become my mother criticizing, pointing out the downside, the deficits, lifting up the rug to look for that one spot I missed when I cleaned the house, reviewing my report card of straight A’s and commenting what a shame it is I have no friends, tasting what I cook and finding it lacking.

“What will you do with your helicopter? Will you keep it up there?” I hear myself say to my niece. “Seems like that will be a problem.”

“Probably Teterboro.”

“So you’ll have to go all the way into New Jersey when you want to fly?”

“It’s not that far.”

“The cost of living up there, too. And you and Teun . . .” I hammer away.

“What about me and Teun?” The lift has left Lucy’s voice. “Why do you keep picking on that?” Anger rolls in. “I don’t work for her anymore. She’s not ATF or my supervisor anymore. There’s nothing wrong with us being friends.”

My fingerprints are all over the crime scene of her disappointment, her hurt. Even worse, the echoes of Dorothy are in my voice. I am ashamed of myself, deeply ashamed. “Lucy, I’m sorry.” I reach over and take her hand in the fingertips of my plaster-confined one. “I don’t want you to leave. I’m feeling selfish. I’m being selfish. I’m sorry.”

“I’m not leaving you. I’ll be in and out. Only two hours away by chopper. It’s all right.” She looks at me. “Why don’t you come work with us, Aunt Kay?” She is out with what I can tell is not a new thought. Obviously, she and McGovern have discussed quite a lot about me, including my possible role in their company. This realization gives me a peculiar sensation. I have resisted contemplating my future and suddenly it rises before me like a great blank screen. While I know in my mind that the way I have lived my life is in the past, I have yet to accept this truth in my heart. “Why don’t you go into business for yourself instead of the state telling you what to do?” Lucy goes on. “Have you ever given serious thought to that?”

“It’s always been the plan for later on,” I reply.

“Well, later on is here,” she tells me. “The twentieth century ends in exactly nine days.”

CHAPTER 7

IT IS ALMOST midnight. I sit before the fire in the hand-carved rocker that is the only hint of rusticity in Anna’s house. She has set her chair at a deliberate angle so she can look at me but I don’t have to look at her if I find myself in sensitive discovery of my own psychological evidence. I have learned of late that I never know what I might find during my conversations with Anna, as if I am a crime scene I am searching for the first time. The lights are switched off in the living room, the fire in its agonal stages of going out. Incandescence spreads along smoldering coals that breathe shades of orange as I tell Anna about a Sunday night in November a little over a year ago, when Benton got uncharacteristically hateful toward me.

“When you say uncharacteristically, you mean what?” Anna asks in her strong, quiet tone.

“He was accustomed to my peregrinations late at night when I couldn’t settle down, when I would stay up late and work. On the night in question he fell asleep while reading in bed. Not unusual, and it was my cue that I could have my own time now. I crave the silence, the absolute aloneness when the rest of the world is unconscious and not needing something from me.”

“You always have felt this need?”

“Always,” I tell her. “It’s when I come alive. I come into myself when I’m absolutely alone. I need the time. I must have it.”

“What happened on the night you mention?” she asks.

“I got up and took the book out of his lap, turned out the light,” I reply.

“What was he reading?”

Her question catches me by surprise. I have to think. I don’t remember clearly, but I seem to recall Benton was reading about Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in American that is less than an hour’s drive east of Richmond. He was very interested in history and had double-majored in it and psychology in college, and then his curiosity about Jamestown was ignited when archaeologists began excavating out there and discovered the original fort. It slowly comes back to me: The book Benton was reading in bed was a collection of narratives, many of them written by John Smith. I don’t recall the title, I tell Anna. I suppose the book is still in my house somewhere, and the idea of happening upon it one of these days pains me. I go on with my story.

“I left the bedroom and quietly shut the door and went down the hall to my office,” I say. “As you know, when I do autopsies, I take sections of every organ and sometimes of wounds, as well. The tissue goes to the histology lab where it’s made into slides I must review. I can never keep up with micro-dictations and routinely take slide folders home, and of course the police asked me all about this. It’s funny, but my normal activities seem mundane and beyond question until they are inspected by others. That’s when I realize I don’t live like other people.”

“Why do you think the police wanted to know about slides you might have in your house?” Anna asks.

“Because they wanted to know about everything.” I go back to my story about Benton, describing being in my office, bent over my microscope, lost in heavy metal-stained neurons that looked like a swarm of one-eyed purple and gold creatures with tentacles. I felt a presence behind me and turned to find Benton standing in my open doorway, his face filled with an eerie, ominous glow, like St. Elmo’s fire before lightning strikes.

Can’t sleep? he asked me in a mean, sarcastic tone that didn’t sound like him. I pushed my chair back from my powerful Nikon microscope. If you could teach that thing to fuck, you wouldn’t need me at all, he said, and his eyes flew at me with the bright fury of the cells I was looking at. Dressed in pajama bottoms, Benton was pale in the partial light spreading out from the lamp on my desk, his chest heaving and shiny with sweat, veins roping in his arms, his silver hair plastered to his forehead. I asked him what in the world was the matter, and he ordered me back to bed, jabbing his finger at me.

At this point, Anna interrupts me. “Nothing else might have preceded this? No forewarning whatsoever?” She knew Benton, too. This wasn’t Benton. This was an alien who had invaded Benton’s body.

“Nothing,” I answer her. “No warning.” I rock slowly, nonstop. Smoldering wood pops. “The last place I wanted to be with him that moment was in bed. He may have been the FBI’s star psychological profiler, but for all of his prowess at reading others, he could be as cold and uncommunicative as a stone. I had no intention of staring up at the dark all night while he lay with his back to me, mute, hardly breathing. But what he wasn’t was violent or cruel. He had never talked to me in such a demeaning, abusive way. If we had nothing else, Anna, we had respect. We always treated each other with respect.”

“And did he tell you what was wrong?” She presses me on this.

I smile bitterly. “When he made the crude comment about teaching my microscope to fuck, that told me.” Benton and I had grown comfortable living in my house, yet he never stopped feeling like a guest. It is my house and everything about it is me. The last year of his life, he was disillusioned with his career, and as I look back on it now, he was tired and without purpose and feared getting old. All of it eroded our intimacy. The sexual part of our relationship became an abandoned airport that looked normal from a distance but had no one in the tower. No landings, no takeoffs, only an occasional touch-and-go because we thought we should, because of the accessibility and old habit, I guess.

“When you did have sex, who usually initiated it?” Anna asks.

“Eventually, just him. More out of desperation than desire. Maybe even frustration. Yes, frustration,” I decide.

Anna watches me, her face in shadows that deepen as the fire dies. Her elbow is propped on the armrest, her chin resting on her index finger in what has become the pose I associate with our intense time together these past few nights. Her living room has become a dark confessional booth where I can be emotionally newborn and naked and feel no shame. I don’t see our sessions as therapy, but rather as a priesthood of friendship that is sacred and safe. I have begun to tell another human being what it is like to be me.

“Let’s go back to the night he got so angry,” Anna navigates. “Can you remember when this was, exactly?”

“Just weeks before his murder.” I talk calmly, mesmerized by coals that look like glowing alligator skin. “Benton knew my space needs. Even on nights when we made love, it wasn’t unusual for me to wait until he fell asleep and get up with the stealth of an adulterer to slip inside my office down the hall. He was understanding about my infidelities.” I feel Anna smile in the dark. “He rarely complained when he reached for me and felt an empty space on my side of the bed,” I explain. “He accepted my need to be alone, or seemed to. I never knew how much my nocturnal habits hurt him until that night when he came into my office.”

“Was it really your nocturnal habits?” Anna inquires. “Or your aloofness?”

“I don’t think of myself as aloof.”

“Do you think of yourself as someone who connects with others?”

I analyze, searching everywhere inside me for a truth I have always feared.

“Did you connect with Benton?” Anna goes on. “Let’s start with him. He was your most significant relationship. Certainly, he was the longest.”

“Did I connect with him?” I hold up the question like a ball I am about to serve, not sure of the angle or spin or how hard. “Yes and no. Benton was one of the finest, kindest men I’ve ever known. Sensitive. Deep and intelligent. I could talk to him about anything.”

“But did you? I get the impression you didn’t.” Anna, of course, is on to me.

I sigh. “I’m not sure I’ve ever talked to anybody about absolutely anything.”

“Perhaps Benton was safe,” she suggests.

“Perhaps,” I reply. “I do know there were deep places in me he never reached. I also never wanted him to, didn’t want to get that intense, that close. I suppose starting out as we did may be part of the explanation. He was married. He always went home to his wife, to Connie. It went on for years. We were on opposite sides of a wall, separated, only touching when we could sneak. God, I would never do that again with anybody, I don’t care who.”

“Guilt?”

“Of course,” I answer. “Every good Catholic feels guilt. In the beginning, I felt terribly guilty. I’ve never been the type to break rules. I’m not like Lucy, or should I say she’s not like me. If rules are mindless and ignorant, she breaks them right and left. Hell, I don’t even get speeding tickets, Anna.”

It is here that she leans forward and holds up a hand. This is her signal. I have said something important. “Rules,” she says. “What are rules?”

“A definition? You want a definition of rules?”

“What are rules to you? Your definition, yes.”

“Right and wrong,” I reply. “What is legal versus illegal. Moral versus immoral. Humane versus inhumane.”

“Sleeping with a married person is immoral, wrong, inhumane?”

“If nothing else, it’s stupid. But yes, it’s wrong. Not a fatal error or unforgivable sin or illegal, but dishonest. Yes, definitely dishonest. A broken rule, yes.”

“Then you admit you are capable of dishonesty.”

“I admit I’m capable of being stupid.”

“But dishonest?” She won’t let me evade the question.

“Everyone is capable of anything. My affair with Benton was dishonest. I indirectly lied because I hid what I was doing. I presented a front to others, including Connie, that was false. Simply false. So am I capable of deception, of lying? Clearly I am.” The confession depresses me deeply.

“What about homicide? What is the rule about homicide? Wrong? Immoral? Is it always wrong to kill? You have killed,” Anna says.

“In self-defense.” On this point I feel strong and certain. “Only when I had no choice because the person was going to kill me or someone else.”

“Did you commit a sin? Thou shalt not kill.”

“Absolutely not.” Now I am getting frustrated. “It’s easy to make judgments about matters one looks at from the distant vantage point of morality and idealism. It’s different when you’re confronted by a killer who’s holding a knife to another person’s throat or reaching for a pistol to shoot you. The sin would be to do nothing, to allow an innocent person to die, to allow yourself to die. I feel no remorse,” I tell Anna.

“What do you feel?”

I close my eyes for a moment, firelight moving across my lids. “Sick. I can’t think about those deaths without feeling sick. What I did wasn’t wrong. I had no choice. But I wouldn’t call it right, either, if you understand the difference. When Temple Gault was hemorrhaging to death in front of me and begging me to help, there are really no words for how that felt and how it feels now to remember it.”

“This was in the subway tunnel in New York. Four or five years ago?” she asks, and I answer with a nod. “Carrie Grethen’s former partner in crime. Gault was her mentor, in a sense. Isn’t that right?” Again, I nod. “Interesting,” she says. “You killed Carrie’s partner and then she killed yours. A connection, perhaps?”

“I have no idea. I have never looked at it like that.” I am jolted by the thought. It has never occurred to me and seems so obvious now.

“Did Gault deserve to die, in your opinion?” Anna then asks.

“Some people would say he forfeited his right to be in this world and we’re all better off now that he’s gone. But my God, I wouldn’t have chosen to be the one who carried out the sentence, Anna. Never, never. Blood was spurting through his fingers. I saw fear in his eyes, terror, panic, the evil in him gone. He was just a human being dying. And I’d caused it. And he was crying and begging me to make his bleeding stop.” I have stopped rocking. I feel Anna’s full attention on me. “Yes,” I finally say. “Yes, it was awful. Just awful. Sometimes I dream about him. Because I killed him, he will forever be part of me. That’s the price I pay.”

“And Jean-Baptiste Chandonne?”

“I don’t want to hurt anybody anymore.” I stare at the dying fire.

“At least he is alive?”

“I take no comfort in that. How can I? People like him don’t stop hurting others, even after they’re locked up. The evil lives on. That is my conundrum. I don’t want them killed, but I know the damage they do while they’re alive. Lose-lose, any way you look at it,” I tell Anna.

Anna says nothing. It is her method to offer silences more than opinions. Grief throbs in my chest and my heart beats in a staccato of fear. “I suppose I’d be punished if I’d killed Chandonne,” I add. “Without question I’ll be punished because I didn’t.”

“You could not save Benton’s life.” Anna’s voice fills the space between us. I shake my head as tears fill my eyes. “Do you feel you should have been able to defend him, too?” she asks. I swallow and spasms of that agonizing loss rob me of my ability to speak. “Did you fail him, Kay? And now it is your penance to eradicate other monsters, perhaps? To do it for Benton, because you let monsters murder him? You did not save him?”

My helplessness, my outrage boil over. “He didn’t save himself, goddamn it. Benton wandered into his murder like a dog or cat wandering off to die, because it was time. Jesus!” I am out with it. “Jesus. Benton was always complaining about wrinkles and sagging and aches and pains, even during the early years of our relationship. As you know, he was older than I. Maybe aging threatened him more for that reason. I don’t know. But when he reached his mid-forties, he couldn’t look in the mirror without shaking his head and griping. ‘I don’t want to get old, Kay.’ That’s what he would say.

“I remember late one afternoon we were taking a bath together and he was complaining about his body. ‘Nobody wants to get old,’ I finally said to him. ‘But I really don’t—don’t to the point that I don’t think I can survive it,’ was his reply. ‘We have to survive it. It’s selfish not to, Benton,’ I said. ‘And besides, we survived being young, didn’t we?’ Ha! He thought I was being ironic. I wasn’t. I asked him how many days of your youth were spent waiting for tomorrow? Because somehow tomorrow is going to be better? He thought about this for a moment as he pulled me closer in the tub, touching and fondling me beneath the steamy cover of hot water scented with lavender. He knew exactly how to play me back in those days when our cells came alive instantly on contact. Back then, when it was good. ‘Yeah,’ he considered, ‘it’s true. I’ve always waited for tomorrow, thinking tomorrow’s going to be better. That’s survival, Kay. If you don’t think tomorrow or next year or the year after that will be better, why bother?’ ”

I stop for a moment, rocking. I tell Anna, “Well, he stopped bothering. Benton died because he no longer believed what was ahead was better than what was past. It doesn’t matter that it was another person who took his life. Benton was the one who decided.” My tears have dried and I feel hollow inside, defeated and furious. Feeble light touches my face as I stare into the afterglow of fire. “Fuck you, Benton,” I mutter to smoking coals. “Fuck you for giving up.”

“Is that why you had sex with Jay Talley?” Anna asks. “To fuck Benton? To pay him back for leaving you, for dying?”

“If so, it wasn’t conscious.”

“What do you feel?”

I try to feel. “Dead. After Benton was murdered . . . ?” I consider this. “Dead,” I decide. “I felt dead. I couldn’t feel anything. I think I had sex with Jay . . .”

“Not what you think. What you feel,” she gently reminds me.

“Yes. That was the whole thing. Wanting to feel, desperate to feel something, anything,” I tell her.

“Did making love with Jay help you feel something, anything?”

“I think it made me feel cheap,” I reply.

“Not what you think,” she reminds me again.

“I felt hunger, lust, anger, ego, freedom. Oh yes, freedom.”

“Freedom from Benton’s death, or perhaps from Benton? He was somewhat repressed, wasn’t he? He was safe. He had a very powerful superego. Benton Wesley was a man who did things properly. What was sex like with him? Was it proper?” Anna wants to know.

“Thoughtful,” I say. “Gentle and sensitive.”

“Ah. Thoughtful. Well, there is something to be said for that,” Anna says with a hint of irony that draws attention to what I have just revealed.

“It was never hungry enough, never purely erotic.” I am more open about it. “I have to admit that many times I was thinking while we were having sex. It’s bad enough to think while talking to you, Anna, but one shouldn’t think while making love. There should be no thoughts, just unbearable pleasure.”

“Do you like sex?”

I laugh in surprise. No one has ever asked me such a thing. “Oh yes, but it varies. I’ve had very good sex, good sex, okay sex, boring sex, bad sex. Sex is a strange creature. I’m not even sure what I think of sex. But I hope I’ve not had the premier grand cru of sex.” I allude to superior Bordeaux. Sex is very much like wine, and if the truth be told, my encounters with lovers usually end up in the village section of the vineyard: low on the slope, fairly common and modestly priced—nothing special, really. “I don’t believe I’ve had my best sex yet, my deepest, most erotic sexual harmony with another person. I haven’t, not yet, not at all.” I am rambling, speaking in stops and starts as I try to figure it out and argue with myself about whether I even want to figure it out. “I don’t know. Well, I guess I wonder how important it should be, how important it is.”

“Considering what you do for a living, Kay, you should know how important sex is. It is power. It is life and death,” Anna states. “Of course, in what you see, mainly we are talking about power that has been terribly abused. Chandonne is a good example. He gets sexual gratification from overpowering, from causing suffering, from playing God and deciding who lives and who dies and how.”

“Of course.”

“Power sexually excites him. It does most people,” Anna says.

“The greatest aphrodisiac,” I agree. “If people are honest about it.”

“Diane Bray is another example. A beautiful, provocative woman who used her sex appeal to overpower, to control others. At least this is the impression I have,” Anna says.

“It’s the impression she gave,” I reply.

“Do you think she was sexually attracted to you?” Anna asks me.

I evaluate this clinically. Uncomfortable with the idea, I hold it away from me and study it like an organ I am dissecting. “That never entered my mind,” I decide. “So it probably wasn’t there or I would have picked up the signals.” Anna doesn’t answer me. “Possibly,” I equivocate.

Anna isn’t buying it. “Didn’t you tell me she had tried to use Marino to get to know you?” she reminds me. “That she wanted to have lunch with you, socialize, get to know you, and tried to arrange this through him?”

“That’s what Marino told me,” I reply.

“Because she was sexually attracted to you, possibly? That would have been the ultimate overpowering of you, wouldn’t it? If she not only ruined your career, but helped herself to your body in the process and therefore appropriated every aspect of your existence? Isn’t that what Chandonne and others of his type do? They must feel attraction, too. It is simply that they act it out differently from the rest of us. And we know what you did to him when he tried to act out his attraction to you. His big mistake, no? He looked at you with lust and you blinded him. At least temporarily.” She pauses, her chin resting on her finger, her eyes steady on me.

I am looking directly at her now. I have that feeling again. I would almost describe it as a warning. I just can’t put a name to it.

“What might you have done had Diane Bray tried to act out her sexual attraction to you, saying it was there? If she had hit on you?” Anna keeps digging.

“I have ways of deflecting unwanted advances,” I reply.

“From women, too?”

“From anyone.”

“Then women have made advances.”

“Now and then, over the years.” It is an obvious question with an obvious answer. I don’t live in a cave. “Yes, I’ve certainly been around women who show interest I can’t reciprocate,” I say.

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Either.”

“And how does it make you feel when it is a woman who desires you? Any different than if it is a man?”

“Are you trying to find out if I’m homophobic, Anna?”

“Are you?”

I consider this. I reach as deep as I can to see if I am uncomfortable with homosexuality. I have always been quick to assure Lucy that I have no problem with same-sex relationships beyond the hardships they bring. “I’m okay with it,” I answer Anna. “Really and truly. It simply isn’t my preference. It’s not my choice.”

“People choose?”

“In a sense.” Of this I am certain. “And I say so because I believe people feel many attractions that aren’t what they would be most comfortable with, and so they don’t act on them. I can understand Lucy. I have seen her with her lovers and in a way envy their closeness, because although they have the difficulty of going against the majority, they also have the advantage of the special friendships women are capable of having with each other. It’s harder for men and women to be soul mates, deep friends. I’ll admit that much. But I think the significant difference between Lucy and me is I don’t expect to be a man’s soul mate, and men make her feel overpowered. And true intimacy can’t occur without a balance of power between the individuals. So because I don’t feel overpowered by men, I choose them physically.” Anna says nothing. “That’s probably as much as I’ll ever figure it out,” I add. “Not everything can be explained. Lucy and her attractions and needs can’t be completely explained. Nor can mine.”

“You really don’t think you can be a man’s soul mate? Then maybe your expectations are too low? Possible?”

“Very possible.” I almost laugh. “If anyone has low expectations, I deserve to after all of the relationships I’ve fucked up,” I add.

“Have you ever felt attracted to a woman?” Anna finally gets to this. I figured she would.

“I have found some women very compelling,” I admit. “I remember getting crushes on teachers when I was growing up.”

“By crushes, you mean sexual feelings.”

“Crushes include sexual feelings. Innocent and naïve as they may be. A lot of girls get crushes on their female teachers, especially if you’re in a parochial school and are taught exclusively by women.”

“Nuns.”

I smile. “Yes, imagine getting a crush on a nun.”

“I imagine some of those nuns got crushes on each other, too,” Anna remarks.

A spreading dark cloud of uncertainty and uneasiness encroaches on me and a warning taps at the back of my awareness. I don’t know why Anna is so focused on sex, particularly homosexual sex, and I entertain the possibility that she is a lesbian and this is why she never married, or maybe she is testing me to see how I might react if she finally, after all these years, tells me the truth about herself. It hurts to think she might have, out of fear, withheld such an important detail from me.

“You told me you moved to Richmond for love.” It is my turn to probe. “And the person proved a waste of time. Why didn’t you go back to Germany? Why did you stay in Richmond, Anna?”

“I went to medical school in Vienna and am from Austria, not Germany,” she tells me. “I grew up in a Schloss, a castle, that had been in the family for hundreds of years, near Linz on the Danube River, and during the war the Nazis lived in the house with us. My mother, my father, two older sisters and my younger brother. And from the windows I could see the smoke from the crematorium some ten miles away, at Mauthausen, a very notorious concentration camp, a huge quarry where prisoners were forced to mine the granite, carrying huge blocks of it up hundreds of steps, and if they faltered, they were beaten or pushed into the abyss. Jews, Spanish Republicans, Russians, homosexuals.

“Day in and day out, dark clouds of death stained the horizon, and I would catch my father staring off and sighing when he thought no one was looking. I could feel his deep pain and shame. Because we could do nothing about what was happening, it was easy to slip into denial. Most Austrians were into denial about what was happening in our beautiful little country. This was unforgivable to me but could not be helped. My father had much wealth and influence, but to go against the Nazis was to end up in a camp or to be shot on the spot. I can still hear laughter and the clink of glasses in my house, as if those monsters were our best friends. One of them started coming into my bedroom at night. I was seventeen. This went on for two years. I never said a word because I knew my father could do nothing, and I suspect he was aware of what was going on. Oh yes, I am sure of it. I worried the same thing was happening to my sisters, and am quite certain it was. After the war, I finished my education and met an American music student in Vienna. He was a very fine violinist, very dashing and witty, and I came back to the States with him. Mainly, because I could not live in Austria anymore. I could not live with what my family had averted its conscience from, and even now, when I see the countryside of my homeland, the image is stained with that dark, ominous smoke. I see it in my mind always. Always.”

Anna’s living room is chilled, and fire-scattered embers look like dozens of irregular eyes glowing in the dark. “What happened with the American musician?” I ask her.

“I suppose reality introduced itself.” Her voice is touched by sadness. “It was one thing for him to fall in love with a young female Austrian psychiatrist in one of the most beautiful, romantic cities in the world. Quite another to bring her back to Virginia, to the former capital of the Confederacy where people still have Confederate flags all over the place. I began my residency at MCV, and James played with the Richmond symphony for several years. Then he moved to Washington and we parted. I am grateful we never married. At least I did not have that complication, that or children.”

“And your family?” I ask.

“My sisters are dead. I have a brother in Vienna. Like my father, he is involved in banking. We should get some sleep,” Anna says.

I shiver when I first slide beneath the covers, and I draw up my legs and tuck a pillow beneath my broken arm. Talking to Anna has begun to unsettle me around the edges, like the earth about to cave in. I feel phantom pains in parts of me that are past, gone, and my spirit is heavy from the added burden of the story she has told about her own life. Of course, she would not volunteer her past to most people. A Nazi association is a terrible stigma, even now, and to consider that fact causes me to paint her demeanor and her privileged lifestyle on a very different canvas. It doesn’t matter that Anna no more had a choice about who stayed in her family home than she had a say about whom she had sex with when she was seventeen. She would not be forgiven if others knew. “My God,” I mutter, staring up at the ceiling in Anna’s dark guest room. “Dear God.”

I get back up and make my way down the dark hallway, passing through the living room again and into the east wing of the house. The master bedroom is at the end the hallway, and Anna’s door is open, thin moonlight seeping through windows and softly outlining her shape beneath the covers. “Anna?” I speak quietly. “Are you awake?”

She stirs, then sits up. I can barely make out her face as I come closer. Her white hair is down around her shoulders. She looks a hundred years old. “Is everything all right?” she asks groggily and with a trace of alarm.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I can’t tell you enough how sorry I am. Anna, I’ve been a terrible friend.”

“You have been my most trusted friend.” She reaches for my hand and squeezes it, and her bones feel small and fragile beneath soft, loose skin, as if she has suddenly become ancient and vulnerable, not the titan I have always envisioned. Perhaps it is because I now know her story.

“You’ve suffered so much, carried so much all alone,” I whisper. “I’m sorry I’ve not been there for you. I’m just so sorry,” I tell her again. I bend over and hug her awkwardly, cast and all, and kiss her cheek.

CHAPTER 8

EVEN DURING MY most burdened, distracted moments, I appreciate where I work. I am always aware that the medical examiner system I head is probably the finest in the country, if not the world, and that I co-direct the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine, the first training academy of its kind. I am able to do all of this in one of the most advanced forensic facilities I have ever seen.

Our new thirty-million-dollar, one-hundred-and-thirty-thousand-square-foot building is called Biotech II and is the center of the Biotechnology Research Park, which has stunningly transformed downtown Richmond by relentlessly replacing abandoned department stores and other boarded-up shells with elegant buildings of brick masonry and glass. Biotech has reclaimed a city that continued to be bullied long after those Northern aggressors fired their last shot.

When I moved here in the late eighties, Richmond consistently topped the list of cities with the highest homicide rate per capita in the United States. Businesses fled to neighboring counties. Virtually no one went downtown after hours. That can be said no more. Remarkably, Richmond is on its way to becoming a city of science and enlightenment, and I confess I never thought it possible. I confess, I hated Richmond when I first moved here for reasons that reach far deeper than Marino’s nastiness to me or what I missed about Miami.

I believe cities have personalities; they take on the energy of the people who occupy and rule them. During its worst era, Richmond was stubborn and small-minded, and bore itself with the wounded arrogance of a has-been now ordered about by the very people it once dominated, or in some instances owned. There was a maddening exclusivity that caused people like me to feel looked down on and alone. Through it all, I detected the traces of old injuries and indignities as surely as I find them on bodies. I found a spiritual sadness in the mournful haze that during summer months clings like battle smoke over swamps and endless stands of scrawny pines and drifts along the river, swathing the wounds of brick pilings and foundries and prison camps left from that awful war. I felt compassion. I did not give up on Richmond. This morning, I struggle with my growing belief that it has given up on me.

The tops of buildings in the downtown skyline have vanished in clouds, the air thick with snow. I stare out my office window, distracted by big flakes drifting past as phones ring and people move along the corridor. I worry that state and city government will shut down. This can’t happen on my first day back.

“Rose?” I call out to my secretary in the adjoining office. “Are you keeping up with the weather?”

“Snow,” her voice sails back.

“I can see that. They aren’t closing anything yet, are they?” I reach for my coffee and silently marvel over the unrelenting white storm that has seized our city. Winter wonderlands typically grace the commonwealth west of Charlottesville and north of Fredericksburg, and Richmond is left out. The explanation I have always heard is that the James River in our immediate area warms up the air just enough to replace snow with freezing rains that sweep in like Grant’s troops to paralyze the earth.

“Accumulation of possibly eight inches. Tapering off by later afternoon with lows in the twenties.” Rose must have logged on to an Internet weather update. “Highs not to get above freezing for the next three days. It looks like we’ll have a white Christmas. Isn’t that something?”

“Rose, what are you doing for Christmas?”

“Nothing much,” her response comes back.

I scan stacks of case files and death certificates and push around phone message slips, mail and inter-office memos. I can’t see the top of my desk and don’t know where to start. “Eight inches? They’ll declare a national emergency,” I comment. “We need to find out if anything’s closing besides schools. What’s on my schedule that hasn’t already been canceled?”

Rose is tired of yelling through the wall at me. She walks into my office, looking sharp in a gray pants suit and white turtleneck sweater, her gray hair pinned up in a French twist. She is rarely without my big calendar and opens it. She runs her finger over what is written in it for today, peering through half-moon reading glasses. “The obvious is we now have six cases and it’s not even eight o’clock yet,” she lets me know. “You’re on call for court, but I have a feeling that’s not going to happen.”

“Which case?”

“Let’s see. Mayo Brown. Don’t believe I remember him.”

“An exhumation,” I remember. “A homicidal poisoning, a rather shaky one.” The case is on my desk, somewhere. I start looking for it as muscles tense in my neck and shoulders. The last time I saw Buford Righter in my office it was over this very case, which was destined to create nothing but confusion in court even after I spent four hours explaining to him the dilution effect on drug levels when the body has been embalmed, that there is no satisfactory method to quantitate the rate of degradation in embalmed tissue. I went over the toxicology reports and prepared Righter for the defense of dilution. Embalming fluid displaces blood and dilutes drug levels, I drilled into him. So if the decedent’s codeine level is at the low end of the acutely lethal dose range, then prior to embalming, the level could only have been higher. I meticulously explained that this is what he needs to focus on because the defense is going to muddy the waters with heroin versus codeine.

We were seated at the oval table in my private conference room, paperwork spread before us. Righter tends to blow out a lot when he is confused, frustrated or just pissed off. He continued to pluck up reports and frown at them, and then put them back down, all the while blowing like a whale breaking surface. “Greek,” he kept saying. “How the hell do you make the jury understand things like 6-mono-acetylmorphine is a marker for heroin, and since it wasn’t detected, then it doesn’t necessarily mean heroin wasn’t present, but if it was present, then that would mean heroin was too? Versus telling if codeine is medicinal?” I told him that was my point, the very thing he didn’t want to focus on. Stick to the dilution offense—that the level had to have been higher before the person was embalmed, I coached him. Morphine is a metabolite of heroin. Morphine is also a metabolite of codeine, and when codeine is metabolized in the blood we get very low levels of morphine. We can’t tell anything definitively here, except we have no marker for heroin, and we do have levels of codeine and morphine, indicating the man took something—willingly or unwillingly—before he died, I painted the scenario for him. And it was a much higher dose than is indicated now because of the embalming, I stressed again. But do these results prove the man’s wife poisoned him with Tylenol Three, for example? No. Don’t get gummed up in the tar baby of 6-mono-acetylmorphine, I told Righter repeatedly.

I realize I am obsessing. I am sitting at my desk, angrily going through stacks of backed-up work as I anguish over how much trouble I went to preparing Righter for yet another case, promising I would be there for him, just as I always have been. It is a shame he does not seem inclined to return the favor. I am a free lunch. All of Chandonne’s Virginia victims are free lunches. I just can’t accept it and am beginning to resent the hell out of Jaime Berger, too. “Well, check with the courts,” I say to Rose. “And by the way, he’s being released from MCV this morning.” I resist saying Jean-Baptiste Chandonne’s name. “Expect the usual phone calls from the media.”

“I heard on the news this New York prosecutor’s in town.” Rose flips through my date book. She doesn’t look up at me. “Wouldn’t that be something if she gets snowed in?”

I get up from my desk, take off my lab coat and hang it on the back of my chair. “I don’t guess we’ve heard from her.”

“She hasn’t called here, not for you.” My secretary hints she knows that Berger did track down Jack or at least someone besides me.

I am very skilled at becoming prepossessed with business and deflecting any effort on another person’s part to probe an area I choose to avoid. “To expedite things,” I say before Rose can give me one of her pregnant looks, “we’ll skip staff meeting. We need to get these bodies out of here before the weather gets any worse.”

Rose has been my secretary for ten years. She is my office mother. She knows me better than anyone but doesn’t abuse her position by pushing me in directions I don’t want to go in. Curiosity about Jaime Berger fizzes on the surface of Rose’s thoughts. I can see questions rising in her eyes. But she won’t ask. She knows damn well how I feel about trying the case in New York instead of here, and that I don’t want to talk about it. “I think Dr. Chong and Dr. Fielding are already in the morgue,” she is saying. “I haven’t seen Dr. Forbes yet.”

It occurs to me that even if the Mayo Brown case goes forward today—even if the courts don’t close because of snow—Righter isn’t going to call me. He will stipulate my report and resort to putting the toxicologist on the stand, at best. There is no way in hell Righter is going to face me after I called him a coward, especially since the accusation is true and a part of him must know it. He will probably figure out a way to avoid me the rest of his life, and that unpleasant thought leads to another one as I cross the hallway. What does all this bode for me?

I push through the ladies’ room door and make the transition from civilized paneling and carpeting, through a series of changing rooms, into a world of biological hazards, starkness and violent attacks on the senses. Along the way, one sheds shoes and outer clothing, stowing them safely in teal-green lockers. I keep a special pair of Nikes parked near the door that leads inside the autopsy suite. The shoes are not destined to walk through the land of the living ever again, and when it is time to get rid of them, I will burn them. I clumsily arrange my suit jacket, slacks and white silk blouse on hangers, my left elbow throbbing. I struggle into a full-length Mega Shield gown that has viral-resistant front panels and sleeves, sealed seams and a gripper neck, which is a snug stand-up collar. I pull on shoe covers, then an O.R. cap and surgical mask. The final touch of my fluid-proofing is a face shield to protect my eyes from splashes that might carry such frights as hepatitis or HIV.

Stainless steel doors automatically open, and my feet make paper sounds over the tan vinyl floor of the biohazard epoxy-finished autopsy suite. Doctors in blue hover over five shiny stainless steel tables fastened to steel sinks, water running, hoses sucking, X rays on light boxes a black-and-white gallery of organ-shaped shadows and opaque bones and tiny, bright bullet fragments that, like loose metal chips in flying machines, break things and cause leaks and vital gears to seize. Hanging from clips inside safety cabinets are DNA specimen cards that have been stained with blood. They look oddly like a bunting of tiny Japanese flags as they air-dry beneath a hood. From closed-circuit television monitors mounted in corners a car engine rumbles loudly in the bay, a funeral home here to deliver or take away. This is my theater. It is where I perform. As unwelcome as the average person might find the morbid odors, sights and sounds that rush to greet me, I am suddenly and immensely relieved. My heart lifts as doctors glance up at me and nod good morning. I am in my element. I am home.

A sour, smoky stench taints the long, high-ceilinged room, and I spot the slender, naked, sooty body on a sheet-covered gurney that has been rolled out of the way of traffic. Alone, cold and silent, the dead man waits his turn. He waits for me. I am the last person he will ever talk to in a language that matters. The name on the toe tag scrawled in permanent Magic Marker, pitifully, is John Do. Someone couldn’t spell Doe right. I tear open a packet of latex gloves and am gratified I can stretch one over my cast, which is further protected by the fluidproof sleeve. I am not wearing the sling and will have to resort to doing autopsies with my right hand for a while. Although being left-handed in a right-handed world has its difficulties, it is not without advantages. Many of us are ambidextrous or at least reasonably functional on both sides. My aching fractured bones radiate reminders that all isn’t right in my world, no matter how tenaciously I go about my business, no matter how intensely I focus on my work.

I slowly circle my patient, leaning close, looking. A syringe is still embedded in the crook of his right arm, and second-degree burns blister his upper body. They have bright red margins, and his skin is streaked black with soot that is thick inside his nose and mouth. He is telling me he was alive when the fire started. He had to be breathing to inhale smoke. He had to have a blood pressure for fluid to be pumped into his burns, causing them to blister and have a bright red margin. The circumstances of a set fire and the needle in his arm certainly could suggest suicide. But on his right upper thigh, he has a contusion that is swollen to the size of a tangerine and crimson. I palpate it. Indurated, hard as a rock. It appears recent. How did it happen? The needle is in his right arm, suggesting that if he injected himself, he most likely is left-handed, yet his right arm is more muscular than his left one, hinting he is right-handed. Why is he nude?

“We still don’t have an ID on him?” I raise my voice to Jack Fielding.

“No further info.” He snaps a new blade into a scalpel. “The detective’s supposed to be here.”

“Found unclothed?”

“Yup.”

I run my gloved fingers through the dead man’s thick, carbon-dusted hair to see what color it is. I won’t be certain until I wash him, but his body and pubic hair are dark. He is clean-shaven with high cheekbones, a sharp nose and square jaw. Burns on his forehead and chin will need to be covered up with funeral home makeup before we can circulate a photograph of him for identification purposes, if it comes to that. He is fully rigorous, arms straight by his sides, fingers slightly curled. Livor mortis, or the blood settling to dependent regions of the body due to gravity, is also fixed, causing the sides of his legs and buttocks to be a deep red, the backs of them blanched wherever they rested against the wall or the floor after death. I hold him tilted on his side to check for injuries to his back and find parallel linear abrasions over the scapula. Drag marks. There is a burn between his shoulder blades and another one at the base of the back of his neck. Clinging to one of the burns is a fragment of a plastic-like material, narrow, about two inches long, white with small blue type on it, such as you might see on the back of a food product’s packaging. I remove the fragment with forceps and hold it up to the surgical lamp. The paper is more like thin, pliable plastic, a material I associate with candy or snack wrappers. I make out the words this product, and 9–4 EST and a toll-free number and part of a website address. The fragment goes inside an evidence bag.

“Jack?” I summon him and begin collecting blank forms and body diagrams, attaching them to a clipboard.

“I can’t believe you’re going to work with that damn cast on.” He walks across the autopsy suite, his bulging biceps straining against the short sleeves of his scrubs. My deputy chief may be famous for his body, but no amount of weightlifting or chocolate cream Myoplex high-protein meals in a glass can stop him from losing his hair. It is eerie, but in recent weeks his light brown hair has started falling out before our very eyes, clinging to his clothing, drifting through the air like down, as if he is molting.

He frowns at the misspelling on the toe tag. “The guy from the removal service must be Asian. John Dooo.”

“Who’s the detective?” I ask.

“Stanfield. Don’t know him. Just don’t get a puncture in your glove or you’ll be wearing a biological hazard for the next few weeks.” He indicates my latex-coated cast. “Actually, what would you do, now that I think of it?”

“Cut it off and put on a new one.”

“So maybe we should have disposable casts down here.”

“I feel like cutting it off anyway. This guy’s burn pattern isn’t making sense to me,” I tell him. “Do we know how far the body was from the fire?”

“About ten feet from the bed. I was told the bed’s the only thing that burned and only partially. He was nude, sitting on the floor, back against the wall.”

“I wonder why only his upper body got burned.” I point out discrete burns the size and shape of silver dollars. “Arms, chest. One here on his left shoulder. And these on his face. And he has several on his back, which should have been spared if he was leaning against the wall. What about the drag marks?”

“As I understand it, when the fire department got there, they dragged his body out into the parking lot. One thing’s for sure, he must’ve been unconscious or incapacitated when the fire started,” Jack says. “Sure as hell don’t know why else someone would just sit there getting burned and breathing in smoke. Obviously that happy-holiday time of year.” My second-in-command is cloaked in a hung-over weariness that causes me to suspect he had a very bad night. I wonder if he and his ex-wife had another one of their explosions. “Everybody killing themselves. That woman over there.” He points to the body on table 1, where Dr. Chong is busy taking photographs from a stepladder. “Dead on the kitchen floor, a pillow, a blanket. The neighbor heard one shot. Mother found her. There’s a note. And behind door number two”—Jack stares at table 2—“a motor vehicle death the state police are suspicious is a suicide. She has extensive injuries. Plowed right into a tree.”

“Did her clothes come in?”

“Yup.”

“Let’s x-ray her feet and get the labs to check the bottom of her shoes to see if she was braking or accelerating when she hit the tree.” I shade areas of a body diagram, indicating soot.

“And we got a known diabetic with a history of overdose,” Jack recites our guest list of the morning. “Was found outside in the yard. Question is drugs, alcohol or exposure.”

“Or a combination of the above.”

“Right. I see what you mean about the burns, though.” He leans closer to look, blinking often, reminding me he wears contact lenses. “And it’s weird they’re all about the same size and shape. You want me to help with this?”

“Thanks. I’ll manage. How are you?” I glance up from my clipboard.

His eyes are tired, his boyish good looks strained. “Maybe we can grab some coffee sometime,” he says. “One of these days. And I should be asking about you.”

I pat his shoulder to let him know I am okay. “As well as can be expected, Jack,” I add.

I begin the external examination of John Doe with a PERK. This is a physical evidence recovery kit, a decided unpleasantness that includes swabbing orifices, clipping fingernails and plucking head, body and pubic hair. We PERK all bodies when there is any reason to suspect something other than a natural death, and I will always PERK a body that is nude, unless there is an acceptable reason for the person’s not being clothed when he died—in the bathtub or on the operating table, for example. For the most part, I don’t spare my patients indignities. I can’t. Sometimes the most important evidence lurks in the darkest, most delicate hollows, and clings underneath nails and in hair. During my violation of this man’s most private places I discover healing tears of his anal ring. He has abrasions at the angles of his mouth. Fibers adhere to his tongue and the inside of his cheeks.

I go over every inch of him with a lens and the story he tells grows more suspicious. His elbows and knees are slightly abraded and covered with dirt and fibers, which I mundanely collect by pressing them with the adhesive backs of Post-its, which I seal inside plastic bags. Over the bony prominences of both wrists are incomplete circumferential dry, reddish-brown abrasions and minute skin tags. I draw blood from the iliac veins and vitreous fluid from the eyes, and test tubes ride up on the dumbwaiter to the third-floor toxicology lab for STAT alcohol and carbon monoxide tests. At half past ten, I am reflecting back tissue from the Y incision when I notice a tall, older man heading toward my station. He has a wide, tired face and maintains a safe distance from my table, gripping a grocery-size brown paper bag, the top folded over and sealed with red evidence tape. I have a flash of my bagged clothing on my red Jarrah Wood dining room table.

“Detective Stanfield, I hope?” I hold up a flap of skin and free it from ribs with small, quick strokes of the scalpel.

“Good morning.” He catches himself as he stares at the body. “Well, I guess not for him.”

Stanfield hasn’t bothered with protective clothing over his ill-fitting herringbone suit. He wears no gloves or shoe covers. He glances at my bulky left arm and refrains from asking me how I broke it, telling me he already knows. I am reminded that my life has been all over the news, which I am adamant in my refusal to follow. Anna has halfway accused me of being chicken, as much as a psychiatrist is allowed to accuse, and she would never actually use the word “chicken.” “Denial” is her word. I don’t care. I am staying away from newspapers. I don’t watch or listen to a goddamn thing that is said about me.

“Sorry it took so long, but the roads out there are bad on their way to awful, ma’am,” Stanfield says. “Hope you got chains on your tires, ’cause I didn’t and got stuck. Had to get the tow truck and then get the chains put on, so that’s why I wasn’t here earlier. You found out anything?”

“His CO’s seventy-two percent.” Vernacular for carbon monoxide. “Notice how cherry-red the blood is? Typical in high levels of CO.” I pick up rib shears from the surgical cart. “STAT alcohol’s zero.”

“So it was the fire that got him, for sure?”

“We know he had a needle in his arm, but carbon monoxide poisoning is his cause of death. Doesn’t tell us much, I’m afraid.” I cut through ribs. “He’s got anal tunneling—evidence of homosexual activity, in other words—and his wrists were bound at some point prior to his death. It appears he was gagged.” I point out the abrasions on the wrists and the corners of the mouth. Stanfield’s eyes pop open. “The abrasions on his wrists aren’t crusty,” I go on. “They don’t look old, in other words. And because he has fibers in his mouth, you can be pretty certain he was gagged at or around the time of death.” I hold a lens over the anticubital fossa, or crook of the arm, and show Stanfield two tiny blood spots. “Fresh injection sites,” I explain. “But what’s interesting is he has no old needle tracks to suggest a history of drug abuse. I’ll put a block of liver through to check for triaditis—mild inflammation of the structural support system of bile duct, artery and vein. And we’ll see what comes back on his tox.”

“Guess he could have AIDS.” This is foremost on Detective Stanfield’s mind.

“We’ll do an HIV on him,” I reply.

Stanfield backs up another step as I remove the triangular-shaped breastplate of ribs. This a stage cue for Laura Turkel, on loan to us from the graves registration unit at the Fort Lee Army Base in Petersburg. She is so attentive and officious and almost salutes me when she suddenly appears at the end of the table. Turk, as everyone knows her, always refers to me as “Chief.” I suppose for her Chief is a rank and doctor isn’t.

“Ready for me to open up the skull, Chief?” Her question is an announcement that requires no answer. Turk is like a lot of the military women we get in here—tough, eager, quick to eclipse the men, who often, truthfully, are the squeamish ones. “That lady Dr. Chong’s working on,” Turk says as she plugs the Stryker saw into the overhead cord reel, “she’s got a living will and even wrote her own obituary. Got all her insurance papers in order, everything. Put ’em all in a binder and left it and her wedding band on the kitchen table before she laid herself down on the blanket and shot herself in the head. Can you imagine? Really, really sad.”

“It’s very sad.” The organs are a shimmering bloc as I lift them out en masse and set them on a cutting board. “If you’re going to be in here, you really should cover up.” I direct this at Stanfield. “Did anybody show you where things are in the locker room?”

He blankly stares at the cuffs of my blood-soaked sleeves, at the blood splashed on the front of my gown. “Ma’am, if you don’t mind, I’d like to go over what I got,” he says. “If we could maybe sit down for a minute? Then I need to head on back before the weather gets any worse. Pretty soon, you’re gonna need Santa’s sleigh to get anywhere.”

Turk picks up a scalpel and makes an incision around the back of the head, ear to ear. She reflects back the scalp and pulls it forward, and the face goes slack, collapsing into tragic protest before it is inside out like a folded-down sock. The exposed dome of the skull glistens pristinely white, and I take a good look at it. No hematomas. No indentations or fractures. The whir of the electric saw sounds like a hybrid of a table saw and a dentist’s drill as I pull off my gloves and drop them in a red biohazard trash can. I motion Stanfield to follow me to the long countertop that runs the length of the wall opposite the autopsy stations. We pull out chairs.

“I gotta be honest with you, ma’am,” Stanfield begins with a slow, negative shake of his head. “We don’t got a clue where to start on this one. All I can tell you right now is this man”—he indicates the body on the table—“checked into The Fort James Motel and Camp Ground yesterday at three P.M.”

“Where exactly is The Fort James Motel and Camp Ground?”

“On Route Five West, no more than ten minutes from William and Mary.”

“You talked to the clerk at this motel, The Fort James Motel?”

“The lady in the office, yes ma’am, I did.” He opens a large manila envelope and scoops out a handful of Polaroid photographs. “Her name’s Bev Kiffin.” He spells it for me, slipping reading glasses out of an inner jacket pocket, hands trembling slightly as he flips through a notepad. “She said the young man come in and said he wants the sixteen-oh-seven special.”

“I’m sorry. The what?” I rest my ballpoint pen on the notes I am making.

“One hundred and sixty dollars and seventy cents Monday through Friday. That’s five nights. Sixteen-oh-seven. The usual rate’s forty-six dollars a night, which is mighty high for a place like that, you ask me. But you know tourist traps.”

“Sixteen-oh-seven? As in the date Jamestown was founded?” It seems odd to hear a reference to Jamestown. I just mentioned Jamestown to Anna last night when I was talking about Benton.

Stanfield nods deeply. “As in Jamestown. Sixteen-oh-seven. That’s the business rate, or so they call it. The amount for the business week, and let me add, ma’am, this isn’t a very nice motel, not at all, no ma’am. A fleabag is what I would call it.”

“Does it have a history of crime?”

“Oh no. No ma’am. No history of crime I’m aware of, not at all.”

“Just seedy.”

“Just seedy.” He nods deeply.

Detective Stanfield has a distinct way of speaking with emphasis, as if he is used to teaching a slow child who needs important words repeated or emphasized. He neatly arranges photographs in a lineup on the countertop and I look at them. “You took these?” I assume.

“Yes ma’am, I sure did.”

Like him, what he has captured on film is emphatic and to the point: the motel door with the number 14 on it, the view of the room through the open doorway, the scorched bed, the smoke damage to the curtains and walls. There is a single chest of drawers and an area to hang clothes that is nothing more than a rod in a recessed area just inside the door. I note that the mattress on the bed has remnants of a cover and white sheets but nothing else. I ask Stanfield if perhaps he submitted the bedcovers to the labs to test for accelerants. He replies that there was nothing on the bed, nothing to submit except burned areas of the mattress, which he placed inside a tightly sealed aluminum paint can—“according to procedure” are his exact words, the words of someone very new at detective work. But he does agree it is odd that the bedcovers were missing.

“They were on the bed when he checked in?” I ask.

“Mrs. Kiffin says she didn’t accompany him to the room, but is sure the bed was properly made because she cleaned it up herself after the last guest checked out several days ago,” he replies, so that is good. At least he thought to ask her about it.

“What about luggage?” I ask next. “Did the victim have luggage?”

“Didn’t find any luggage.”

“And the fire department got there when?”

“They were called at five-twenty-two P.M.”

“Who called?” I am making notes.

“Someone anonymous driving by. Saw smoke and called from his car phone. This time of year, the motel doesn’t do a lot of business, according to Mrs. Kiffin. She says about three fourths of the rooms was empty yesterday, being as how it’s almost Christmas and the weather and all the rest. You can see by looking at the bed, the fire wasn’t going nowhere.” He touches several of the photographs with a thick, rough finger. “It pretty much had put itself out by the time the fire trucks got there. All they needed was fire extinguishers, didn’t need to hose things down, which is a good thing for us. This here’s his clothes.”

He shows me a photograph of a dark pile of clothing on the floor just beyond the open bathroom door. I make out pants, a T-shirt, a jacket and shoes. Next I look at photographs taken inside the bathroom. On the sink is a coppertone plastic ice bucket, plastic glasses covered with cellophane and a small bar of soap still in its wrapper. Stanfield fishes in a pocket for a small knife, opens a blade and slits the evidence tape sealing the paper bag he brought with him. “His clothes,” he explains. “Or at least I assume they’re his.”

“Hold on,” I tell him. I get up and cover a gurney with a clean sheet, and put on fresh gloves and ask him if a wallet or any other personal effects were recovered. He tells me no. I smell urine as I pull out clothing from the bag, careful that if any trace evidence is dislodged, it will fall on the sheet. I examine black bikini briefs and black Giorgio Armani cashmere trousers, both soaked with urine.

“He wet his pants,” I tell Stanfield.

He just shakes his head and shrugs, and doubt crosses his eyes—maybe doubt tainted by fear. None of this is making much sense, but the feeling I have is clear. This man may have checked in alone, but at some point, another person entered the picture, and I am wondering if the victim lost control of his bladder because he was terrified. “Does the lady in the office, Mrs. Kiffin, remember him dressed like this when he checked in?” I ask as I pull pockets inside out to see if there is anything in them. There isn’t.

“Didn’t ask her that,” Stanfield responds. “So he’s got nothing in his pockets. That’s kind of unusual.”

“No one checked them at the scene?”

“Well, I didn’t bag the clothes, to tell you the truth. Another officer did that, but I’m sure nobody dug in the pockets, or at least no personal effects was found or I would know and have them with me,” he says.

“Well, how about you call Mrs. Kiffin right now and see if she remembers him wearing this clothing when he checked in?” I politely tell Stanfield to do his job. “And what about a car? Do we know how he got to the motel?”

“No vehicle’s turned up so far.”

“The way he was dressed is certainly inconsistent with a low-budget motel, Detective Stanfield.” I am drawing pants on a clothing diagram form.

The black jacket and black T-shirt as well as the belt, shoes and socks are expensive designer labels, and this makes me think about Jean-Baptiste Chandonne, whose unique baby-fine hair was found all over Thomas’s decomposing body when it showed up in the Richmond Port earlier this month. I comment on the similarity of the clothes to Stanfield. The prevailing theory, I go on to explain to him, is that Jean-Baptiste murdered his brother, Thomas, probably in Antwerp, Belgium, and switched clothing with him before sealing the body inside a cargo container bound for Richmond.

“Because you found all those hairs I been reading about in the paper?” Stanfield is trying to understand what would be difficult for even the most experienced investigator who has seen it all.

“That and microscopic findings that relate to diatoms—algae—consistent with an area of the Seine near the Chandonne house in Île Saint-Louis, in Paris.” I talk on. Stanfield is completely lost. “Look, all I can tell you, Detective Stanfield, is this man”—I refer to Jean-Baptiste Chandonne—“has a very rare congenital disorder and allegedly has been known to bathe in the Seine, maybe thinking it might cure him. We have reason to believe the clothing on his brother’s body was originally Jean-Baptiste’s. Make sense?” I am drawing a belt and noting from the indentation in the leather which notch was used the most.

“Well, to tell you the truth,” Stanfield replies, “I been hearing about nothing but this weird case and this Werewolf fellow. I mean, ma’am, that really is all you hear when you turn on TV or pick up the paper, and I guess you know that, and by the way, I’m really sorry for what you been through and to tell you the truth, can’t figure how you can even be in here or thinking straight. Godalmighty!” He shakes his head. “The wife said if something like that showed up at our door, he wouldn’t have to do a thing to her. She’d die right off of a heart attack.”

I catch a spark of his misgivings about me. He is wondering if I am completely rational right now, if I might just be projecting—if somehow everything I experience becomes tainted by Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. I slip the clothing diagram off the clipboard and place it with John Doe’s paperwork as Stanfield dials a number he reads from his notepad. I watch him insert a finger in his free ear, squinting as if Turk’s sawing open another skull hurts his eyes. I can’t hear what Stanfield is saying. He hangs up and comes back over to me as he reads the video display of his pager.

“Well, we got good news and bad news,” he announces. “The lady, Mrs. Kiffin, remembers him dressed real nice in a dark suit. That’s the good news. The bad news is, she also remembers he had a key in his hand, one of those remote kinds that a lot of new, expensive cars have.”

“But there’s no car,” I reply.

“No ma’am, no car. No key, either,” he says. “Sure looks like whatever happened to him, he had some help. You think maybe somebody drugged him and then tried to burn him up to hide the evidence?”

“I think we’d better seriously consider homicide.” I state the obvious. “We need to get him printed and see if he matches up with anybody in AFIS.”

The Automated Fingerprint Identification System allows us to scan fingerprints into a computer and compare them with those in a database that can be linked state to state. If this dead man has a criminal record in this country, or if his prints are in the database for some other reason, we most likely will get a hit. I work my hands into a pair of fresh gloves, doing my best to cover the plaster looped around my left lower palm and thumb. Fingerprinting dead bodies requires a simple tool called a spoon. It is nothing more than a curved metal implement shaped much like a hollow tube cut in half lengthwise. A strip of white paper is threaded through slits in the spoon so that the paper’s surface is curved to accommodate the contours of fingers no longer flexible or compliant to their owner’s will. With each print, the strip is advanced ahead to the next clean square. The procedure isn’t hard. It doesn’t require great intelligence. But when I tell Stanfield where the spoons are, he frowns as if I have just spoken to him in a foreign language. I ask him if he has ever printed a dead body before. He admits he has not.

“Hold on,” I say, and I go to the phone and dial the extension for the fingerprints lab. No one answers. I try the switchboard. Everyone is gone for the day because of the weather, I am told. I get a spoon and ink pad from a drawer. Turk wipes off the dead man’s hands and I ink his fingers, pressing them one at a time against the curved paper strip. “What I can do if you have no objection,” I tell Stanfield, “is see if Richmond City will pop these into AFIS so we can get that going.” I press a thumb inside the spoon while Stanfield watches with an unpleasant expression on his face. He is one of these people who hates the morgue and can’t get out of it fast enough. “Doesn’t look like there’s anyone in the labs to help us right now, and the sooner we can figure out who this guy is, the better,” I explain. “And I’d like to get the prints and other information to Interpol in the event this man has international connections.”

“Okay,” Stanfield says with another nod as he glances at his watch.

“Have you ever dealt with Interpol?” I ask him.

“Can’t say I have, ma’am. They’re sort of like spies, aren’t they?”

I page Marino to see if he can help. He drops by forty-five minutes later, by which time Stanfield is long gone and Turk is tucking John Doe’s sectioned organs inside a heavy plastic bag that she will place in the body cavity before she sews up the Y incision.

“Yo Turk,” Marino hails her when he passes through opening steel doors. “Freezing leftovers again?”

She glances up at him with one raised eyebrow and a cocked smile. Marino likes Turk. He likes her so much he is rude to her at every opportunity. Turk doesn’t look like what one might conjure up from her nickname. She is petite, with a clean prettiness and creamy complexion, her long blond hair tied back and clipped up high like a show horse’s tail. She threads heavy white waxed twine into a twelve-gauge suture needle as Marino continues to pick on her. “I tell ya,” he says, “I ever get cut, I ain’t coming to you for stitches, Turk.” She smiles, dipping the big, angled needle into flesh and tugging twine through.

Marino looks hung over, his eyes bloodshot and puffy. Despite his quips, he is in a foul mood. “You forget to go to bed last night?” I ask him.

“More or less. It’s a long story.” He tries to ignore me, watching Turk and oddly distracted and ill at ease. I untie my gown and take off my face shield, mask and O.R. cap. “See how quickly you guys can get these into the computer,” I tell him, all business and not especially friendly. He is keeping secrets from me and I am pissed off by his peacock display of adolescent behavior. “We’ve got a bad situation here, Marino.”

His attention lifts off Turk and lights on me. He gets serious. He drops the childish act. “How ’bout you tell me what’s going on while I smoke,” he says to me, meeting my eyes for the first time in days.

Mine is a nonsmoking building, which has not stopped various people high in the pecking order from lighting up inside their offices if they are surrounded by people who won’t snitch on them. In the morgue, I don’t care who asks. I don’t allow smoking, period. It isn’t that our clientele need to worry about inhaling secondhand smoke, but my concern is for the living who should do nothing in the morgue that requires them to have hand-to-mouth contact. No eating, drinking or smoking, and I discourage chewing gum or sucking on candies or lozenges. Our designated smoking area is two chairs by an upright ash can near the soda machines in the bay. This time of year, this is not a warm, cozy place to sit, but it is private. The James City County case isn’t Marino’s jurisdiction, but I need to tell him about the clothes. “It’s a feeling I have,” I sum it up.

He flicks an ash toward the can, his legs splayed in the plastic chair. We can see our breath.

“Yeah, well I don’t like it, either,” he replies. “Fact is, it may be coincidence, Doc. But another fact is, the Chandonne family’s scary shit. What we don’t know is what the hell the fallout’s going to be now that their ugly duckling son’s locked up in the U.S. for murder—now that he’s managed to draw so much attention to his Godfather daddy and all the rest. These are bad people capable of anything, you ask me. Believe me, I’m just beginning to see how really, really bad they are,” he cryptically adds. “I don’t like the mob, Doc. No sir. When I was coming along, they ran everything.” His eyes get hard as he says this. “Fuck, they probably still do, only difference is, there ain’t any rules, any respect anymore. I don’t know what the hell this guy was doing out near Jamestown, but it wasn’t to sightsee, that’s for sure. And Chandonne’s just sixty miles away in the hospital. Something’s going on.”

“Marino, let’s get Interpol on this immediately,” I say.

It is up to the police to report individuals to Interpol, and to do this Marino will have to contact the liaison at State Police, who will pass on the case information to Interpol’s U.S. National Central Bureau in Washington. What we will be asking Interpol to do is to issue an international advisory notice for our case and to search their massive criminal intelligence database at their General Secretariat in Lyon. Notices are color-coded: Red is for immediate arrest with probable extradition; blue is for someone who is wanted but his identity isn’t absolutely clear; green is a warning about someone who is likely to commit crimes, such as habitual offenders like child molesters and pornographers; yellow is for missing people; and black is for unidentified dead bodies, those who most likely are fugitives and are also coded red. My case will be my second black notice this year, following the first one just weeks ago when the badly decomposed body of Thomas Chandonne was discovered in a cargo container at the Richmond Port.

“Okay, we’ll get Interpol a mug shot, prints and your autopsy info,” Marino makes a mental note. “I’ll do that soon as I leave here. Just hope Stanfield don’t feel I’m stepping on his toes.” He says this as more of a warning. Marino doesn’t care if he steps on Stanfield’s toes but he doesn’t want a hassle.

“He’s clueless, Marino.”

“A shame, too, because James City County has real good cops,” Marino replies. “Problem is, Stanfield’s brother-in-law is Representative Matthew Dinwiddie, so Stanfield’s always gotten extra good treatment down there and has about as much business working homicides as Winnie-the-Pooh. But I guess he had that on his wish list and Dimwit, as I call him, must have sweet-talked the chief.”

“See what you can do,” I tell Marino.

He lights another cigarette, his eyes roving around the bay, thoughts palpable. I resist smoking. The craving is awful and I hate myself for ever resuming the habit. Somehow I always think I can have just one cigarette, and I am always wrong. Marino and I share an awkward silence. Finally, I bring up the subject of the Chandonne case and what Righter told me on Sunday.

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” I quietly say to Marino. “I assume he was released from the hospital early this morning, and I assume you were there. And I guess you’ve met Berger.”

He sucks on the cigarette, taking his time. “Yeah, Doc, I was there. Fucking zoo.” His words drift out on smoke. “They even had reporters from Europe.” He glances at me, and I sense there is much he isn’t going to tell me, and this depresses me deeply. “You ask me, they ought to stick assholes like him in the Bermuda Triangle and not let nobody talk to them or take their picture,” Marino goes on. “It ain’t right, except at least in this case, the guy’s so ugly, he probably gave everybody technical problems, broke a bunch of expensive cameras. They brought him out in enough chains to anchor a damn battleship, leading him along like he was stone-blind. He had bandages over his eyes, faking like he’s in pain, the whole nine yards.”

“Did you talk to him?” This is what I really want to know.

“It wasn’t my show,” he oddly replies, staring off across the bay, clenching his jaw muscles. “They’re saying they might have to do cornea transplants. Fuck. Here we got all these people in the world who can’t even afford glasses, and this piece of furry shit’s gonna get new corneas. And I guess the taxpayers will bankroll his corrective surgery, just like we’re paying all these doctors and nurses and God knows who to take care of his ass.” He crushes out the cigarette in the ash can. “Guess I’d better get cracking.” He reluctantly gets up. He wants to talk to me but for some reason won’t. “The Luce and I are grabbing a beer later on. Says she’s got some big news for me.”

“I’ll let her tell you herself,” I reply.

He gives me a sidelong glance. “So you’re gonna just leave me hanging, huh?”

I start to say that he is one to talk.

“Not even a hint? I mean, is it good news or bad? Don’t tell me she’s pregnant,” he adds ironically as he holds the door for me and we leave the bay.

Inside the autopsy suite, Turk is hosing off my workstation, water slapping and steel grates clanking loudly as she sponges off the table. When she spots me, she shouts above the clamor that Rose is trying to reach me. I go to the phone. “Courts are closed,” Rose tells me. “But Righter’s office says he plans to stipulate your testimony anyway. So not to worry.”

“What a shock.” What was it Anna called him? Ein Mann something. No backbone.

“And your bank called. A man named Greenwood wants you to call.” My secretary gives me a number.

Whenever my bank tries to reach me, I am paranoid. Either investments have taken a dive or I am overdrawn because the computer is screwed up or there is a problem of one sort or another. I get hold of Mr. Greenwood in the private banking division. “I’m very sorry,” he says coolly. “The message was a mistake. A misunderstanding, Dr. Scarpetta. I’m very sorry you were bothered.”

“So no one needs to talk to me. No problems?” I am perplexed. I have dealt with Greenwood for years and he is acting as if he has never met me.

“It was a mistake,” he repeats in the same distant tone. “Again, I apologize. Have a good day.”

CHAPTER 9

I SPEND THE next few hours at my desk, dictating the autopsy report of John Doe and returning phone calls and initialing paperwork, and leave the office late afternoon, heading west.

Sunlight filters through broken clouds and gusts of wind send brown leaves fluttering to the earth like lazy birds. It has stopped snowing and the temperature is rising, the world dripping and sizzling with the wet sounds of traffic.

I drive Anna’s silver Lincoln Navigator toward Three Chopt Road while news on the radio endlessly goes on about Jean-Baptiste Chandonne’s transport out of the city. There is much made over his bandaged eyes and chemical burns. The story of my maiming him to save my life has taken on an energy. Reporters have found their angle. Justice is blind. Dr. Scarpetta has rendered the classic corporeal punishment. “Blinding somebody, hey take that,” a host says on the air. “Who was the guy in Shakespeare? Remember, they gouged his eyes out? King Lear? You see that movie? The old king had to put raw eggs in his eye sockets or something so it wouldn’t hurt so much. Really gross.”

The sidewalk leading to St. Bridget’s brown double front doors is slushy with salt and melted snow, and there are at most twenty cars in the parking lot. It is as Marino predicted: The police are not out in force, nor is the press. The weather may be what has kept the crowds away from the old Gothic brick church, or more likely it is the deceased herself. I, for one, am not here out of respect or affection or even a sense of loss. I unbutton my coat and step inside the narthex as I try to evade the uncomfortable truth: I could not stand Diane Bray and have come here only out of duty. She was a police official. I was acquainted with her. She was my patient.

There is a large photograph of her on a table, just inside the narthex, and I am startled to see her haughty self-absorbed beauty, the icy cruel glint in her eyes that no camera could disguise, no matter the angle, the lighting or skills of the photographer. Diane Bray hated me for reasons I still fail to completely grasp. By all accounts, she was obsessed with me and my power and focused on my every dimension in ways I never have. I suppose I do not see myself the way she did, and I was slow to catch on when she began her aggressions, her unbelievably intense war against me which culminated in her aspiring to be appointed to a cabinet position in the commonwealth.

Bray had it all figured out. She would help mastermind transferring the medical examiner’s division from the health department to public safety so she could then, if all went according to plan, somehow maneuver the governor into appointing her secretary of public safety. That done, I would politically answer to her, and she could even have the pleasure of firing me. Why? I continue to search for reasonable motivations and fail to find any that completely satisfy me. I had never even heard of her before she signed on with the Richmond P.D. last year. But she certainly knew about me and moved to my fair city with plots and schemes in the works to undo me sadistically, slowly, through a series of shocking disruptions, slanders and professional obstructions and humiliations before she ultimately ruined my career, my life. I suppose in her fantasies, the climax to her cold-blooded machinations would have been for me to give up my position in disgrace, commit suicide and leave a note saying it was her fault. Instead, I am still here. She is not. That I should have been the one who tended to her brutalized remains is an irony beyond description.

A cluster of police officers in dress uniform are talking to each other, and near the sanctuary door, Chief Rodney Harris is with Father O’Connor. There are civilians, too, people in fine clothes who don’t look familiar, and I sense from the lost, vacant way they are casting about that they aren’t local. I pick up a service bulletin and wait to speak to Chief Harris and my priest. “Yes, yes, I understand,” Father O’Connor is saying. He is serene in a long, creamy robe, his fingers laced at his waist. I realize with a twinge of guilt that I have not seen him since Easter.

“Well, Father, I just can’t. That’s the part I can’t accept,” Harris replies, his thinning red hair plastered back from his flabby, unattractive face. He is a short man with a soft body that is genetically coded to be fat, a Pillsbury Dough Boy in dress blues. Harris is not a nice man and he resents powerful women. I have never understood why he hired Diane Bray and can only assume it wasn’t for the right reasons.

“God’s will is not always for us to understand,” says Father O’Connor, and then he sees me. “Dr. Scarpetta.” He smiles and takes my hand in both of his. “So good of you to come. You’ve been in my thoughts and prayers.” The pressure of his fingers and the light in his eyes convey that he understands what has happened to me and cares. “How’s your arm? I wish you would come by to see me sometime.”

“Thank you, Father.” I offer my hand to Chief Harris. “I know this is a difficult time for your department,” I tell him. “And for you personally.”

“Very, very sad,” he says, staring off at other people as he gives me a perfunctory, brusque handshake.

The last time I saw Harris was at Bray’s house when he walked in and was confronted by the appalling sight of her body. That moment will forever lodge between him and me. He should never have come to the scene. There was no good reason for him to see his deputy chief so completely degraded, and I will always resent him for it. I have a special distaste for people who treat crime scenes callously and with disrespect, and Harris’s showing up at Bray’s scene was a power play and an indulgence in voyeurism, and he knows I know it. I move on into the sanctuary and feel his eyes on my back. “Amazing Grace” swells from the organ, and people are finding pews midway up the aisle. Saints and crucifixion scenes glow in rich stained glass, and marble and brass crosses gleam. I sit on the aisle, and moments later the processional begins, and the smartly dressed strangers I noticed earlier walk in with the priest. A young crucifer carries the cross, while a man in a black suit bears the gold-and-red enamel urn containing Diane Bray’s cremated remains. An elderly couple holds hands, dabbing tears.

Father O’Connor greets all of us and I learn that Bray’s parents and two brothers are here. They have come from upstate New York, Delaware and Washington, D.C., and loved Diane very much. The service is simple. It isn’t long. Father O’Connor sprinkles the waters of baptism on the urn. No one but Chief Harris offers any reflections or eulogies, and what he has to say is stilted and generic. “She gladly enlisted in a profession that is all about rendering help to others.” He stands stiffly behind the pulpit and reads from his notes. “Knowing every day that she was placing herself at risk, for that is the life of the police. We learn to stare death in the face and fear not. We know what it is to be alone and even to be hated, and yet we fear not. We know what it is to be a lightning rod for evil, for those who are on this planet to take from others.”

Wood creaks as people shift in their pews. Father O’Connor smiles kindly, his head tilted at an angle as he listens. I tune out Harris. I have never attended such a sterile, hollow service and I shrink inside with dismay. The liturgy, the gospel acclamations, the singing and prayers carry no music or passion, because Diane Bray did not love anyone, including herself. Her rapacious, overreaching life has scarcely left a ripple. All of us leave silently, venturing out into the raw, dark night to find our cars and escape. I walk briskly with head bent, the way I do when I wish to avoid others. I am aware of sounds, of a presence, and I turn around as I unlock my car door. Someone has stepped up behind me.

“Dr. Scarpetta?” The woman’s refined features are accentuated by the uneven glare of streetlights, her eyes deeply set in shadows, and she wears a full-length shorn mink coat. A hint of recognition sparks somewhere in the deep. “I didn’t know you were going to be here, but sure am glad,” she adds. I am aware of her New York accent, and shock rocks me before I comprehend. “I’m Jaime Berger,” she says, offering a kid-gloved hand. “We need to talk.”

. . .

“YOU WERE AT the service?” These are the first words out of my mouth. I didn’t see her there. I am paranoid enough to consider that Jaime Berger never stepped inside the church at all but has been waiting in the parking lot for me. “Did you know Diane Bray?” I ask her.

“I’m getting to know her now.” Berger turns up her coat collar, her breath smoking out. She glances at her watch and pushes the winding stem. The luminescent dial glows pale green. “I don’t suppose you’re going back to your office.”

“I wasn’t planning on it, but I can,” I say without enthusiasm. She wants to talk about the murders of Kim Luong and Diane Bray. Of course, she’s interested in the unidentified body from the port, too—the one we all assume is Chandonne’s brother, Thomas. But if his case ever sees a courtroom at all, she adds, it isn’t going to be in this country. This is her way of telling me Thomas Chandonne is another free lunch. Jean-Baptiste murdered his brother and got away with it. I climb up into the driver’s seat of the Navigator.

“How do you like your car?” she asks what seems an inane, inappropriate question at a time like this. Already I am feeling probed. I sense instantly that Berger does nothing, asks nothing, without a reason. She surveys the luxurious sport utility vehicle that Anna is letting me use while my sedan remains strangely off limits.

“It’s borrowed. Maybe you’d better follow me, Ms. Berger,” I say. “There are some parts of town you wouldn’t want to get lost in after dark.”

“I’m wondering if you could track down Pete Marino.” She points a remote key at her own sport utility vehicle, a white Mercedes ML430 with New York plates, and headlights flash as the doors unlock. “Maybe it would be a good thing for all of us to talk.”

I start the engine and shiver in the dark. The night is soggy and icy water drips from trees. The cold seeps inside my cast and finds its way into the cracks of my fractured elbow, seizing exquisitely tender spaces where nerve endings and marrow live, and they begin to complain in deep rolling throbs. I page Marino and realize I don’t know the number of Anna’s car phone. I fumble to dig my cell phone out of my satchel while steering with the fingertips of my broken arm and keeping an eye on Berger’s headlights in my rearview mirror. Marino calls me back long minutes later. I tell him what has happened and he reacts with typical cynicism, but beneath it is an excited current, maybe anger, maybe something else. “Yeah, well, I don’t believe in coincidences,” he says sharply. “You just happen to go to Bray’s memorial service and Berger just happens to be there? Why the hell did she go, in the first place?”

“I don’t know why,” I reply. “But if I were new to the town and to the characters involved, I’d want to see who cared enough about Bray to show up. I’d also want to see who didn’t.” I try to be logical. “She didn’t tell you she was going? What about when you met with her last night?” I am out with it. I want to know what went on in that meeting.

“Didn’t say nothing about it,” he replies. “She had other things on her mind.”

“Such as? Or are we keeping secrets?” I add pointedly.

He is silent for a long moment. “Look, Doc,” he finally says, “this ain’t my case. It’s New York’s case and I’m just doing what I’m told. You want to know stuff, ask her, ’cause that’s the way she fucking wants it.” Resentment hardens his tone. “And I’m in the middle of lovely Mosby Court and have other things to do besides jump every time she snaps her fancy big-city fingers.”

Mosby Court is not the princely residential neighborhood the name suggests, but one of seven low-rent housing projects in the city. All are called courts, and four are named for outstanding Virginians: an actor, an educator, a prosperous tobacconist, a Civil War hero. I hope Marino isn’t in Mosby Court because there has been another shooting. “You’re not bringing me more business, are you?” I ask him.

“Another misdemeanor murder.”

I don’t laugh at this bigoted code—this cynical label for a young, black male shot multiple times, probably on the street, probably over drugs, probably dressed in expensive athletic clothes and basketball shoes, and nobody saw a thing.

“Meet you in the bay,” Marino sullenly says. “Five, ten minutes.”

The snow has completely stopped and the temperature remains warm enough to keep the city from locking up with freezing slush again. Downtown is dressed for the holidays, the skyline bordered in white lights, some of them burned out. In front of the James Center, people have pulled over to explore a blaze of reindeer sculpted of light, and on 9th Street, the capitol glows like an egg through the bare branches of ancient trees, the pale yellow mansion next to it elegant with candles in every window. I catch a glimpse of couples in evening clothes getting out of cars in the parking lot and remember with panic that tonight is the governor’s Christmas party for top state officials. I sent in my RSVP more than a month ago, confirming I would attend. Oh God. It will not be lost on Governor Mike Mitchell and his wife, Edith, that I am a no-show, and the impulse to swerve onto the capitol grounds is so strong that I flip on my turn signal. I just as quickly flip it off. I can’t possibly go, not even for fifteen minutes. What would I do with Jaime Berger? Take her along? Introduce her to everyone? I smile ruefully and shake my head inside my dark cockpit as I imagine the looks I would get, as I fantasize about what would happen if the press found out.

Having worked for government my entire career, I never underestimate the potential for the mundane. The telephone number for the governor’s mansion is listed, and directory assistance can automatically dial it for an additional fifty cents. Momentarily, I have an executive protection unit officer on the line, and before I can explain that I simply want to pass on a message, the trooper puts me on hold. A tone sounds at measured intervals, as if my call is being timed, and I wonder if calls to the mansion are taped. Across Broad Street, an older, drearier part of town gives way to the new brick and glass empire of Biotech, where my office is the anchor. I check the rearview mirror for Berger’s SUV. She doggedly follows, her lips moving in my rearview mirror. She is on the phone, and it gives me an uneasy feeling as I watch her say words I can’t hear.

“Kay?” Governor Mitchell’s voice suddenly sounds over Anna’s hands-free car phone.

My own voice catches in surprise as I rush to tell him I wasn’t expecting to disturb him, that I am terribly sorry to miss his party tonight. He doesn’t answer right away, his hesitation his way of saying I am making a mistake by not coming to his party. Mitchell is a man who understands opportunity and knows how to appropriate it. In his way of thinking, for me to pass up a chance for even a moment with him and other powerful leaders of the commonwealth is foolish, especially now. Yes, now of all times.

“The New York prosecutor’s in town.” I don’t have to say for which cases. “I’m on my way to meet her right now, Governor. I hope you understand.”

“I think it would be a good idea for you and me to meet, too.” He is firm. “I was going to take you aside at the party.”

I have the sensation of stepping on broken glass, afraid to look because I might find I am bleeding. “Whenever it’s convenient for you, Governor Mitchell,” I respectfully answer.

“Why don’t you stop by the mansion on your way home?”

“I can probably be free in about two hours,” I tell him.

“I’ll see you then, Kay. Say hello to Ms. Berger,” he goes on. “When I was attorney general, we had a case that involved her office. I’ll tell you about it sometime.”

Off 4th Street, the enclosed bay where bodies are received looks like a square, gray igloo appended to the side of my building. I drive up the ramp and stop at the massive garage door, realizing with intense frustration that I have no way to get in. The remote opener is in my car, which is inside my garage at the house I have been banished from. I dial the number for the after-hours morgue attendant. “Arnold?” I say when he answers on the sixth ring. “Could you please open the bay door?”

“Oh, yes ma’am.” He sounds groggy and confused, as if I just woke him up. “Doing it right now, ma’am. Your opener not working?”

I try to be patient with him. Arnold is one of those people who is overwhelmed by inertia. He battles gravity. Gravity wins. I am constantly having to remind myself that there is no point in getting angry with him. Highly motivated people aren’t fighting for his job. Berger has pulled up behind me and Marino is behind her, all of us waiting for the door to rise, granting us entrance into the kingdom of the dead. My portable phone rings.

“Well, ain’t this cozy,” Marino says in my ear.

“Apparently she and the governor are acquainted.” I watch a dark van turn into the ramp behind Marino’s midnight blue Crown Victoria. The bay door begins to lurch up with screeching complaints.

“Well, well. You don’t think he has something to do with Wolfman leaving us for the Big Apple, do you?”

“I don’t know what to think anymore,” I confess. The bay is large enough to hold all of us, and we get out at the same time, the rumbling of engines and shutting of doors amplified by concrete. Cold, raw air jars my fractured elbow again, and I am baffled to see Marino in a suit and tie. “You look nice,” I dryly comment. He lights a cigarette, his eyes fastened to Berger’s mink-draped figure as she leans inside her Mercedes to collect belongings from the backseat. Two men in long, dark coats open the tailgate of the van, revealing the stretcher inside and its ominous, shrouded cargo.

“Believe it or not,” Marino says to me, “I was going to stop by the memorial service for the hell of it, then he decides to get whacked.” He indicates the dead body in the back of the van. “It’s turning out to be a little more complicated than we thought at first. Maybe more than a case of urban renewal.” Berger heads toward us, loaded down with books, accordion files and a sturdy leather briefcase. “You came prepared.” Marino stares at her with a flat expression on his face. Aluminum clacks as stretcher legs open. The tailgate slams shut.

“I really appreciate both of you seeing me on such short notice,” Berger says.

In the glare of the lighted bay, I note the fine lines on her face and neck, the faint hollows in her cheeks that tattle on her age. At a glance, or when she’s made up for the camera, she could pass for thirty-five. I suspect she is a few years older than I am, closer to fifty. Her angular features, short dark hair and perfect teeth coalesce into a portrait of the familiar, and I connect her with the expert I have seen on Court TV. She begins to resemble the photographs I pulled up on the Internet when I released search engines to find her in cyberspace so I could prepare myself for this invasion from what seems an alien galaxy.

Marino doesn’t offer to help her carry anything. He ignores her the same way he does me when he is stung or resentful or jealous. I unlock the door leading inside as the attendants wheel the stretcher in our direction, and I recognize the two men but can’t recall their names. One of them stares at Berger with starstruck eyes. “You’re the lady on TV,” he pipes up. “Holy smoke. That lady judge.”

“ ’Fraid not. I’m no judge.” Berger looks them in the eye and smiles.

“You ain’t the lady judge? You swear?” The stretcher clatters through the doorway. “I guess you want him in the cooler,” one of the men says to me.

“Yes,” I reply. “You know where to sign him in. Arnold’s around here somewhere.”

“Yes ma’am, I know what to do.” Neither attendant makes any indication that I might have ended up in their van last weekend as another delivery had my destiny turned out differently. It is my observation that people who work for funeral homes and removal services aren’t shocked or even moved by much. It is not lost on me that these two guys are more impressed with Berger’s celebrity than with the fact that their local chief medical examiner is lucky to be alive and is faring rather poorly in the public eye these days. “You ready for Christmas?” one of them asks me.

“Never am,” I reply. “You gentlemen have a happy one.”

“Lot happier than he’s gonna have.” Indicating the pouched body, they roll off in the direction of the morgue office, where they will fill out a toe tag and sign in the newest patient. I push buttons to open several sets of stainless steel doors as we walk over disinfected floors, passing coolers and the rooms where autopsies are done. Industrial-strength deodorizers are heavy-handed in their presence, and Marino talks about the case from Mosby Court. Berger asks him nothing about it, but he seems to think she wants to know. Or maybe he is showing off now.

“First, it looked like a drive-by since he was in the street and his head was bloody. But I gotta tell you, now I’m wondering if maybe he got hit by a car,” he informs us. I open doors leading into the dim silence of the administrative wing while he goes on to tell Berger every detail of a case he hasn’t even discussed with me yet. I show them into my private conference room and we take off our coats. Berger is dressed in dark wool slacks and a heavy black sweater that does not accentuate but certainly can’t hide her ample bosom. She has the slender, firm build of an athlete, and her scuffed Vibram boots hint that she will go anywhere and do anything if work requires it. She pulls out a chair and begins arranging briefcase, files and books on the round wooden table.

“See, he’s got burns here and here.” Marino points to his left cheek and neck and pulls out Polaroid photographs from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. He makes the smart choice of handing them to me first.

“Why would a hit-and-run have burns?” My question is a rebuttal, and I am getting an uneasy feeling.

“If he was pushed out while the car was moving, or if he got toasted by the exhaust pipe,” Marino suggests, not sure, not really caring. He has other matters on his mind.

“Not likely,” I reply in an ominous tone.

“Shit,” Marino says, and it begins to dawn on him as he meets my eyes. “I never looked at him, was already in a bag by the time I got there. Goddamn, I just went by what I was told by the guys at the scene. Shit,” he says again, glancing at Berger, his face darkening with gathering embarrassment and irritation. “They’d already bagged the body by the time I got there. Dumb as a bag of hammers, all of ’em.”

The man in the Polaroids is light-skinned with handsome features and short, tightly curled hair dyed egg-yolk yellow. A small gold loop pierces his left ear. I know instantly that his burns were not made by an exhaust pipe, which would leave elliptical burns and not these, which are perfectly round and the size of silver dollars and blistered. He was alive when he got them. I give Marino a long look. He makes the connection and blows out, shaking his head. “We have an ID?” I say to him.

“We don’t got a clue.” He smooths back hair that at this stage in his life is nothing more than gray fringe gelled to the top of his broad bald pate. He would look much better if he would just shave his head. “Nobody in the area says they’ve ever seen him before, either, and none of my guys think he looks like anybody we’re used to seeing out there on the street.”

“I need to look at the body now.” I get up from the table.

Marino pushes back his chair. Berger watches me with penetrating blue eyes. She has stopped spreading out her paperwork. “Do you mind if I come along?” she asks.

I do, but she is here. She is a professional. It would be unthinkably rude for me to imply she might not act like one or to suggest I don’t trust her. I step next door to fetch my lab coat from my office. “I guess you’ve got no way of knowing whether it’s possible this guy might have been gay. I guess it’s not an area where gays might cruise or hang out.” I quiz Marino as we head out of the conference room. “What about male prostitutes in Mosby Court?”

“He has that look, now that you mention it,” Marino replies. “One of the cops said he was sort of a pretty boy, that buffed kind of workout build. He was wearing an earring. Like I said, though, I ain’t seen the body.”

“I do believe you win the prize for stereotypes,” Berger comments to him. “And I thought my guys were bad.”

“Oh yeah? What guys?” Marino is a millimeter from being snide to her.

“At my office,” she says in a blasé way. “The investigative squad.”

“Oh yeah? You got your own personal NYPD cops? Ain’t that sweet. How big?”

“About fifty.”

“They work in your building?” I can hear it in his tone. Berger threatens the hell out of him.

“Yes.” She does not relay this with any sort of condescension or arrogance, but simply reports the facts.

Marino walks ahead of her and tosses back, “Well, ain’t that something.”

The removal service attendants are in the office chatting with Arnold. He looks stricken when I appear, as if I have caught him in the middle of something he shouldn’t be doing, but then, this is simply Arnold. He is a timid, quiet man. Like a moth that has begun to turn the color of his environment, he is wan with an unhealthy gray tint to his skin, and chronic allergies keep his eyes red-rimmed and runny. The second John Doe of the day is in the middle of the hallway, zipped up inside a burgundy, deep-pile pouch that is embroidered with the name of the removal service, Whitkin Brothers. I suddenly remember the names of the attendants. Of course, they are the Whitkin brothers. “I’ll take care of him.” I let the brothers know they don’t have to roll the body into the cooler or transfer him onto a gurney.

“We don’t mind,” they are quick to nervously offer, as if I am implying they are lollygagging.

“That’s all right. I need to spend a little time with him first,” I say, and I push the stretcher through double steel doors and hand out shoe covers and gloves. It takes a few moments for me to do the necessary housekeeping of signing John Doe into the autopsy log, assigning him a number and photographing him. I smell urine.

THE AUTOPSY SUITE gleams bright and clean, devoid of the usual sights and sounds. The quiet is a relief. After all these years, the constant clamor of water running into steel sinks, of Stryker saws, of steel clacking against steel still makes me tense and tired. The morgue can be surprisingly noisy. The dead are loud in their demands and gory colors, and this new patient is going to resist me. I can already tell. He is completely rigorous and not about to allow me to undress him or open his jaws to look at his tongue or teeth, not without a struggle. I unzip the pouch and smell urine. I pull a surgical lamp close and palpate his head, feeling no fractures. Blood smeared on his jaw and drops on the front of his jacket indicate he was upright when he was bleeding. I direct the light up his nostrils. “He’s had a nosebleed,” I report to Marino and Berger. “So far, I’m not seeing any injuries to his head.”

I begin examining the burns through a lens while Berger moves near me to observe. I note fibers and dirt adhering to blistered skin, and I find abrasions at the corners of his mouth and on the inside of his cheeks. I push up the sleeves of his red warm-up jacket and look at his wrists. Sharply angled ligature marks have left pronounced indentations in the skin, and when I unzip his jacket, I find two burns directly centered on the navel and left nipple. Berger is leaning so close, her gown brushes me. “Rather cold to be out with just a warm-up suit and no T-shirt or anything beneath it,” I point out to Marino. “Were his pockets checked at the scene?”

“Better to wait and do it here where you can see worth a damn,” he answers.

I slide my hands into the pockets of the warm-up pants and jacket, finding nothing. I pull the pants down and blue running shorts underneath are soaked with urine, and the ammonia smell sends an alert through my psyche, and tiny hairs all over my flesh stand up like sentries. The dead rarely frighten me. This man does. I check the pocket inside the waistband and pull out a steel key etched with Do Not Duplicate, and written on it in permanent Magic Marker is the number 233. “A hotel or house, maybe?” I wonder out loud as I place the key inside a transparent plastic bag and am pricked by more paranoid feelings. “Maybe a locker.” Two-thirty-three was my family’s post office box number when I was a child in Miami. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that 233 is my lucky number, but it is one I have frequently used for pass codes and lock combinations, because the number isn’t obvious and I can remember it.

“Anything so far that might suggest what killed him?” Berger asks me.

“Not so far. I don’t guess we’ve had any luck with AFIS or Interpol yet?” I say to Marino.

“Didn’t get a cold hit, so whoever your motel guy is, he ain’t in AFIS. Nothing from Interpol yet, which ain’t necessarily good, either. If it’s obvious, you usually know in an hour,” he says.

“Let’s print this guy and get him into AFIS as fast as we can.” I try not to sound anxious. With a lens I check the hands, front and back, for any obvious trace evidence that might be dislodged by my getting fingerprints. I clip fingernails and place them in an envelope that I label and leave on a countertop with the beginnings of the paperwork, then I ink the fingertips and Marino helps me with the spoon. I take two sets of prints. Berger is silent and keenly curious during all this, her scrutiny like the warmth of a bright lamp. She watches my every move, listens to my every question and instruction. I don’t focus on her but am aware of her attention, and in the far reaches of my consciousness, I know this woman is making assessments that I may or may not like. I gather the sheet around the body and zip up the pouch, motioning to Marino and Berger to follow me as I roll the gurney to the cooler against one wall and open the stainless steel door. The stench of death blasts out in a frigid front. Our residents are few this night, only six, and I check the tags on pouch zippers, looking for the John Doe from the motel. When I find him, I uncover his face and point out his burns, and the abrasions at the corners of his mouth and around his wrists.

“Jesus,” Marino says. “What the hell is this? Some serial killer going around tying up people and torturing them with a blow-dryer?”

“We need to let Stanfield know about this right away,” I answer him, because it is apparent that the death of John Doe from the motel may be connected to the body dumped in Mosby Court. I glance at Marino, reading his thoughts. “I know.” He makes no effort to disguise his disdain at telling Stanfield anything. “We’ve got to tell him, Marino,” I add.

We walk out of the cooler and he goes to the “clean hands” wall phone. “Can you find your way back to the conference room?” I ask Berger.

“Sure.” She looks almost glazed, maybe puzzled as distant thoughts show in her eyes.

“I’ll be right there,” I say to her. “I’m sorry for the interruption.”

She hovers in the doorway, untying her surgical gown in back. “Strange. But I had a case a couple months back, a woman tortured with a heat gun. Burns looked a lot like the ones in these two cases.” She bends over to pull off her booties and drop them in the trash. “Gagged, tied up and had these round burns on her face, her breasts.”

“Did they catch who did it?” I am quick to ask, not happy about the parallel.

“A construction guy working in her apartment building,” she says with a small frown. “The heat gun was for burning off paint. A real dumb shit, loser—broke into her apartment about three o’clock in the morning, raped, strangled her and all the rest, and when he went out several hours later, his truck had been stolen. Welcome to New York. So hello, he calls the cops and next thing is in a patrol car, a duffel bag in his lap, giving a statement about his stolen truck at the same time the victim’s housekeeper shows up, finds the body, starts screaming hysterically and calls nine-one-one. The killer’s sitting right there in the cop car when the detectives roar up, and he tries to run. A clue. Turns out the asshole has clothesline and a heat gun inside the duffel bag.”

“Was there a lot about the case in the news?” I ask.

“Locally. The Times, the tabloids.”

“Let’s hope it didn’t give someone else the idea,” I reply.

CHAPTER 10

I AM SUPPOSED to handle any sight, any image, any smell, any sound without flinching. I am not allowed to react to horror the way normal people do. It is my job to reconstruct pain without feeling it vicariously, to conjure up terror and not allow it to follow me home. I am supposed to submerge myself in Jean-Baptiste Chandonne’s sadistic art without imagining that his next mutilated work was supposed to be me.

He is one of the few killers I have seen who looks like what he does, the classic monster. But he didn’t step from the pages of Mary Shelley. Chandonne is real. He is hideous, his face formed of two halves set together unevenly, one eye lower than the other, teeth widely spaced, small and pointed like an animal’s. His entire body is covered with long, unpigmented, baby-fine hair, but it is his eyes that disturb me most. I saw hell in that stare, a lust that seemed to light up the air when he pushed his way into my house and back-kicked the door shut behind him. His evil intuition and intelligence are palpable, and although I resist feeling even a breath of mercy for him, I know the suffering Chandonne causes others is a projection of his own wretchedness, a transient re-creation of the nightmare he endures with every beat of his hateful heart.

I found Berger in my conference room and now she accompanies me down a corridor as I explain that Chandonne suffers from a rare disorder called congenital hypertrichosis. It afflicts only one in a billion people, if such statistics are to be trusted. Before him, I had encountered only one other case of this cruel genetic disorder, when I was a resident physician in Miami, rotating through pediatrics, and a Mexican woman gave birth to one of the ghastliest deformities of human life I have ever seen. The infant girl was covered with long, gray hair that spared only her mucous membranes, her palms and the soles of her feet. Long tufts protruded from her nostrils and ears, and she had three nipples. Hypertrichotic people can be overly sensitive to light and suffer anomalies of their teeth and genitalia. They might have extra fingers and toes. In earlier centuries these wretched people were sold to carnivals or royal courts. Some were accused of being werewolves.

“Then do you think there’s significance to his biting his victims’ palms and feet?” Berger asks. She has a strong, modulated voice. I would almost call it a television voice: Low-pitched and refined, it gets your attention. “Maybe because those are the only areas of his own body that aren’t covered with hair? Well, I don’t know,” she reconsiders. “But I would have to suppose there’s some sort of sexual association, like people, for example, who have foot fetishes. But I’ve never seen a case where someone bites hands and feet.”

I turn on lights in the front office and pass an electronic key over the lock of the fireproof vault we call the evidence room, where the door and walls are reinforced with steel, and a computer system logs the code of whoever enters and when and how long he stays. We rarely have much in the way of personal effects locked up in here. Generally, the police take such items to the property room or we return them to the families. My reason for having this room built is I face the reality that no office is immune from leaks and I need a secure place to store extremely sensitive cases. Against a back wall are heavy steel cabinets, and I unlock one of them and pull out two thick files sealed with heavy tape that I have initialed so no one can snoop without my knowing. I enter Kim Luong’s and Diane Bray’s case numbers in the log book beside the printer that has just hammered out my code and the time. Berger and I continue talking as we follow the hallway back to the conference room where Marino awaits us, impatiently, tensely.

“Why haven’t you had a profiler look at these cases?” Berger asks me as we pass through the doorway.

I set the files on the table and give Marino a look. He can take this one. It is not my responsibility to send cases to profilers.

“A profiler? What for?” he answers Berger in a manner that can only be described as confrontational. “The point of profiling is to figure out what sort of squirrel did it. We already know what sort of squirrel did it.”

“But the why? The meaning, the emotion, the symbolism? Those sorts of analyses. I would like to hear what a profiler has to say.” She pays no attention to him. “Especially about the hands and feet. Weird.” She is still focused on that detail.

“You ask me, most profiling is smoke and mirrors,” Marino holds forth. “Not that I don’t think there are some guys who really got the gift, but most of it’s bullshit. You get some squirrel like Chandonne who’s into biting hands and feet and it don’t take no FBI profiler to consider that maybe those body parts have some significance to him. Like maybe he’s got something oddball with his own hands and feet—or in this case, it’s the opposite. Those are the only places he ain’t got hair, except inside his friggin’ mouth and maybe his asshole.”

“I can understand him destroying what he hates in himself, mutilating those areas of his victims’ bodies, such as their faces.” She will not be bullied by Marino. “But I don’t know. The hands and feet. There’s something more to that.” Berger rebuffs him by her every gesture and inflection.

“Yeah, but his favorite part of the chicken’s the white meat,” Marino pushes. He and Berger treat each other like lovers who have turned on each other. “That’s his thing. Women with big tits. He’s got some mother-thing going when he selects victims with certain body types. Don’t take no FBI profiler to connect them dots, either.”

I say nothing but give Marino a look that tells him plenty. He is acting like an insensitive ass, apparently so intent on battling this woman that he fails to realize what he is saying in front of me. He knows damn well that Benton had a genuine gift based on science and a significant database the Bureau has been building by studying and interviewing thousands of violent offenders. And I don’t appreciate references to the victims’ body types since mine was selected by Chandonne, too.

“You know, I don’t like the word ‘tit.’” Berger says this matter-of-factly, as if she is telling a waiter to hold the béarnaise sauce. She looks levelly at Marino. “Do you even know what a tit is, Captain?”

Marino, for once, is without words.

“A small bird, maybe,” she goes on, shuffling through her paperwork, the energy of her hands betraying her anger. “A blow. Tit for tat, blow for blow. Etymology. And I don’t mean the study of bugs. That would be with an N—Entomology. I’m talking about words. Which can offend. And can offend back. Balls, for example, can be something used in games—tennis, soccer. Or refer to the very limited brains between the legs of males who talk about tits.” She glances at him with a weighty pause. “Now that we’ve crossed our language barrier, shall we proceed?” She turns expectantly to me.

Marino’s face is the color of a radish.

“You have copies of the autopsy reports already?” I know the answer, but ask her anyway.

“I’ve been through them numerous times,” she responds.

I peel tape off the cases and push them in her direction while Marino pops his knuckles and avoids our eyes. Berger slides color photographs out of an envelope. “What can you tell me?” she asks us.

“Kim Luong,” Marino begins in a workmanlike tone, reminding me of M. I. Calloway after he persisted in humiliating her. Marino is seething. “Thirty-year-old Asian, worked part-time in a West End convenience store called Quik Cary. It appears Chandonne waited until there was no one there but her. This was at night.”

“Thursday, December ninth,” Berger says as she looks at a scene photo of Luong’s mutilated, seminude body.

“Yeah. The burglar alarm went off at nineteen-sixteen,” he says as I puzzle. What did Marino and Berger talk about last night, if not this? I assumed she met with him to go over the investigative aspects of the cases, but it seems clear the two of them have not discussed the murders of Luong or Bray.

Berger frowns, looking at another photograph. “Sixteen past seven P.M.? That’s when he came into the store or when he left after the fact?”

“When he left. Went out a back door that was always armed, on a separate alarm system. So he came into the store sometime earlier than that, through the front door, probably right after dark. He had a gun, walked in, shot her as she was sitting behind the counter. Then he put up the closed sign, locked the door, and dragged her back into the storeroom so he could do his thing with her.” Marino is laconic and on good behavior, but beneath all this is a volatile concoction of chemistry that I am beginning to recognize. He wants to impress, belittle and bed Jaime Berger, and all of it is about his aching wounds of loneliness and insecurity, and his frustrations with me. As I watch him struggle to hide his embarrassment behind a wall of nonchalance, I am touched by sorrow. If only Marino wouldn’t force misery upon himself. If only he wouldn’t invite bad moments like these.

“Was she alive when he began beating and biting her?” Berger directs this at me as she slowly goes through more photographs.

“Yes,” I reply.

“Based on?”

“There was sufficient tissue response to the injuries of her face to suggest she was alive when he began beating her. What we can’t know is whether she was conscious. Or better put, how long she was conscious,” I say.

“I got videotapes of the scenes,” Marino offers in a voice meant to suggest he is bored.

“I want everything.” Berger makes that patently clear.

“At least I filmed the Luong and Diane Bray scenes. Not brother Thomas. We didn’t videotape him in the cargo container, which is probably a damn lucky thing.” Marino stifles a yawn, his act becoming more ridiculous and annoying.

“You went to all the scenes?” Berger asks me.

“I did.”

She looks at another photograph.

“No way I’d ever eat blue cheese again, not after spending quality time with ol’ Thomas.” Hostility bristles closer to the surface of Marino’s skin.

“You know, I was going to put on coffee,” I say to him. “Would you mind?”

“Mind what?” Stubbornness holds him in his chair.

“Mind putting on a pot.” I look at him in a way that strongly suggests he leave me alone with Berger for a few minutes.

“I’m not sure I know how to work your machine here.” He makes a stupid excuse.

“I have complete faith you’ll figure it out,” I reply.

“I can see you two have a nice rhythm going,” I ironically observe when Marino is down the hall and can’t hear us.

“We had plenty of opportunity to get acquainted this morning, very early this morning, I might add.” Berger glances up at me. “At the hospital, before Chandonne was sent along his merry way.”

“Might I suggest, Ms. Berger, that if you’re going to spend some time around here, you might want to start by telling him to keep his mind on the mission. He seems to have some battle going with you that overshadows everything else, and it simply isn’t helpful.”

She continues studying photographs with no expression on her face. “God, it’s like an animal tore into them. Just like Susan Pless, my case. These could just as easily be photos of her body. I’m halfway ready to believe in werewolves. Of course, there’s the theory in folklore that the notion of werewolves might have been based on real people who suffered from hypertrichosis.” I am not sure if she is trying to show me how much research she has done, or if she is deflecting what I just said about Marino. She meets my eyes. “I appreciate your words of advice about him. I know you’ve worked with him forever, so he can’t be all bad.”

“He’s not. You won’t find a better detective.”

“And let me guess. He was obnoxious when you first met him.”

“He’s still obnoxious,” I reply.

Berger smiles. “Marino and I have a few issues that we still haven’t worked out. Clearly, he isn’t used to prosecutors who tell him how a case is going to work. It’s a little different in New York,” she reminds me. “For example, cops can’t arrest a defendant in a homicide case without the D.A.’s approval. We run the cases up there, and frankly”—she picks up lab reports—“it works a whole lot better, as a result. Marino feels it excruciatingly necessary to be in charge, and he’s overly protective of you. And jealous of anyone who comes into your life,” she sums it up, skimming the reports. “No alcohol on board, except Diane Bray. Point-zero-three. Isn’t the thought that she’d had a beer or two and pizza before the killer showed up at her door?” She pushes photographs around on the table. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody beaten this badly. Rage, unbelievable rage. And lust. If you can call something like this lust. I don’t think there’s a word for whatever he was feeling.”

“The word is ‘evil.’”

“I guess we won’t know about other drugs for a while.”

“We’ll test for the usual suspects. But it will be weeks,” I tell her.

She spreads out more photographs, sorting them as if she is playing Solitaire. “How does it make you feel, knowing this might have been you?”

“I don’t think about that,” I answer.

“What do you think about?”

“What the injuries are saying to me.”

“Which is?”

I pick up a photograph of Kim Luong—a bright, wonderful young woman by all reports, who was working to put herself through nursing school. “The blood pattern,” I describe. “Almost every inch of her exposed skin is smeared with bloody swirls, part of his ritual. He fingerpainted.”

“After they were dead.”

“Presumably. In this photo”—I show her—“you can plainly see the gunshot wound to the front of her neck. It hit her carotid and her spinal cord. She would have been paralyzed from the neck down when he dragged her into the storeroom.”

“And hemorrhaging. Because of the severed carotid.”

“Absolutely. You can see the arterial spatter pattern on the shelves he dragged her past.” I lean closer to her and show her in several photographs. “Big sweeps of blood that start getting lower and weaker the farther he dragged her through the store.”

“Conscious?” Berger is fascinated and grim.

“The injury to her spinal cord wasn’t immediately fatal.”

“How long could she have survived, bleeding like that?”

“Minutes.” I find an autopsy photograph that shows the spinal cord after it has been removed from the body and centered on a green towel, along with a white plastic ruler for a scale. The smooth creamy cord is contused a violent purple-blue and partly severed in an area correlating with the gunshot wound that penetrated Luong’s neck between the fifth and sixth cervical disks. “She would have been instantly paralyzed,” I explain, “but the contusion means she had a blood pressure, her heart was still pumping, and we know that anyway from the arterial blood spatter at the scene. So yes. She was probably conscious as he dragged her by her feet along the aisle, back to the storeroom. What I can’t say is how long she was conscious.”

“She would have been able to see what he was doing and watch her own blood spurting out of her neck as she bled to death?” Berger’s face is keen, her energy at a higher wattage that burns brightly in her eyes.

“Again, it depends on how long she was conscious,” I tell her.

“But it’s in the realm of possibility she might have been conscious the entire time he was dragging her down the aisle, back to the storeroom?”

“Absolutely.”

“Could she talk or scream?”

“She might not have been able to do anything.”

“But saying no one heard her scream, that wouldn’t mean she was unconscious?”

“No, it wouldn’t mean that necessarily,” I reply. “If you’ve been shot in the neck and are hemorrhaging and being dragged . . .”

“Especially dragged by someone who looks like him.”

“Yes. You might be too terrified to scream. He might have told her to shut up, for that matter.”

“Good.” Berger seems pleased. “How do you know he dragged her by the feet?”

“Bloody drag pattern made by her long hair, and trails of blood from her fingers above her head,” I describe. “If you’re paralyzed and being dragged by your ankles, for example, your arms are going to spread. Like making angels in the snow.”

“Wouldn’t the human impulse be to grab your neck and try to stop the bleeding?” Berger asks. “And she can’t. She’s paralyzed and awake, watching herself die and anticipating what the hell he’s going to do to her next.” She pauses for impact. Berger has the jury in mind, and I can tell already that she didn’t earn her incredible reputation accidentally. “These women really suffered,” she quietly adds.

“They most certainly did.” My blouse is damp and I am cold again.

“Did you anticipate the same treatment?” She looks at me, a challenge in her eyes, as if daring me to explore everything that went through my mind when Chandonne forced his way through my front door and tried to throw his coat over my head. “Can you remember anything you thought?” she prods. “What did you feel? Or did it all happen so fast . . .”

“Fast,” I cut in. “Yes, it happened fast,” I go back. “Fast. And forever. Our internal clocks quit working when we are panicking, fighting for our lives. That’s not a medical fact, just a personal observation,” I add, groping, feeling my way through memories that aren’t complete.

“Then minutes might have seemed like hours to Kim Luong,” Berger decides. “Chandonne was with you probably only minutes as he chased you through your great room. How long did it seem?” She is completely focused on this, riveted to me.

“It seemed . . .” I struggle to describe it. There is no basis for comparison. “Like a flutter . . .” My voice trails off as I stare at nothing, unblinking, sweating and chilled.

“Like a flutter?” Berger sounds faintly incredulous. “Can you explain what you mean by that, by flutter?”

“Like reality distorts, ripples, like wind ruffling water, the way a puddle looks when wind blows across it, all of your senses suddenly so acute as the animal’s survival instinct overrides the brain. You hear air move. You see air move. Everything seems in slow motion, collapsing in on itself, and endless. You see everything, every detail of what is happening, and notice . . .”

“Notice?” Berger prods.

“Yes, notice,” I talk on. “Notice the hair on his hands catching light like monofilament, like fishing line, almost translucent. Notice that he looks almost happy.”

“Happy? What do you mean?” Berger quietly asks me. “Was he smiling?”

“I would describe it differently. Not a smile so much as the primitive joy, lust, raging hunger you see in the eyes of an animal about to be fed fresh raw meat.” I take a deep breath, focusing on the wall inside my conference room, on a calendar with a Christmas snow scene. Berger sits rigidly, her hands motionless on top of the table. “The problem is not what you observe, it’s what you remember,” I go on more lucidly. “I think the shock of it all causes a disk error and you can’t remember with the same degree of intense attention to detail. Maybe that’s survival, too. Maybe we need to forget some things so we don’t keep reliving them. Forgetting is part of healing. Like the Central Park jogger dragged off by a gang, raped, beaten, left for dead. Why would she want to remember? And I know you are well acquainted with that case,” I add with irony. It was Berger’s case, of course.

Assistant District Attorney Berger shifts in her chair. “But you do remember,” she quietly points out. “And you had seen what Chandonne does to his victims. ‘Severe lacerations to the face.’ ” She begins skimming Luong’s autopsy report out loud. “ ‘Massive comminuted fractures of right parietal bone . . . fracture of right frontal bone . . . extending down the midline . . . bilateral subdural hematoma . . . disruption of cerebral tissue beneath with accompanying subarachnoid hemorrhaging . . . depressed fractures that drove the inner table of the skull into the underlying brain . . . eggshell-like fractures . . . clotting . . .’”

“Clotting suggests a survival time of at least six minutes from the time the injury was inflicted.” I return to my role of interpreter for the dead.

“A hell of a long time,” Berger observes, and I can imagine her making a jury sit in silence for six minutes to show them just how long.

“The crushed facial bones, and here”—I touch areas of a photograph—“the splits and tears to skin made by some sort of tool that left a pattern of round and linear wounds.”

“Pistol whipping.”

“In this case, the Luong case, yes. In Bray’s case, he used an unusual type of hammer.”

“A chipping hammer.”

“I can see you’ve done your homework.”

“A funny habit of mine,” she says.

“Premeditation,” I go on. “He brought his weapons to the scenes versus using something he found when he got there. And this photo here”—I pick out another horror—“shows knuckle bruises from punching. So he also used his fists to beat her, and from this angle we can see her sweater and bra over there on the floor. It appears he tore them off with his bare hands.”

“Based on what?”

“Under the scope you can see that the fibers are torn instead of cut,” I reply.

Berger is staring at a body diagram. “Don’t think I’ve ever seen so many bite marks inflicted by a human. Frenzied. Any reason to suspect he might have been under the influence of drugs when he committed these murders?”

“I wouldn’t have a way to know.”

“What about when you encountered him?” she asks. “When he attacked you on Saturday, shortly after midnight. And by the way, he had the same odd type of hammer, as I understand? A chipping hammer?”

“ ‘Frenzied’ is a good word for it. But I would have no reason to know whether he was on drugs.” I pause. “Yes, he had a chipping hammer with him when he tried to attack me.”

“Tried? Let’s state the facts.” She gives me her eyes. “He attacked you. Not tried. He attacked you and you escaped. You got a good look at the hammer?”

“Good point, if we’re stating facts. It was a tool of some sort. I know what a chipping hammer looks like.”

“What do you remember? The flutter,” she refers back to my strange rendition. “Those endless minutes, the hair on his hands catching light like monofilament.”

I envision a black coil handle. “I saw the coil,” I tell her as best I can. “I remember that. It’s so unusual. A chipping hammer has a handle that looks like a thick, black spring.”

“You sure? That’s what you saw when he came after you?” She pushes me.

“I am vaguely sure.”

“It would be helpful if you are more than vaguely sure,” she responds.

“I saw the tip of it. Like a big black beak. When he raised it to hit me. Yes, I’m sure. He had a chipping hammer.” I become defiant. “That’s exactly what he had.”

“They took Chandonne’s blood in the E.R.,” Berger informs me. “Negative for drugs and alcohol.”

She is testing me. She already knew Chandonne was negative for drugs and alcohol, yet she withheld that detail long enough to hear my impressions. She wants to see if I can be objective when talking about my own case. She wants to see if I can stick to the facts. I hear Marino down the hall. He walks in with three steaming Styrofoam cups and sets them on the table, sliding a black coffee my way. “I don’t know what you take, but you got cream,” he rudely tells Berger. “And yours truly takes it fully loaded with cream and sugar because I sure as hell wouldn’t want to do anything that might deprive me of my nourishment.”

“How seriously messed up would someone be if he got formalin in his eyes?” Berger says to me.

“Depends on how quickly the person rinsed,” I objectively answer, as if her inquiry is theoretical and not an allusion to my maiming another human being.

“Must hurt like living hell. An acid, right? I’ve seen what it does to tissue—turns it into rubber,” she comments.

“Not literally.”

“Of course not literally,” she agrees with a trace of a smile that suggests I ought to lighten up a little, as if that is possible.

“If you suspend tissue in formalin for a long period of time, or inject it—in embalming, for example,” I explain, “then yes, it fixes tissue, preserves it indefinitely.”

But Berger has little interest in the science of formalin. I am not even sure how interested she is in the extent of any permanent damage the chemical may have caused Chandonne. I have the sensation she is more focused on how I feel about causing him pain and possible disability. She does not ask me. She just looks at me. I am beginning to feel the weight of those looks. Her eyes are like experienced palpating hands feeling for any anomaly or tenderness.

“We got any idea who he’s going to get for a lawyer?” Marino reminds us he is present.

Berger sips her coffee. “The six-million-dollar question.”

“So you don’t got a clue,” Marino says with suspicion.

“Oh, I have a clue. It will be someone you definitely won’t like.”

“Huh,” he retorts. “That’s easy to predict. I’ve never met a defense attorney I liked.”

“At least it will be my problem,” she says. “Not yours.” She puts him in his place again.

I bristle at this, too. “Look,” I tell her, “trying him in New York isn’t something that makes me happy.”

“I understand how you feel.”

“I seriously doubt it.”

“Well, I’ve talked to your friend Mr. Righter—enough to tell you exactly how it would go if you put Monsieur Chandonne on trial here in Virginia.” She is cool now, the expert, just a little sardonic. “The court would null pross the impersonating-an-officer charge and reduce attempted murder to entering a dwelling with intent to commit murder.” She pauses, looking for my reaction. “He never actually touched you. That’s the problem.”

“Actually, it would have been more of a problem if he had,” I answer, refusing to show that she is really beginning to piss me off.

“He may have raised that hammer to strike you, but he never did.” Her eyes are steady on mine. “For which we’re all grateful.”

“You know what they say, your rights are honored only in the breach.” I lift my coffee.

“Righter would have filed a motion to have all of the charges combined into one trial, Dr. Scarpetta. And then what would have been your role? Expert witness? Fact witness? Or victim? The conflict is glaringly apparent. Either you testify as the medical examiner and the attack on you is completely left out, or you’re simply a victim who survived and someone else testifies to your record. Or worse”—she pauses for effect—“Righter stipulates your reports. He seems to have a habit of that, from what I understand.”

“The guy’s got the guts of an empty sock,” Marino says. “But the Doc’s right. Chandonne ought to pay for what he tried to do to her. And he sure as hell should pay for what he did to the other two women. And he ought to get the death penalty. At least down here, we’d fry him.”

“Not if Dr. Scarpetta were somehow discredited as a witness, Captain. A good defense attorney would be quick to paint her as conflicted and squirt a lot of ink into the water.”

“Don’t matter. It’s all moot, right?” Marino says. “He ain’t being tried here and I wasn’t born yesterday. He won’t ever be tried here. You guys will lock him up and us small-timers down here will never get our day in court.”

“What was he doing in New York two years ago?” I ask. “Do you have any ideas about that?”

“Huh,” Marino says as if he knows details that have not been shared with me yet. “That’s a story.”

“Could it be his family has cartel connections in my fair city?” Berger lightly suggests.

“Hell, they probably have a damn penthouse apartment,” Marino retorts.

“And Richmond?” Berger goes on. “Isn’t Richmond a stopping-off point between New York and Miami along the I-95 drug corridor?”

“Oh yeah,” Marino answers. “Before Project Exile got going and slapped these drones with time in federal prison if they were caught with guns, drugs. Yeah, Richmond used to be a real popular place to do your business. So if the Chandonne cartel’s in Miami—and we already know that, based on the undercover stuff Lucy was doing down there—and if there’s a big New York connection, then no big surprise that cartel guns and drugs were ending up in Richmond, too.”

“Were?” she queries. “Maybe still are.”

“I guess all this will keep ATF busy for a while,” I say.

“Huh,” Marino snorts again.

A weighty pause, then Berger says, “Well, now that you’ve brought that up.” Her demeanor tells me she is about to give me news I will not appreciate. “ATF has a little problem, it appears. As do the FBI and the French police. The hope, obviously, was to use Chandonne’s arrest as an opportunity to get warrants to search his family’s Paris home and maybe during the course of it find evidence that might help bring down the cartel. But we’re having a little difficulty placing Jean-Baptiste inside the family house. In fact, we have nothing to prove who he is. No driver’s license. No passport or birth certificate. No record this bizarre man even exists. Only his DNA, which is so close to the DNA of the man found in your port we can assume they are probably related, probably brothers. But I need something more tangible than that if I’m going to get a jury on my side.”

“And no way in hell his family’s going to come forward and claim the Loup-Garou,” Marino says in awful French. “That’s the whole reason there’s no record of him to begin with, right? The mighty Chandonnes don’t want the world to know they got a son who’s a hairy-ass serial-killing freak.”

“Wait a minute,” I stop them. “Didn’t he identify himself when he was arrested? Where did we get the name Jean-Baptiste Chandonne, if not from him?”

“We got it from him.” Marino rubs his face in his hands. “Shit. Show her the videotape,” he suddenly blurts out to Berger. I have no idea what videotape he is talking about, and Berger isn’t at all happy he mentioned it. “The Doc has a right to know,” he says.

“What we have here is a new spin on a defendant who has a DNA profile but no identity.” Berger sidesteps the subject Marino has just tried to force.

What tape? I think, as paranoia heats up. What tape?

“You got it with you?” Marino regards Berger with open hostility, the two of them squaring off in a stony angry tableau, staring across the table at each other. His face darkens. He outrageously grabs her briefcase and slides it toward him as if he plans to help himself to whatever is inside it. Berger places her hand on top of it with an arresting look. “Captain!” she warns in a tone that bodes the worst trouble he has ever seen. Marino withdraws his hand, his face a furious red. Berger opens her briefcase and gives me her full attention. “I have every intention of showing the tape to you,” she measures her words. “I just wasn’t going to do it right this minute, but we can.” She is very controlled but I can tell she is very angry as she slides a videotape out of a manila envelope. She gets up and inserts it into the VCR. “Someone know how to work this thing?”

CHAPTER 11

I TURN ON the television and hand Berger the remote control.

“Dr. Scarpetta”—she completely ignores Marino—“before we get into this, let me give you a little background on how the district attorney’s office works in Manhattan. As I’ve already mentioned, we do a number of things very differently from what you’re accustomed to here in Virginia. I was hoping to explain all that to you before you were subjected to what you are about to see. Are you familiar with our system of homicide call?”

“No,” I reply as my nerves tighten and begin to hum.

“Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, an assistant D.A. is on call should a homicide go down or the cops locate a defendant. In Manhattan, the cops can’t arrest a defendant without the D.A.’s office giving them the go-ahead, as I’ve already explained. This is to ensure that everything—search warrants, for example—are executed properly. It’s common for the prosecutor, the assistant, to go to the crime scene, and in a situation where a defendant is arrested, if he’s willing to be interviewed by the assistant, we jump all over it. Captain Marino,” she says, giving him her cool attention, “you started out in NYPD, but that may have been before all this was implemented.”

“Never heard of it before today,” he mumbles, face still dangerously red.

“What about vertical prosecution?”

“Sounds like a sex act,” Marino replies.

Berger pretends she didn’t hear that. “Morgenthau’s idea,” she says to me.

Robert Morgenthau has been the district attorney in Manhattan for nearly twenty-five years. He is a legend. It is obvious Berger loves working for him. Something stirs deep inside me. Envy? No, maybe wistfulness. I am tired. I experience a growing feeling of powerlessness. I have no one but Marino, who is anything but innovative or enlightened. Marino is not a legend and right now I don’t love working with him or even want him around.

“The prosecutor has the case from intake on,” Berger begins to explain vertical prosecution. “Then we don’t have to fool with three or four people who have already interviewed our witnesses or the victim. If a case is mine, for example, I might literally start out at the crime scene and end up in court. A purity you absolutely can’t argue with. If I’m lucky, I interrogate the defendant before he retains counsel—obviously, no defense attorney’s going to agree to his client talking to me.” She hits the play button on the remote control. “Fortunately, I caught Chandonne before he got counsel. I interviewed him several times in the hospital beginning at the rather inhumane hour of three o’clock this morning.”

To say I am shocked would be a gross trivialization of my reaction to what she has just revealed. It can’t be possible that Jean-Baptiste Chandonne would talk to anyone.

“Clearly, you’re a bit taken aback.” Berger’s comment to me seems rhetorical, as if she has some point to make.

“You might say that,” I answer her.

“Maybe it hasn’t really occurred to you that your assailant can walk, talk, chew gum, drink Pepsi? Maybe he doesn’t seem fully human to you?” she suggests. “Maybe you think he really is a werewolf.”

I never actually saw him when he spoke cogently on the other side of my front door. Police. Is everything all right in there? After that, he was a monster. Yes, a monster. Yes, a monster coming after me with a black iron tool that looked like something from the Tower of London. Then he was grunting and screaming and sounded very much the way he looks, which is hideous, unearthly. A beast.

Berger smiles a bit wearily. “Now you’re about to see our challenge, Dr. Scarpetta. Chandonne isn’t crazy. He isn’t supernatural. And we don’t want jurors holding him to a different standard just because he has an unfortunate medical condition. But I also want them to see him now, before he’s cleaned up and wearing a three-piece suit. I think the jurors need to fully appreciate the terror his victims felt, don’t you?” Her eyes touch mine. “Might help them get the drift that no one in her right mind would have invited him into her home.”

“Why? Is he saying he was invited in?” My mouth has gone dry.

“He’s saying quite a lot of things,” Berger replies.

“Biggest bunch of fucking bullshit you ever heard,” Marino says in disgust. “But then I knew that right off the bat. I go to his room late last night, right? Tell him Ms. Berger wants to interview him and so he asks me what she looks like. I don’t say a word, play the asshole along. I tell him, ‘Well, let’s just put it this way, John. A lotta guys have a real hard time—no pun intended—concentrating when she’s around, know what I mean?’”

John, I numbly think. Marino calls him John.

“Testing, one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five,” a voice sounds on the tape, and a cinder-block wall fills the screen. The camera begins to focus on a bare table and a chair. In the background a telephone rings.

“He wants to know if she has a good body, and Ms. Berger, I hope you’ll excuse me for making reference to it.” Marino oozes sarcasm, still furious with her for reasons I don’t yet fully understand. “But I’m just repeating what the piece of shit said. And so I tell him, ‘Geez, it wouldn’t be right for me to comment, but like I said, the guys can’t think straight when she’s around. At least straight guys can’t think straight.’”

I know damn well this is not what Marino said. In fact, I doubt Chandonne asked about Berger’s appearance at all. More likely, the suggestion of her sexy good looks came from Marino, to bait Chandonne into talking to her, and as I recall the crude comment Marino made about Berger when we were walking out to Lucy’s car last night, I feel a rush of resentment, of anger. I am fed up with him and his machismo. I am sick of his male chauvinism and crudity.

“What the hell is this?” I feel like hosing him off with cold water. “Do female body parts have to enter every goddamn conversation? Do you think it’s possible, Marino, that you might focus on this case without obsessing over how big a woman’s breasts are?”

“Testing, one, two, three, four, five,” the cameraman’s voice sounds again on tape. The telephone stops ringing. Feet shuffle. Voices murmur. “We’re gonna sit you at this table and chair right here.” I recognize Marino’s voice on tape, and in the background someone knocks on a door.

“The point is, Chandonne talked.” Berger is looking at me, palpating me with her eyes again, finding my weaknesses, my inflamed spots. “He talked to me quite a lot.”

“For whatever that’s worth.” Marino angrily stares at the TV screen. So that’s it. Marino might have helped induce Chandonne into talking to Berger, but the truth is, Marino wanted Chandonne to talk to him.

The camera is fixed and I see only what is directly in its view. Marino’s big gut comes into the picture as he pulls out a wooden chair, and someone in a dark blue suit and deep red tie helps Marino steer Jean-Baptiste Chandonne into the chair. Chandonne wears short-sleeved blue hospital scrubs and long pale hair hangs from his arms in tangles of wavy, soft fur the color of pale honey. Hair splays over his v-necked collar and climbs up his neck in repulsive, long swirls. He sits and his head enters the frame, swathed in gauze from mid-forehead to the tip of his nose. Directly around the bandages, the flesh has been shaven and is as white as milk, as if it has never seen the sun.

“Can I have my Pepsi, please?” Chandonne asks. He wears no restraints, not even handcuffs.

“You want it topped off?” Marino says to him.

No answer. Berger moves past the camera and I note that she is wearing a chocolate brown suit with padded shoulders. She sits across from Chandonne. I see only the back of her head and shoulders.

“You want a refill, John?” Marino asks the man who tried to murder me.

“In a minute. Can I smoke?” Chandonne says.

His voice is soft and heavily French. He is polite and calm. I stare at the television screen, my concentration flickering. I experience electrical disturbances again, post-traumatic stress, my nerves jump like water hitting hot grease, and I am getting another bad headache. The dark blue–sleeved arm with the white cuff reaches into the picture, setting a drink and a pack of Camel cigarettes in front of Chandonne, and I recognize the blue-and-white tall paper cup as coming from the hospital cafeteria. A chair scrapes back and the blue-sleeved arm lights a cigarette for Chandonne.

“Mr. Chandonne.” Berger’s voice sounds at ease and in charge, as if she talks to mutant serial killers every day. “I’m going to start with introducing myself. I’m Jaime Berger, a prosecutor with the New York County district attorney’s office. In Manhattan.”

Chandonne raises a hand to lightly touch his bandages. The backs of his fingers are covered with downy pale hair, almost albino, colorless hair. It is maybe half an inch long, as if until recently he shaved the backs of his hands. I have flashbacks of those hands coming after me. His fingernails are long and filthy and for the first time, I catch the contours of powerful muscles, not thick and bulging like men who obsessively work out in the gym, but ropey and hard, the physical habitat of one who, like a wild animal, uses his body to feed, to fight and flee, to survive. His strength seems to contradict our assumption that he has lived a rather sedentary and useless life, hiding inside his family’s hôtel particulier, as the elegant private houses on Île Saint-Louis are called.

“You’ve already met Captain Marino,” Berger says to Chandonne. “Also present is Officer Escudero from my office—he’s the cameraman. And Special Agent Jay Talley with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.”

I feel Berger’s eyes touch me. I avoid looking. I refrain from interrupting to ask, Why? Why was Jay there? It streaks through my mind that she is exactly the sort of woman he would be attracted to—intensely. I slip a tissue out of a jacket pocket and blot cold sweat off my brow.

“You know this is being videotaped, don’t you, and you have no objection to that,” Berger is saying on tape.

“Yes.” Chandonne takes a drag on the cigarette and picks a piece of tobacco off the tip of his tongue.

“Sir, I’m going to ask you some questions about the death of Susan Pless on December fifth, nineteen-ninety-seven.”

Chandonne has no reaction. He reaches for his Pepsi, finding the straw with his pink, uneven lips as Berger goes on to give him the victim’s address in New York’s Upper East Side. She tells him that before they can go any further, she wants to advise him of his rights, even though he has already been advised of them God knows how many times. Chandonne listens. Maybe it is my imagination, but he seems to be enjoying himself. He does not seem in pain or the least bit intimidated. He is quiet and courteous, his hairy, awful hands resting on top of the table or touching his bandages, as if to remind us of what we—what I—did to him.

“Anything you say can be used against you in court,” Berger goes on. “Do you understand? And it would be helpful if you would say yes or no instead of nodding.”

“I understand.” He cooperates almost sweetly.

“You have a right to consult a lawyer now before any questioning or to have a lawyer present during any questioning. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“And if you don’t have a lawyer or can’t afford one, a lawyer will be provided to you free of charge. Do you understand?”

At this, Chandonne reaches for his Pepsi again. Berger relentlessly goes on making sure that he and all the world know this process is legal and fair and that Chandonne is completely informed and is talking to her of his own volition, freely, without any pressure of any sort. “Now that you have been advised of your rights,” she concludes her forceful, self-assured opening, “are you going to tell the truth about what happened?”

“I always tell the truth,” Chandonne replies softly.

“And you’ve been read these rights in front of Officer Escudero, Captain Marino and Special Agent Talley, and you understood these rights?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you just tell me in your own words what happened to Susan Pless?” Berger says.

“She was very nice,” Chandonne replies, to my amazement. “I am still made sick by it.”

“Yeah, I just bet you are,” Marino sardonically mutters inside my conference room.

Berger instantly hits the pause button. “Captain,” she fires at him, “no editorializing. Please.”

Marino’s sullenness is like a poisonous vapor. Berger points the remote control and on tape she is asking Chandonne how he and Susan Pless met. He replies that they met in a restaurant called Lumi on 70th Street, between Third and Lexington.

“You were what? Eating there, working there?” Berger pushes ahead.

“Eating there by myself. She walked in, also by herself. I had a very nice bottle of Italian wine. A nineteen-ninety-three Massolino Barolo. She was very beautiful.”

Barolo is my favorite Italian wine. The bottle he mentions is pricey. Chandonne goes on to tell his story. He was eating antipasto—“Crostini di polenta con funghi trifolati e olio tartufato,” he says in perfect Italian—when he noticed a stunning African-American woman enter the restaurant alone. The maître d’ treated her as if she was important and a regular customer, and seated her at a corner table. “She was well-dressed,” Chandonne says. “She obviously was not a prostitute.” He asked the maître d’ to see if she would like to come to his table and join him, and she was very easy.

“What do you mean, very easy?” Berger inquires.

Chandonne gives a slight shrug and reaches for his Pepsi again. He takes his time sucking on the straw. “I think I would like another.” He holds up the cup and the dark blue–sleeved arm—Jay Talley’s arm—takes it from him. Chandonne blindly feels for the pack of cigarettes, his hairy hand groping over the top of the table.

“What do you mean when you say Susan was very easy?” Berger asks again.

“She needed no coaxing to join me. She came over to my table and sat. And we had a very nice conversation.”

I don’t recognize his voice.

“What did you talk about?” Berger asks him.

Chandonne touches his bandages again and I am imagining this hideous man with his long body hair, sitting in a public place, eating fine food and drinking fine wine and picking up women. It weirdly darts through my thoughts that Chandonne might have suspected Berger would show me this videotape. Is the Italian food and wine something he mentions for my benefit? Is he taunting me? What does he know about me? Nothing, I answer myself. There is no reason he would know anything about me. Now he is telling Berger that he and Susan Pless discussed politics and music over dinner. When Berger asks him if he was aware of what Pless did for a living, he answers that she told him she worked for a television station.

“I said to her, ‘So you’re famous,’ and she laughed,” Chandonne says.

“Had you ever seen her on television?” Berger asks him.

“I don’t watch much television.” He slowly blows out smoke. “Now, of course, I don’t watch anything. I can’t see.”

“Just answer the question, sir. I didn’t ask how much television you watch but if you had ever seen Susan Pless on television.”

I strain to recognize his voice as fear tickles over my flesh and my hands begin to shake. His voice is completely unfamiliar. It sounds nothing like the voice outside my door. Police. Ma’am, we’ve gotten a call about a suspicious person on your property.

“I don’t remember seeing her on television,” Chandonne replies.

“What happened next?” Berger asks him.

“We ate. We drank the wine, and I asked her if she would like to go somewhere and have a little champagne.”

“Somewhere? Where were you staying?”

“In the Barbizon Hotel, but not under my real name. I had just gotten in from Paris and was only in New York a few days.”

“What was the name you signed in under?”

“I don’t remember.”

“How did you pay?”

“Cash.”

“And you’d come to New York for what reason?”

“I was very frightened.”

Inside my conference room, Marino shifts in his chair and blows out in disgust. He editorializes again. “Hold on to your hats, folks. Here comes the good part.”

“Frightened?” Berger’s voice sounds on the tape. “What were you frightened of?”

“These people who are after me. Your government. That’s what this whole thing is about.” Chandonne touches his bandages again, this time with one hand, then with the one holding the Camel cigarette. Smokes curls around his head. “Because they are using me—have been using me—to get to my family. Because of untrue rumors about my family . . .”

“Hold on. Hold on a minute,” Berger interrupts.

Out of the corner of my eye I see Marino angrily shaking his head. He leans back in his chair and crosses his arms over his swollen gut. “You get what you ask for,” he mutters, and I can only assume he means that Berger should never have interviewed Chandonne. It was a mistake. The tape is going to hurt more than it will help.

“Captain, please,” the real Berger in this room says to Marino in a tone that means business, while her voice on tape asks Chandonne, “Sir, who is using you?”

“FBI, Interpol. Maybe even CIA. I don’t know exactly.”

“Yeah,” Marino sarcastically pipes up from the table. “He don’t mention ATF ’cause no one’s ever heard of ATF. It’s not even in spellcheck.”

His hatred for Talley in addition to what is happening to Lucy’s career has metastasized into Marino’s hating all of ATF. Berger says nothing this time. She ignores him. On tape she confronts Chandonne, her no-nonsense nature marching forth, “Sir, I need you to understand how important it is for you to tell the truth now. Do you understand how important it is that you are absolutely truthful with me?”

“I tell the truth,” he softly, earnestly says. “I know it sounds unbelievable. It seems incredible, but it all has to do with my powerful family. Everyone in France knows of them. They have lived for hundreds of years on Île Saint-Louis and it’s rumored they are connected with organized crime, like the Mafia, which isn’t true at all. This is where the confusion comes. I’ve never lived with them.”

“You’re part of this powerful family, though. Their son?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have brothers and sisters?”

“I had a brother. Thomas.”

“Had?”

“He’s dead. You know that. He’s why I’m here.”

“I would like to get back to that. But let’s talk about your family in Paris. Are you telling me you don’t live with your family and have never lived with them?”

“Never.”

“Why is that? Why have you never lived with your family?”

“They’ve never wanted me. When I was very young they paid a childless couple to take care of me so no one would know.”

“Know what?”

“That I am Monsieur Thierry Chandonne’s son.”

“Why wouldn’t your father want people to know you’re his son?”

“You look at me and ask such a question?” Anger tightens his mouth.

“I’m asking you the question. Why wouldn’t your father want people to know you’re his son?”

“Oh, all right. I will pretend you don’t notice my appearance. You are very kind to pretend you don’t notice.” A sneer creeps into his voice. “I have a severe medical condition. Shame, my family is ashamed of me.”

“Where does the couple live? These people who you say took care of you?”

“Quai de l’Horloge, very near the Conciergerie.”

“The prison? Where Marie Antoinette was detained during the French Revolution?”

“The Conciergerie is very famous, of course. A tourist place. People seem so preoccupied with prisons, torture chambers and beheadings. Especially Americans. I’ve never understood it. And you will kill me. The United States will kill me easily. You people kill everyone. It is all part of the big plan, the conspiracy.”

“Where exactly on the Quai de l’Horloge? I thought that entire huge block was the Palais de Justice and the Conciergerie.” Berger pronounces French like one who speaks it. “Yes, there are some apartments, very expensive ones. You’re saying your foster home was there?”

“Very near there.”

“What is the name of this couple?”

“Olivier and Christine Chabaud. Sadly, they are both dead, for many years.”

“What did they do? Their occupations?”

“He was a boucher. She was a coiffeureuse.”

“A butcher and a hairdresser?” Berger’s tone hints that she doesn’t believe him and knows damn well he is mocking her and all of us. Jean-Baptiste Chandonne is a butcher. He is dressed in hair.

“A butcher and a hairdresser, yes,” Chandonne affirms.

“Did you ever see your family, the Chandonnes, while you were living with these other people near the prison?”

“Now and then I would show up at the house. Always after dark so people wouldn’t see me.”

“So people wouldn’t see you? Why didn’t you want people to see you?”

“It’s as I’ve said.” He taps an ash blindly. “My family didn’t want people to know I am their son. There would have been much made of it. He’s very, very well known. I can’t really blame him. So I would go late at night when it was dark and the streets on Île Saint-Louis were deserted, and I would sometimes get money from them or other things.”

“Would they let you into the house?” Berger is desperate to place him inside the family house so authorities can have probable cause for a search warrant. I can see already that Chandonne is a master of the game. He knows damn well why she wants to place him inside the incredible Chandonne hôtel particulier on Île Saint-Louis, a house I actually saw with my own eyes when I was recently in Paris. There will be no search warrant in my lifetime.

“Yes. But I wouldn’t stay long, and I didn’t go into all the rooms,” he is telling Berger as he calmly smokes. “There are many rooms in my family’s house that I have never been in. Only the kitchen, and, let me see, the kitchen and the servants’ quarters and just inside the door. For the most part, you see, I have taken care of myself.”

“Sir, when was the last time you visited your family’s home?”

“Oh, no time recently. Two years, at least. I really don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember? If you don’t know, just say you don’t know. I’m not asking you to guess.”

“I don’t know. But not recently, of that I’m sure.”

Berger points the remote control and the picture freezes. “You see his game, of course,” she says to me. “First, he gives us information we can’t trace. People who are dead. Cash in a hotel where he signed in under an assumed name he can’t remember. And now, no basis for a warrant to search his family’s home because he’s saying he never lived there and has scarcely been inside it. And certainly not recently. No probable cause that’s fresh.”

“Hell! No probable cause, period,” Marino adds. “Not unless we can find witnesses who’ve seen him in and out of the family house.”

CHAPTER 12

BERGER RESUMES THE videotape. She is asking Chandonne, “Are you employed or have you ever been?”

“This and that,” he mildly replies. “Whatever I can find.”

“Yet you could afford to stay in a nice hotel and eat at an expensive New York restaurant? And buy a good bottle of Italian wine? Where did you get the money for all that, sir?”

At this, Chandonne hesitates. He yawns, giving us a startling view of his grotesque teeth. Small and pointed, they are widely spaced and gray. “Sorry. I am very tired. I don’t have much strength.” He touches his bandages again.

At this, Berger reminds him that he is talking of his own volition. No one is forcing him. She offers to stop but he says he will continue a little longer, maybe just a few minutes longer. “I’ve been on the street much of my life when I can find no work,” he tells her. “Sometimes I beg, but most times I find any job I can. Washing dishes, sweeping. Once I even drove a moto-crottes.”

“And what is that?”

“A trottin’net. One of those green motorcycles in Paris that cleans sidewalks, you know, with the vacuum that picks up dog shit.”

“Do you have a driver’s license?”

“No.”

“Then how did you drive a trottin’net?”

“If it’s under one hundred and twenty-five CCs you don’t need a driver’s license, and the moto-crottes only go maybe twenty kilometers an hour.”

This is all bullshit. Again, he is mocking us. Marino shifts in his chair inside my conference room. “The asshole’s got an answer to everything, don’t he?”

“Any other ways you get money?” Berger is asking Chandonne.

“Well, from women sometimes.”

“And how do you get money from women?”

“If they give money to me. I admit women are my weakness. I love women—the way they look, smell, feel, taste.” He who sinks his teeth into women he brutalizes and murders says all this in a gentle tone. He feigns perfect innocence. He has begun flexing his fingers on the table as if they are stiff, splaying his fingers in and out, slowly, hair shining.

“You like the way they taste?” Berger is getting more aggressive. “Is that why you bite them?”

“I don’t bite them.”

“You didn’t bite Susan Pless?”

“No.”

“Sir, she was covered with bite marks.”

“I didn’t do that. They did it. I’m followed and it’s they who kill. They kill my lovers.”

“They?”

“I told you. Government agents. FBI, Interpol. So they can get to my family.”

“If your family has been so careful to hide you from the world, then how do these people—FBI, Interpol, whatever—know you are a Chandonne?”

“They must have seen me come out of the house at times, followed me. Or maybe someone told them.”

“And you think it’s been at least two years since you were in your family home?” She tries again.

“At least.”

“How long do you believe you have been followed?”

“Many years. Maybe five years. It’s hard to know. They’re very clever.”

“And how might you help these people, quote, get to your family?” Berger asks him.

“If they can frame me as if I’m a terrible killer, then the police might get into my family’s house. They would find nothing. My family is innocent. It’s all politics. My father is very powerful politically. Beyond that, I don’t know. I only can say what has been happening to me, to my life, and it’s all a conspiracy to get me into this country and be arrested and then put to death. Because you Americans kill people even when they are innocent. It is well known.” His claim seems to make him weary, as if he is tired of pointing it out.

“Sir, where did you learn to speak English?” Berger then asks.

“I picked it up myself. And when I was younger, my father would give me books when I would show up at the house. I read a lot of books.”

“In English?”

“Yes. I wanted to learn English very well. My father speaks many languages because he is in international shipping and deals with many foreign countries.”

“Including this country? The United States?”

“Yes.”

Talley’s arm enters the picture again as he sets down another Pepsi. Chandonne greedily plunges the straw between his lips and makes loud sucking sounds.

“What kind of books did you read?” Berger continues.

“A lot of histories and other books to educate myself, because I had to teach myself, you see. I never went to school.”

“Where are these books now?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know. Gone. Because I am homeless sometimes or move around a lot. Always on the move, looking over my shoulder because of these people after me.”

“Do you know any other languages besides French and English?” Berger asks.

“Italian. A little German.” He belches quietly.

“And you picked those up yourself, too?”

“I find newspapers in many languages in Paris and have learned that way, also. Sometimes I have slept on newspapers, you see. When I have no shelter.”

“He’s breaking my heart.” Marino can’t restrain himself as Berger says to Chandonne on tape, “Let’s get back to Susan, to her death on December fifth, two years ago in New York. Tell me about that night, the night you say you met her in Lumi. What exactly happened?”

Chandonne sighs as if he is getting more tired by the second. He touches his bandages frequently and I notice that his hands tremble. “I need something to eat,” he says. “I’m feeling faint, very weak.”

Berger points the remote control and the picture freezes and blurs. “We broke for about an hour,” she tells me. “Long enough for him to eat something and rest.”

“Yeah, the guy sure as hell knows the system,” Marino tells me, as if I haven’t yet figured that out. “And the stuff about this couple who raised him is bullshit. He’s just protecting his Mafia family.”

Berger says to me, “I’m wondering if you’re familiar with the restaurant Lumi?”

“Not off the top of my head,” I reply.

“Well, it’s interesting. When we began investigating Susan Pless’s murder two years ago, we knew then that she had eaten at Lumi the night she was killed because the person who waited on her called the police the minute he heard the news. The medical examiner even found traces of the meal in her stomach contents, indicating she had probably eaten several hours, at most, before death.”

“Was she alone at the restaurant?” I inquire.

“Came in alone and joined a man who was also alone, only he wasn’t a freak—not hardly. Was described as tall, broad-shouldered, well dressed, good-looking. Clearly someone for whom money wasn’t a problem, or at least he gave that impression.”

“Do you know what he ordered?” I ask.

Berger runs her fingers through her hair. It is the first time I have seen her uncertain. In fact, the word spooked comes to mind. “He paid cash, but the waiter remembered what he served her and her companion. He got the polenta and mushrooms and a bottle of Barolo, exactly what Chandonne described on the tape. Susan had an antipasto of grilled vegetables and olive oil, and lamb, which is, by the way, consistent with her stomach contents.”

“Jesus,” Marino says. Clearly, this part is news to him. “How the hell can that be? It would take Holly-fuckin’-wood special effects to turn that ugly hairball into some good-looking ladies’ man.”

“Unless it wasn’t him,” I say. “Might it have been his brother, Thomas? And Jean-Baptiste was following him?” I catch myself by surprise. I called the monster by name.

“A very logical first thought,” Berger says. “But there’s another monkey wrench thrown into the scenario. The doorman of Susan’s apartment remembers her coming in with a man who fits the description of the one in Lumi. This was around nine o’clock that night. The doorman was on duty until seven the next morning, so he was there when the man left around three-thirty A.M., the time Susan would normally be up and on her way to work. She was due at the television station around four or four-thirty because the broadcast begins at five. Her body was found around seven A.M., and according to the medical examiner, Susan had been dead for several hours. The main suspect has always been the stranger she met in the restaurant. In fact, I just can’t see how it could have been anybody but this guy. He kills her. Spends some time mutilating the body. Leaves at three-thirty, and no trace of him ever again. And if he’s not guilty, why didn’t he contact the police when he heard about her murder? God knows the news was blasted all the hell over the place.”

It gives me a strange feeling to realize that I heard about this case when it happened. Suddenly, I am vaguely remembering details that were part of huge, sensational stories at the time. It is numbing to consider that when I heard about Susan Pless two years ago, I had no idea that eventually I would be involved in her case, especially like this.

“Unless he’s not local or even from this country,” Marino is suggesting.

Berger shrugs a question mark, hands palm up. I am trying to add up the evidence she has presented and am not getting an answer that even begins to make sense. “If she ate between seven and nine P.M., her food should have been largely digested by as early as eleven P.M.,” I point out. “Assuming the medical examiner is correct in his estimated time of death, if she died several hours before her body was found—let’s just say, by one or two A.M.—then her food should have cleared her stomach before that.”

“The explanation was stress. She was frightened and her digestion may have slowed down,” Berger says.

“That makes sense when you talk about a stranger hiding in your closet and jumping out at you when you get home. But she was apparently comfortable enough with this man to invite him into her apartment,” I offer. “And he was comfortable enough not to care if the doorman saw him come in and then leave much later. What about vaginal swabs?”

“Positive for seminal fluid.”

“This guy”—I indicate Chandonne—“isn’t into vaginal penetration and there’s no evidence he ejaculates,” I remind Berger. “Not in the Paris murders, certainly not in the ones here. The victims are always clothed from the waist down. They have no injuries from the waist down. He doesn’t seem remotely interested in them from the waist down, except for their feet. I was under the impression Susan Pless was clothed from the waist down, too.”

“She was, had pajama bottoms on. But she had seminal fluid—possibly suggesting consensual sex, at least at first. Certainly not after that, not when you see what he did to her,” Berger replies. “The DNA from the seminal fluid matches up with Chandonne. Then we’ve got the weird long hairs that sure as hell look like his.” She nods at the television. “And you guys tested brother Thomas, right? And his DNA isn’t identical to Jean-Baptiste’s, so it doesn’t appear Thomas left the seminal fluid.”

“Their DNA profiles are very close, but not identical,” I agree. “And wouldn’t be unless the brothers were identical twins, which clearly they aren’t.”

“How do you know that for sure?” Marino frowns.

“If Thomas and Jean-Baptiste were identical twins,” I explain, “both of them would have congenital hypertrichosis. Not just one of them.”

“So how do you explain it?” Berger asks me. “A genetic match in all cases, yet the descriptions of the killers seem to indicate they can’t be the same person.”

“If the DNA in Susan Pless’s case matches Jean-Baptiste Chandonne’s DNA, then I can only explain it by concluding that the man who left her apartment at three-thirty in the morning isn’t the man who killed her,” I reply. “Chandonne killed her. But the man people saw her with isn’t Chandonne.”

“So maybe Wolfman screws ’em now and then, after all,” Marino adds. “Or tries to and we just don’t know it because he usually don’t leave any juice.”

“And then what?” Berger challenges him. “Puts their pants back on? Dresses them from the waist down after the fact?”

“Hey, it ain’t like we’re talking about somebody who does things the normal way. Oh, almost forgot to tell you.” He looks at me. “One of the nurses got a peek at what he’s packing. Unclipped.” Marino’s jargon for uncircumcised. “And smaller than a damn Vienna sausage.” He shows us by holding his thumb and index finger about an inch apart. “No wonder the squirrel’s in such a bad mood all the time.”

CHAPTER 13

WITH A CLICK of the remote control, I am returned to the cinder block interview room inside the forensic ward of MCV. I am returned to Jean-Baptiste Chandonne, who wants us to believe he is capable of somehow transforming his uniquely hideous appearance into elegant good looks when he is in the mood to dine out and pick up a woman. Impossible. His torso with its swirling coat of immature hair fills the television screen as he is helped back into his chair, and when his head enters the picture I am startled to discover that his bandages have been removed, his eyes now masked by dark plastic Solar Shield glasses, the flesh around them an irritated raw pink. His eyebrows are long and confluent, as if someone has taken a strip of downy fur and glued it on his brow. The same downy pale hair covers his forehead and temples.

Berger and I sit in my conference room. It is not quite seven-thirty and Marino has left for two reasons: He was paged about a possible identification of the body found dumped on the street in Mosby Court, and Berger encouraged him not to rejoin us. She said she needed to have some private time with me. I think she also was just plain sick of him, not that I blame her. Marino has made it abundantly clear that he is intensely critical of the way she interviewed Chandonne and that she did it in the first place. Part of this—no, all of this—is jealousy. There isn’t an investigator on this planet who wouldn’t want to interview such a notorious, freakish killer. It just so happens that the beast picked the beauty, and Marino is seething.

As I listen to Berger remind Chandonne on camera that he understands his rights and has agreed to talk to her further, I am gripped more convincingly by a certain reality. I am a small creature caught in a web, an evil web spun of threads that seem to wrap around the entire globe like lines of latitude and longitude. Chandonne’s attempt to murder me was incidental to what he is all about. I was an amusement. If he figures I am watching his taped interview, then I am still an amusement. Nothing more. It occurs to me that if he had succeeded in ripping me to shreds, he would have already been focused on someone new and I would be nothing but a brief bloody moment, a past wet dream in his hateful, hellish life.

“And the detective got you something to eat and drink, sir, isn’t that right?” Berger is asking Chandonne.

“Yes.”

“And what was that?”

“A hamburger and a Pepsi.”

“And fries?”

“Mais oui. Fries.” He seems to think this is funny.

“So you’ve been given whatever you need, isn’t that right?” she asks him.

“Yes.”

“And the hospital staff removed your bandages and gave you special glasses to wear. You’re comfortable?”

“I hurt a little bit.”

“Were you given any pain medication?”

“Yes.”

“Tylenol. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes, I suppose. Two tablets.”

“Nothing more than that. Nothing that might interfere with your thinking.”

“No, nothing.” His black glasses are fixed on her.

“And nobody is forcing you to talk to me or made you any promises, isn’t that right?” Her shoulders move as she flips a page in what I assume is a legal pad.

“Yes.”

“Sir, have I made any threats or promises to get you to talk to me?”

This goes on and on as Berger runs through her checklist. She is making sure that Chandonne’s eventual representation won’t have any opportunity to say that Chandonne was intimidated, badgered, abused or treated unfairly in any way. He sits straight in his chair, his arms folded on top of each other in a tangle of hair that splays over the top of the table and hangs in repulsive clumps, like dirty cornsilk, from the short sleeves of his hospital-issue shirt. Nothing about the way his anatomy has been put together computes. He reminds me of old campy movies where silly boys on the beach bury each other in sand and paint eyes on their foreheads and make beards look like head hair or wear sunglasses on the backs of their heads or kneel with shoes on their knees to turn themselves into dwarfs—people turning themselves into freakish caricatures, because they think it is amusing. There is nothing amusing about Chandonne. I can’t even find him pitiful. My anger stirs like a great shark deep beneath the surface of my stoical demeanor.

“Let’s get back to the night you say you met Susan Pless,” Berger says to him on the tape. “In Lumi. That’s on the corner of Seventieth and Lexington?”

“Yes, yes.”

“You were saying you had dinner together and then you asked her if she would like to drink champagne with you somewhere. Sir, are you aware that the description of the gentleman Susan met and dined with that night doesn’t fit yours in the least?”

“I have no way to know.”

“But you must be aware that you have a serious medical condition that causes you to look very different from other people, and it’s hard to imagine, therefore, that you could be confused with someone who absolutely doesn’t have your condition. Hypertrichosis. Isn’t that what you have?”

I catch the barely perceptible flicker of Chandonne blinking behind the dark glasses. Berger has touched a nerve. The muscles in his face tense. He begins flexing his fingers again.

“Is that the name of your medical condition? Or do you know what it’s called?” Berger says to him.

“I know what it is,” Chandonne replies in a tone that is tighter.

“And you have lived with it all your life?”

He stares at her.

“Please answer the question, sir.”

“Of course. That is a stupid question. What do you think? You come down with it like a cold?”

“My point is, you don’t look like other people, and therefore I’m having a hard time imagining you might be mistaken for a man described as clean-cut and handsome with no facial hair.” She pauses. She is picking at him. She wants him to lose control. “Someone well groomed in an expensive suit.” Another pause. “Didn’t you just finish telling me you’ve virtually lived like a homeless person? How could that man in Lumi have been you, sir?”

“I had on a black suit, a shirt and tie.” Hate. Chandonne’s true nature has begun to shine through his mantle of dark deceit like a distant cold star. I expect him to dive over the table any moment and crush Berger’s throat or bash her head against the wall before Marino or anyone else can stop him. I have almost quit breathing. I remind myself that Berger is alive and well, sitting at the table with me inside my conference room. It is Thursday night. In four hours, it will have been exactly five days since Chandonne kicked his way into my house and tried to beat me to death with a chipping hammer.

“I have gone through periods where my condition isn’t as bad as it is now.” Chandonne has steadied himself. His politeness returns. “Stress makes it worse. I’ve been under so much stress. Because of them.”

“And who is them?”

“The American agents who’ve set me up. When I began to realize what was happening, that they were setting me up to look like a murderer, I became a fugitive. My health deteriorated to the worst it has ever been, and the worse I got, the more I had to hide. I haven’t always looked like this.” His dark glasses point slightly away from the camera as he stares at Berger. “When I met Susan, I was nothing like this. I could shave. I could get odd jobs and manage and even look good. And I had clothes and money sometimes because my brother would help me.”

Berger stops the tape and says to me, “Possible the bit about stress could be true?”

“Stress tends to make everything worse,” I reply. “But this man has never looked good. I don’t care what he says.”

“You’re talking about Thomas,” Berger’s voice resumes on the videotape. “Thomas would give you clothes, money, maybe other things?”

“Yes.”

“You say you were wearing a black suit in Lumi that night. Did Thomas give you the suit?”

“Yes. He liked very fine clothes. We were about the same size.”

“And you dined with Susan. Then what? What happened when you were finished eating? You paid the check?”

“Of course. I’m a gentleman.”

“How much was the bill?”

“Two hundred and twenty-one dollars, not including the gratuity.”

Berger corroborates what he says as she stares straight ahead at the TV screen, “And that’s exactly what the bill was. The man paid in cash and left two twenty-dollar bills on the table.”

I quiz Berger closely on how much about the restaurant, the bill, the tip was publicly disclosed. “Was any of this ever in the news?” I ask her.

“No. So if it wasn’t him, how the hell did he know what the damn bill was?” Frustration seeps into her voice.

On the videotape she asks Chandonne about the tip. He claims he left forty dollars. “Two twenties, I believe,” he says.

“And then what? You left the restaurant?”

“We decided to have a drink at her apartment,” he says.

CHAPTER 14

CHANDONNE GOES INTO great detail at this point. He claims he left Lumi with Susan Pless. It was very cold, but they decided to walk because her apartment was only a few blocks from the restaurant. He describes the moon and the clouds in sensitive, almost poetic detail. The sky was streaked with great swipes of bluish-white chalk and the moon was partially obscured and full. A full moon has always excited him sexually, he says, because it reminds him of a pregnant belly, of buttocks, of breasts. Gusts of wind kicked up around tall apartment buildings and at one point, he took off his scarf and put it around Susan to keep her warm. He claims to have been wearing a long, dark cashmere coat, and I remember the chief medical examiner of France, Dr. Ruth Stvan, telling me about her encounter with the man we believe was Chandonne.

I visited Dr. Stvan at the Institut Médico-Légal not even two weeks ago because Interpol asked me to review the Paris cases with her, and during our conversation she recounted to me a night when a man came to her home, feigning car trouble. He asked to use her phone, and she recalled he was wearing a long dark coat and seemed very much a gentleman. But Dr. Stvan said something else when I was with her. It was her recollection that the man had a strange, most unpleasant body odor. He smelled like a dirty, wet animal. And he made her uneasy, very uneasy. She sensed evil. All the same, she might have let him in or, more likely, he would have forced his way in except for one miraculous happenstance.

Dr. Stvan’s husband is a chef at a famous Paris restaurant called Le Dome. He happened to be home sick that night and called out from another room, wanting to know who was at the door. The stranger in the dark coat fled. The next day a note was delivered to Dr. Stvan. It was written in block printing on a bit of bloody, torn brown paper and signed Le Loup-Garou. I have yet to really face my denial of what should have been obvious. Dr. Stvan autopsied Chandonne’s French victims and then he went after her. I autopsied his American victims and didn’t take serious measures to prevent him from coming after me. A great common denominator underlies this denial, and it is this: People tend to believe that bad things happen only to others.

“Can you describe what the doorman looked like?” Berger asks Chandonne on the videotape.

“A thin mustache. In a uniform,” Chandonne says. “She called him Juan.”

“Wait a minute,” I speak up.

Berger stops the tape again.

“Did he have a body odor?” I ask her. “When you sat in the room with him early this morning.” I indicate the television. “When you interviewed him, did he have . . .”

“No kidding,” she interrupts. “Smelled like a filthy dog. Kind of a strange mix of wet fur and bad body odor. It was all I could do not to gag. I guess the hospital didn’t give him a bath.”

It is a misconception that people are automatically bathed in the hospital. Usually, only the injuries are scrubbed unless the person is a long-term patient. “When Susan’s murder was investigated two years ago, did anyone in Lumi mention a body odor? That the man she was with smelled bad?” I ask.

“No,” Berger replies. “Not at all. Again, I just don’t see how that person could have been Chandonne. But listen. It gets stranger.”

For the next ten minutes I watch Chandonne suck down more Pepsi as he smokes and tells the incredible account of his alleged visit with Susan Pless in her apartment. He describes where she lived in amazing detail, from the rugs on the hardwood floor to the floral upholstered furniture to the faux Tiffany lamps. He says he was not impressed with her taste in art, that she had a lot of rather pedestrian museum exhibit posters and some prints of seascapes and horses. She liked horses, he said. She told him she grew up with horses and missed them terribly. Berger taps the table inside my conference room whenever she verifies what he is saying. Yes, his description of the inside of Susan’s apartment certainly leads one to believe he was there at some point. Yes, Susan did grow up with horses. Yes, yes, to everything.

“Jesus.” I shake my head as fear coils tightly in my gut. I am afraid of where this is going. I resist thinking about it. But a part of me can’t stop thinking about it. Chandonne is going to say that I invited him into my house.

“And it’s what time now?” Berger asks him on the tape. “You said Susan opened a bottle of white wine. What time was it when she did that?”

“Maybe ten or eleven. I don’t remember. It was not good wine.”

“How much had you had to drink at this point?”

“Oh, maybe half a bottle of wine at the restaurant. I didn’t drink much of the wine she poured for me later. Cheap California wine.”

“Then you weren’t drunk.”

“I am never drunk.”

“You were thinking clearly.”

“Of course.”

“In your opinion, was Susan drunk?”

“Only maybe a little. I would say happy, she was happy. So we sat on the sofa in her living room. It has a very nice view, a southwest view. From the living room you can see the red sign for the Essex House hotel on the park.”

“All true,” Berger says to me as she taps the table again. “And her blood alcohol was point-one-one. She’d had a few,” she adds details from Susan Pless’s postmortem examination.

“Then what happened?” she is asking Chandonne.

“We hold hands. She puts my fingers in her mouth, one after the other, very sexy. We started kissing.”

“Do you know what time it was at this point?”

“I had no reason to be looking at my watch.”

“You were wearing a watch?”

“Yes.”

“Do you still have that watch?”

“No. My life got worse because of them.” He spits the word them. Saliva sprays through the air every time he says “them” with a loathing that seems genuine. “I no longer had money. I pawned the watch maybe a year ago.”

“Them? These same people you keep referring to? Law enforcement agents?”

“American federal agents.”

“Back to Susan,” Berger directs him.

“I am a shy person. I don’t know how much detail you will want me to go into at this point.” He lifts his Pepsi and his lips curl around the straw like grayish worms.

I can’t imagine anyone wanting to kiss those lips. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to touch this man.

“I want you to tell me everything you remember,” Berger says to him. “The truth, sir.”

Chandonne sets down the Pepsi and I am slightly jarred when Talley’s sleeved arm enters the picture again. He lights another Camel for Chandonne. I wonder if it occurs to Chandonne that Talley is a federal agent, that he is one of the very people who Chandonne says have been following him and ruining his life. “Yes then, I will tell you. I don’t want to, but I’m trying to be cooperative.” Chandonne blows out smoke.

“Please go on. In as much detail as you can remember.”

“We kissed for a while and it quickly progressed.” He says nothing more.

“What do you mean, it quickly progressed?”

Ordinarily, it is enough for someone to say he had sex and leave it at that. Ordinarily, the officer or attorney conducting the interview or the direct or cross-examination doesn’t find it relevant to ask for explicit details. But the sexual violence done to Susan and to all of the women we believe Chandonne murdered makes it important to know the details, all the details of what his idea of sex might be.

“I am reluctant,” Chandonne says, playing with Berger again. He wants coaxing.

“Why?” Berger asks him.

“I don’t talk about such things, certainly not with a woman present.”

“It would be better for all of us if you would think of me as a prosecutor and not a woman,” Berger tells him.

“I can’t talk to you and not think woman,” he says softly. He smiles a little. “You are very pretty.”

“You can see me?”

“I can barely see, not really. But I can tell you are pretty. I’ve heard you are.”

“Sir, I’ll ask you to make no further personal references to me. Are we clear on that?”

He stares at her and nods.

“Sir, what exactly did you do after you began kissing Susan? What next? You touched her, fondled her, undressed her? Did she touch you, fondle you, undress you? What? Do you remember what she was wearing that night?”

“Brown leather pants. I would describe them as the color of Belgian chocolate. They were tight but not in a way that was cheap. She had on boots, brown leather half boots. She had on a black top, sort of a leotard. Long-sleeved.” He looks up at the ceiling. “A scoop neck, rather low scooped neck. The kind of top that snaps between the legs.” He makes a snapping motion. His fingers with their short, pale hair remind me of cacti, of bottle brushes.

“A bodysuit,” Berger helps him out.

“Yes. I was a bit confused at first when I tried to touch her and couldn’t pull out her top.”

“You were trying to put your hands under her top but couldn’t because it was a bodysuit that snapped between her legs?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“And what was her response when you tried to untuck her top?”

“She laughed at my confusion and made fun of me.”

“She made fun of you?”

“Oh, not in a mean way. She thought I was funny. She made a joke. She said something about Frenchmen. We are supposed to be such skilled lovers, you know.”

“Then she knew you’re from France.”

“But of course,” Chandonne blandly answers.

“Did she speak French?”

“No.”

“She told you that or did you just assume it?”

“I asked her at dinner if she knew French.”

“So she teased you, then, about her bodysuit.”

“Yes. Teased. She slid my hand down her pants and helped me undo the snaps. I remember she was aroused and I was a little surprised that she had gotten aroused so quickly.”

“And you know she was aroused because . . . ?”

“Wet,” Chandonne says. “She was very wet. I really don’t like saying all this.” His face is animated. He loves saying all this. “Is it really necessary for me to continue in such detail?”

“Please, sir. Everything you can remember.” Berger is firm and unemotional. Chandonne may as well be telling her about a clock he took apart.

“I begin to touch her breasts and unhook her bra.”

“Do you remember what her bra looked like?”

“It was black.”

“Were the lights on?”

“No. But the bra was a dark color, I think black. I could be mistaken. But it wasn’t a light color.”

“How did you unhook it?”

Chandonne pauses, his dark glasses boring into the camera. “I just unhooked it in back.” He makes an unhooking motion with his fingers.

“You didn’t rip her bra off?”

“Of course not.”

“Sir, her bra was ripped in front. Ripped off from the front. Literally torn in half.”

“I didn’t. Someone else must have done that after I left.”

“All right, let’s get back to your taking her bra off. Are her pants undone at this time?”

“Undone but still on. I pull up her top. I am very oral, you see. She liked that quite a bit. It was difficult to slow her down.”

“Please explain what you mean by, ‘It was difficult to slow her down.’”

“She began to grab for me. Between my legs, trying to get my pants off, and I wasn’t ready. I still had much to do.”

“Much to do? What else did you have to do, sir?”

“I wasn’t ready for it to end.”

“What do you mean by end? For sex to end? For what to end?”

For her life to end, I think.

“For making love to end,” he replies.

I hate this. I can’t stomach listening to his fantasies, especially when I consider that he might know I am listening to them, that he is subjecting me to them just as he is subjecting Berger to them, and that Talley is listening, sitting right there, watching. Talley isn’t so different from Chandonne. Both of them secretly hate women, no matter how much they lust for them. I didn’t realize the truth about Talley until it was too late, until he was in my bed in my hotel room in Paris. I imagine him close to Berger in the small interview room at the hospital. I can almost see what is in his mind as Chandonne gives us an account of an erotic night he has probably never lived even once in his entire existence.

“She had a very lovely body and I wanted to enjoy it for a while, but she was most insistent. She couldn’t wait.” Chandonne relishes each word. “So we went back to the bedroom. We got on her bed and took our clothes off and made love.”

“Did she take her own clothes off or did you do all of it? Beyond helping with the snaps?” she asks with a hint of her underlying and overwhelming disbelief of his veracity.

“I took all her clothes off. And she took mine off,” he says.

“Did she make any comment about your body?” Berger asks. “Had you shaved your entire body?”

“Yes.”

“And she didn’t notice?”

“I was very smooth. She didn’t notice. You must understand, a lot has happened to me since then, because of them.”

“What has happened?”

“I have been pursued and persecuted and beaten. I was jumped by some men months after the night with Susan. They beat my face very badly. Split my lip, crushed bones in my face here.” He touches his glasses, indicating his orbits. “I had many dental problems as a child because of my condition and had much work done as a result. Crowns on my front teeth so they would look more normal.”

“This couple you say you stayed with paid for cosmetic dental work?”

“My family helped them with money.”

“Did you shave before you went to the dentist?”

“I would shave those areas that would show. Such as my face. Always, if I was going out during the day. When I was beaten, my front teeth were broken, my crowns were broken, and eventually, well, you can see what my teeth look like now.”

“Where did this beating occur?”

“I was still in New York.”

“Did you receive medical treatment or report this assault to the police?” Berger asks him.

“Oh, that would have been impossible. The top law enforcement people are all in this together, of course. They are the ones who did it to me. I could report nothing. I received no medical treatment. I became a nomad, always hiding. Ruined.”

“What about the name of your dentist?”

“Oh, that was very long ago. I doubt he’s still alive. His name was Corps. Maurice Corps. His office was on rue Cabanis, I believe.”

“Corps as in corpse?” I comment to Berger. “And is Cabanis a play on cannabis, or marijuana?” I am shaking my head in disgust and amazement.

“So you and Susan had sex in her bedroom.” Berger gets back to that on the tape. “Please continue. How long were the two of you in bed?”

“I would say until three o’clock in the morning. Then she told me I had to leave because she needed to get ready for work. So I got dressed and we made arrangements to see each other that night again. We said we would meet at seven at L’Absinthe, a nice French bistro in the neighborhood.”

“You say you got dressed. What about her? Was she dressed when you left her?”

“She had a pair of black satin pajamas. She put those on and kissed me at the door.”

“So you went downstairs? Did you see anyone?”

“Juan, the doorman. I went out and walked for a while. I found a cafe and had breakfast. I was very hungry.” He pauses. “Neil’s. That’s the name. It is right across the street from Lumi.”

“Do you remember what you ate?”

“Espresso.”

“You were very hungry but all you had was espresso?” Berger lets him know she picks up on the word “hunger” and realizes he is mocking her, jerking her around, fucking with her. Chandonne’s hunger wasn’t for breakfast. He was enjoying the afterglow of violence, of destroying flesh and blood because he had just left behind a woman he had beaten to death and bitten. No matter what he says, that is what he did. The bastard. The goddamn lying bastard.

“Sir, when did you first learn that Susan was murdered?” Berger asks him.

“She didn’t show up for dinner that night.”

“Well, I guess not.”

“Then the next day . . .”

“Would this be December fifth or the sixth?” Berger asks, and she is stepping up the tempo, indicating to him that she’s had it with his games.

“The sixth,” he says. “I read about her in the paper the morning after she was supposed to meet me at L’Absinthe.” He now puts on the act of feeling sad about it. “I was shocked.” He sniffs.

“Obviously, she didn’t show up at L’Absinthe the night before. But you’re saying you did?”

“I had a glass of wine in the bar and waited. Finally, I left.”

“Did you mention to anyone in the restaurant that you were waiting for her?”

“Yes. I asked the maître d’ if she had been by and perhaps left a message for me. They knew who she was because of her being on TV.”

Berger questions him closely about the maître d’, asking his name, what Chandonne was wearing that night, how much he had paid for the wine and was it in cash, and when he inquired after Susan, did he give his name. Of course not. She spends five minutes on all this. She mentions to me that the police had been contacted by the bistro and were told that a man had come in and said he was waiting for Susan Pless. All of it was painstakingly checked out back then. It is true. The description of the way the man was dressed is identical to Chandonne’s description of how he was dressed that night. This man did order a glass of red wine at the bar and ask if Susan had been by or had left a message, and he did not give his name. This man also fit the description of the man who had been in Lumi with Susan the night before.

“And did you tell anyone you had been with her the night of her murder?” Berger says on tape.

“No. Once I knew what happened, I could say nothing.”

“And what was it that you knew had happened?”

“They did it. They did that to her. To set me up again.”

“Again?”

“I had women in Paris before all this. They did it to them, too.”

“These women were before Susan’s death?”

“Maybe one or two before. Then some afterwards, as well. The same thing happened to all of them because I was followed. This is why I went more and more into hiding, and the stress and hardships made my condition so much worse. It has been a nightmare and I’ve said nothing. Who would believe me?”

“Good question,” Berger says sharply. “Because you know what? I, for one, don’t believe you, sir. You murdered Susan, didn’t you, sir?”

“No.”

“You raped her, didn’t you, sir?”

“No.”

“You beat her and bit her, didn’t you, sir?”

“No. This is why I’ve told nothing to anybody. Who would believe me? Who would believe people are trying to destroy me all because they think my father is a criminal, a godfather?”

“You never told the police or anyone that you may have been the last person to see Susan alive because you murdered her, didn’t you, sir?”

“I told no one. If I had, I would have been blamed for her death, just as you are blaming me. I returned to Paris. I wandered. I hoped they would forget me, but they haven’t. You can see they haven’t.”

“Sir, are you aware that Susan was covered with bite marks and that your saliva was found on those bite marks and the DNA testing on them and on the seminal fluid found in her vagina matches your DNA?”

He just fixes those black glasses on Berger.

“You know what DNA is, don’t you?”

“I would expect my DNA to come up.”

“Because you bit her.”

“I never bit her. But I am very oral. I . . .” He stops.

“You what? What did you do that might explain your saliva being on bite marks you say you didn’t inflict?”

“I’m very oral,” he says again. “I suck and lick. All over the body.”

“Where specifically? Do you literally mean every inch of the body?”

“Yes. All of it. I love a woman’s body. Every inch of it. Perhaps because I don’t have . . . Perhaps because it is so beautiful, and beauty is something I can never have for myself, you see. So I worship them. My women. Their flesh.”

“You lick and kiss their feet, for example?”

“Yes.”

“The bottoms of their feet?”

“Everywhere.”

“Have you ever bitten a woman’s breasts?”

“No. She had very beautiful breasts.”

“But you sucked them, licked them?”

“Obsessively.”

“Are breasts important to you?”

“Oh yes. Very much—I am honest about it.”

“You seek out big-breasted women?”

“I have a type I like.”

“What exactly is your type?”

“Very full.” He cups his hands at his chest and sexual tension shines in his face as he describes the type of woman who arouses him. Maybe it is my imagination, but his eyes gleam behind the black Solar Shields. “But not fat. I don’t like fat women, no, no. Slender through the waist and hips, but very full.” He cups his hands again, as if he is gripping volleyballs, and veins rope through his arms and his muscles flex.

“And Susan was your type?” Berger is completely unflappable.

“The instant I spotted her in the restaurant, I was attracted,” he replies.

“In Lumi?”

“Yes.”

“Hairs were also found on her body,” Berger then says. “Are you aware that unusual long, baby-fine hair consistent with your unusual baby-fine hair was found on her body? How can that be if you’d shaved? Didn’t you just tell me you shaved your entire body?”

“They plant things. I’m sure of it.”

“These same people who are out to get you?”

“Yes.”

“And where would they get your hair?”

“There was a period, in Paris some five years ago, when I started getting the sense someone was after me,” he says. “I had a feeling I was being watched, being followed. I had no idea why. But when I was younger I didn’t shave my body always. My back, you can imagine. It is very hard to reach, hard to shave my back, impossible really, so sometimes many, many months would go by, and you see, when I was younger, I was more shy with women and rarely approached them. So I didn’t think about shaving as much, would just hide beneath long pants and sleeves and only shave my hands and neck and face.” He touches his cheek. “One day I came home to the apartment where my foster parents lived . . .”

“Your foster parents are still alive at this point? The couple you’ve mentioned? Who lived near the prison?” she adds with a trace of irony.

“No. But I still was able to live there for a while. It was not expensive and I had work, odd jobs. I come home and I can tell someone has been inside. It was strange. Nothing was missing except the covers on my bed. I think, well, that’s not so bad. At least whoever it was took only that. Then it happened again several more times. I realize now it was them. They wanted my hair. That’s why they took my bedcovers. Because I lose a lot of hair, you see?” He touches tangles of hair on top of his head. “It is always falling out if I don’t shave. It gets caught on things when it’s so long.” He holds out an arm to show her, and long hair wafts weightlessly on the air.

“Then you’re saying you didn’t have long hair when you met Susan? Not even on your back?”

“Not at all. If you found long hairs on her body, then they were put there, you see what I am saying? All the same, I accept that her murder is my fault.”

CHAPTER 15

WHY IS IT your fault?” Berger asks Chandonne. “Why would you say that Susan’s murder is your fault?”

“Because they followed me,” he answers her. “They must have come in just after I left, and then they did that to her.”

“And did they follow you to Richmond, too, sir? Why did you come here?”

“I came because of my brother.”

“Explain that to me,” Berger replies.

“I heard about the body at the port, and I was convinced it was my brother, Thomas.”

“What did your brother do for a living?”

“He was in the shipping business with my father. He was a few years older. Thomas was good to me. I didn’t see him much, but he would give me his clothes when he no longer wanted them, and other things, as I’ve told you. And money. I know the last time I saw him, maybe two months ago in Paris, he was frightened something bad was going to happen to him.”

“Where in Paris was this meeting with Thomas?”

“Faubourg Saint Antoine. He loved to go where the young artists and nightclubs are, and we met in a stone alleyway. Cour des Trois Frères, where the artisans are, you know, not too far from Sans Sanz and the Balanjo and, of course, the Bar Américain, where girls can be paid to keep you company. He gave me money and said he was going to Belgium, to Antwerp, and then on to this country. I never heard from him again, and next the news came out about the body.”

“And where did you hear this news?”

“I told you I get many newspapers. I pick up what people throw away. And many tourists who don’t speak French read the international version of USA Today. There was a small story in it about the body found here, and I knew right away it was my brother. I was sure. For this reason, I came to Richmond. I had to know.”

“How did you get here?”

Chandonne sighs. He looks fatigued again. He touches the inflamed, raw skin around his nose. “I don’t want to say,” he replies.

“Why don’t you want to say?”

“I’m afraid you’ll use it against me.”

“Sir, I need you to be truthful with me.”

“I’m a pickpocket. I took a wallet from a man who had his coat draped over a monument in Père-Lachaise, the most famous cemetery in Paris, where some of my family is buried. A concession à perpétuité,” he says proudly. “Stupid man. An American. It was a big wallet, the sort people keep passports and plane tickets in. I’ve done this many times, I regret to tell you. It’s part of living on the street, and I’ve lived on the street more and more since they started after me.”

“These same people again. Federal agents.”

“Yes, yes. Agents, magistrates, everyone. I immediately took the plane because I didn’t want to give the man time to report his wallet missing and then have someone stop me at the gate in the airport. It was a return ticket, coach, to New York.”

“You flew out of what airport and when?”

“De Gaulle. That would have been last Thursday.”

“December sixteenth?”

“Yes. I got in early that morning and took a train to Richmond. I had seven hundred dollars because of what I took from the man.”

“Do you still have the wallet and passport?”

“No, never. That would be stupid. I threw them in the trash.”

“Where in the trash?”

“At the train station in New York. I can’t tell you exactly where. I got on the train. . . .”

“And during your travels, nobody looked at you? You weren’t shaven, sir? No one stared at you or reacted to you?”

“I had my hair in a net under a hat. I wore long sleeves and a high collar.” He hesitates. “I have another thing I do when I look like this, when I have not cleaned off the hair. I wear a mask. The type of mask people put over their nose and mouth if they have severe allergies. And I wear black cotton gloves and large tinted glasses.”

“This is what you wore on the plane and the train?”

“Yes. It works very well. People move away from me and I, in this instance, had an entire row of seats to myself. So I slept.”

“Do you still have the mask, hat, gloves and glasses?”

He stops to think before answering. She has thrown him a curveball and he is uncertain. “I can possibly find them,” he hedges.

“What did you do when you got to Richmond?” Berger asks him.

“I got off the train.”

She questions him about this for several minutes. Where is the train station? Did he take a taxi next? How did he get around? Just what did he think he would do about his brother? His answers are lucid. Everything he describes makes it seem plausible that he might have been where he claims to have been, such as the Amtrak station on Staples Mill Road and in a blue taxicab that let him off at a dump of a motel on Chamberlayne Avenue, where he paid twenty dollars for a room, again using an assumed name and paying cash. From here, he states that he called my office to get information about the unidentified body he says is his brother. “I asked to speak to the doctor but no one would help me,” he is telling Berger.

“Who did you talk to?” she asks him.

“It was a woman. Maybe a clerk.”

“Did this clerk tell you who the doctor is?”

“Yes. A Dr. Scarpetta. So then I asked to speak to him, and the clerk tells me Dr. Scarpetta is a woman. So I say, okay. May I speak to her? And she is busy. I don’t leave my name and number, of course, because I must continue to be careful. Maybe I’m followed again. How do I know? And then I get a newspaper and read about a murder here, a lady in a store killed a week earlier, and I’m shocked—frightened. They are here.”

“These same people? The ones you say are after you?”

“They are here, don’t you see? They killed my brother and knew I would come to find him.”

“They certainly are amazing, aren’t they, sir? How amazing they are to know you would come all the way to Richmond, Virginia, because you just happen to read a discarded USA Today and learn that a body has turned up here, and that you would assume it’s Thomas, and that you would steal a passport and wallet and off you’d go.”

“They would know I would come. I love my brother. My brother is all I have in life. He is the only one ever good to me. And I need to find out for Papa. Poor Papa.”

“What about your mother? She wouldn’t be upset to find out Thomas is dead?”

“She is drunk so much.”

“Your mother’s an alcoholic?”

“She’s always drinking.”

“Every day?”

“Every day, all day. And then she gets angry or cries a lot.”

“You don’t live with her, yet you know she drinks every day and all day long?”

“Thomas would tell me. It’s been her life ever since I can remember. I’ve always been told she is drunk. The few times I would go to the house, she was drunk. It was mentioned to me once that my condition might have happened because she was drunk when she was pregnant with me.”

Berger looks at me. “Possible?”

“Fetal alcohol syndrome?” I consider. “Not likely. Generally severe mental and physical retardation would result if the mother were a chronic alcoholic, and cutaneous changes such as hypertrichosis would be the least of the child’s problems.”

“Doesn’t mean he doesn’t believe she caused his condition.”

“He certainly might believe it,” I agree with her.

“Helping to explain his extreme hatred of women.”

“As much as anything can explain his kind of hate,” I reply.

On tape, Berger has returned Chandonne to the subject of his allegedly calling the morgue here in Richmond. “So you tried to get through to Dr. Scarpetta on the phone but couldn’t. Then what?”

“Then the next day, Friday, I hear on the TV in my motel room that another woman has been murdered. This time a policewoman. They do a newsbreak, you know, and I’m watching it as it is happening and next thing the cameras focus on a big black car pulling up to the scene and they say it is the medical examiner. It is her, Scarpetta. So I get the idea to go there immediately. I will wait until she is leaving the scene and then I will approach her. I will tell her I must talk to her. So I get a taxi.”

His remarkable memory fails him here. He recalls nothing about the taxi company, not even the color of the car, only that the driver was a “black man.” Probably eighty percent of the taxi drivers in Richmond are black. Chandonne claims that while he is being driven to the scene—and he knows the address because it was on the news—he hears another newsbreak. This time, the public is being warned about the killer, that he may have a strange medical condition which causes him to have a very unusual appearance. The hypertrichotic description fits Chandonne. “I know now, for sure,” he goes on. “They have set the trap and the world thinks I have killed these women in Richmond. So I panic in the back of the taxi, trying to figure out what to do. I say to the taxi driver, ‘Do you know this lady they speak of? Scarpetta?’ He says that everyone in the city knows her. I ask where she lives and say I’m a tourist. He takes me to her neighborhood but we don’t go in because there are guards and a gate. But I know enough to find her. I get out of the taxi several blocks from there. I’m determined I will find her before it’s too late.”

“Too late for what?” Berger asks.

“Before anybody else is killed. I must come back later that night and somehow get her to open the door so I can talk to her. You know, of course, I’m worried they will kill her next. It’s their pattern, you see. They did that in Paris, you know. They tried to murder the medical examiner there, a woman. She was very lucky.”

“Sir, let’s keep on the subject of what happened here in Richmond. Tell me what happened next. It’s what, midmorning on Friday, December seventeenth, last Friday? What did you do after the taxi dropped you off? What did you do the rest of the day?”

“Wandered. Found an abandoned house on the river and went in it just to get out of the weather.”

“Do you know where that house is?”

“I can’t tell you, but not far from her neighborhood.”

“From Dr. Scarpetta’s neighborhood?”

“Yes.”

“You could find that house again, the one you stayed in, couldn’t you, sir?”

“It’s under construction. Very big. A mansion no one lives in right now. I know where it is.”

Berger says to me, “The one where they think he was staying the entire time he was here?”

I nod. I am familiar with the house. I think of the poor people it belongs to and can’t imagine them ever wanting to live there again. Chandonne says he hid in the abandoned mansion until dark. Several times that night he ventured out, avoiding the guard gate in my neighborhood by simply following the river and railroad tracks that run behind it. He claims to have knocked on my door early evening and got no answer. At this point, Berger asks me when I got home that night. I tell her it was after eight. I had stopped off at Pleasants Hardware store after leaving the office. I wanted to look at tools because I was perplexed by the strange wounds I had found on Diane Bray’s body and by bloody transfers made to the mattress when the killer had set down the bloody tool he had beaten her with. It was during this foraging at Pleasants Hardware that I came across a chipping hammer, and I purchased one and went on home, I tell Berger.

Chandonne goes on to claim he began to get fearful about coming to see me. He claims there were a lot of police cars cruising the neighborhood, and that at one point when he came to my house late, there were two police cruisers parked in front. This was because my alarm had gone off—when Chandonne forced open my garage door so the police would come. Of course, he tells Berger that it wasn’t him who set off the alarm. It was them—it must have been them, he says. By now, it is getting close to midnight. It is snowing hard. He hides behind trees near my house and waits until the police leave. He says it is his last chance, he has to see me. He believes they are in the area and will kill me. So he goes to my front door and knocks.

“What did you knock with?” Berger asks him.

“I recall there was a door knocker. I believe I used that.” He drains the last of his Pepsi and Marino on tape asks him if he wants another one. Chandonne shakes his head and yawns. He is talking about coming into my house to bash my brains out and the bastard is yawning.

“Why didn’t you ring the bell?” Berger wants to know. This is important. My doorbell activates the camera system. Had Chandonne rung the bell, I would have been able to see him on a video screen inside the house.

“I don’t know,” he replies. “I saw the knocker and used it.”

“Did you say anything?”

“Not at first. Then I heard a woman ask, ‘Who is it?’”

“And what did you say?”

“I told her my name. I said I have information about the body she’s trying to identify, and to please let me talk to her.”

“You told her your name? You identified yourself as Jean-Baptiste Chandonne?”

“Yes. I said I was here from Paris and had been trying to get her at her office.” He yawns again. “The most amazing thing happens,” he goes on. “The door suddenly opens and she is there. She tells me to come in, and the minute I do, she slams the door shut behind me and I can’t believe it. She suddenly has this hammer and is trying to hit me.”

“Suddenly has a hammer? Where did she get it? Did it just appear out of thin air?”

“I believe she grabbed it off a table just inside the doorway. I don’t know. It happened so fast. And I try to get away from her. I run into the living room, yelling for her to stop, and that’s when the terrible thing happened. It was fast. I only remember I was on the other side of the sofa, and then something was flying in my face. It felt like liquid fire in my eyes. I have never felt anything so, so . . .” He sniffs again. “The pain. I was screaming and trying to get it out of my eyes. I was trying to get out of the house. I knew she was going to kill me and suddenly it went into my mind that she is one of them. Them. They have got me at last. I walked right into their trap! It was planned all along that she would get my brother’s body because she is them. Now I would be arrested and they would finally get the opportunity they want, finally, finally.”

“And they want what?” Berger asks him. “Tell me again, because I’m having a very hard time understanding, much less believing, this part.”

“They want my father!” he says with the first emotion I have seen. “To get Papa! To find a reason to go after him and bring him down, destroy him. To make it look like my father has a son who is a killer so they can get to my family. All this for years! And I am Chandonne and look at me! Look at me!!”

He stretches out his arms in a pose of crucifixion, hair floating out from his body. I watch in shock as he rips off his dark glasses and light pierces his tender, burned eyes. I stare into those bright red, chemically burned eyes. They don’t seem to focus and tears stream down his face.

“I am ruined!” he cries out. “I am ugly and blind and accused of crimes I didn’t do! You Americans want to execute a Frenchman! Isn’t that it! To make an example!” Chairs scrape loudly and Marino and Talley are all over him, holding him in his chair. “I killed no one! She tried to kill me! Look what she did to me!”

And Berger is calmly saying to him, “We’ve been at this an hour. We’re going to stop now. That’s enough. Calm down, calm down.”

Frames flicker and bars fill the screen before it turns the bright blue of a perfect afternoon. Berger turns off the VCR. I sit in stunned silence.

“Hate to tell you.” She breaks the appalling spell Chandonne has cast over my small, private conference room. “There are some antigovernment, paranoid idiots in the world who are going to find this guy believable. Let’s hope none of them end up on the jury. It only takes one.”

CHAPTER 16

JAY TALLEY,” BERGER startles me by saying. Now that Chandonne has vanished from our midst with a simple pointing of a remote control, this New York prosecutor wastes no time shifting her intense focus to me. We are returned to a small, bland reality—a conference room with a round wooden table and wooden built-in bookcases and a vacant television screen. Case files and gory photographs are spread out before us, forgotten, ignored, because Chandonne has preempted everything and everyone for the past two hours.

“Do you want to volunteer, or should I start with telling you what I know?” Berger confronts me.

“I’m not sure what you want me to volunteer.” I am taken aback, then offended, then furious all over again as I think of Talley’s presence at Chandonne’s interview. I imagine Berger talking to Talley before and after her interrogation of Chandonne and during his break for rest and fast food. Berger had hours with Talley and Marino. “And more to the point,” I add, “what does this have to do with your New York case?”

“Dr. Scarpetta.” She leans back in her chair. I feel as if I have been inside this room with her for half my life, and I am late. I am hopelessly late for meeting the governor. “As hard as it’s going to be for you,” Berger says, “I’m asking you to trust me. Can you do that?”

“I don’t know who to trust anymore,” I reply truthfully.

She smiles a little and sighs. “That’s honest. Fair enough. You have no reason to trust me. Maybe you have no reason to trust anyone. But you really have no factual reason not to trust me as a professional whose singular intent is to make Chandonne pay for his crimes—if he murdered these women.”

“If?” I ask her.

“We have to prove it. And absolutely anything I can learn from what has happened here in these Richmond cases is invaluable to me. I promise you, I’m not trying to be a voyeur or to violate your privacy. But I must have the full context. Frankly, I need to know what the hell I’m dealing with, and my difficulty lies in that I don’t know who all the characters are or what they are or if any of them might in any way overlap my case in New York. For example, could Diane Bray’s prescription drug habit in fact be a marker for other illegal activity possibly connected to organized crime, to the Chandonne family? Or possibly even connected to why brother Thomas’s body ended up in Richmond?”

“By the way.” I am stuck on another matter, namely, my credibility. “How does Chandonne explain that there were two chipping hammers at my house? Yes, I bought one at the hardware store, as I have told you. So where did the other one come from if he didn’t bring it with him? And if I wanted to kill him, why didn’t I use the pistol? My Glock was right there on the dining-room table.”

Berger hesitates and completely dodges my questions. “If I don’t know the whole truth, then it makes it very difficult to sort out what’s relevant to my case and what isn’t.”

“I understand that much.”

“Can we start with the status of your relationship with Jay now?”

“He drove me to the hospital.” I give up. I am clearly not the one who is going to be asking the questions in this situation. “When I broke my arm. He showed up with the police, with ATF, and I spoke briefly to him Saturday afternoon while the police were still at my home.”

“Do you have any idea why he thought it necessary to fly here from France to assist in the manhunt for Chandonne?”

“I can only assume it’s because he’s so familiar with the case.”

“Or an excuse to see you?”

“He’d have to answer that.”

“Are you seeing him?”

“Not since Saturday afternoon, as I’ve said.”

“Why not? Do you consider the relationship over?”

“I don’t consider it ever began.”

“But you slept with him.” She raises an eyebrow.

“So I’m guilty of poor judgment.”

“He’s handsome, bright. And young. Some might be more likely to convict you of good taste. He’s single. So are you. It’s not as if you committed adultery.” She drags out a pause. Is she alluding to Benton, to the fact that I have been guilty of adultery in the past? “Jay Talley has a lot of money, doesn’t he?” She taps her felt-tip pen on the legal pad, a metronome measuring what a bad time I am having. “From his family, supposedly. I’ll check into that. And by the way, you should know I’ve talked to him, to Jay. At length.”

“I just assume you’ve talked to the entire world. What I haven’t yet figured out is how you’ve had time.”

“There was a little downtime at MCV, the medical college hospital.”

I imagine her drinking coffee with Talley. I can picture the look on his face, his demeanor. I wonder if she is attracted to him.

“I talked to both Talley and Marino while Chandonne had his various rest periods and whatnot.” Her hands are folded on top of a notepad that has the letterhead of her office on it. She has not taken a single note, not one word the entire time we have been inside this room. Already, she is planning for the defense to huff and puff about Rosario this and that. Whatever is in writing, the defense is entitled to see it. So don’t write anything down. Now and then she doodles. She has filled two pages with doodles since she entered my conference room. A red flag is raised in the back of my mind. She is treating me like a witness. I shouldn’t be a witness, not in her New York case.

“I’m getting the impression that you’re wondering if Jay is somehow involved. . . .” I start to say.

Berger interrupts me with a shrug. “No stone unturned,” she says. “Is it possible? By this point, I’m about to believe anything is possible. What a wonderful position Talley would be in if he were in collusion with the Chandonnes, true? Interpol, ah, that’s handy for a crime cartel. He calls you and brings you to France, perhaps for the purpose of seeing what you know about the loose cannon Jean-Baptiste. Suddenly, Talley’s in Richmond for the manhunt.” She crosses her arms and penetrates me with that gaze again. “I don’t like him. I’m surprised you did.”

“Look,” I say with a hint of defeat in my voice, “Jay and I were intimate in Paris over a twenty-four-hour period, at most.”

“You initiated sex. Quarreled in a restaurant that evening and you stormed out, jealous because he was looking at another woman. . . .”

“What?” I blurt out. “He said that?”

She regards me silently. Her tone is no different from the one she was using with Chandonne, a terrible monster. Now she is interviewing me, a terrible person. That is how I feel. “It had nothing to do with another woman,” I answer her. “What other woman? I certainly wasn’t jealous. He was coming on too strong and acting petulant and I’d had enough.”

“The Café Runtz on rue Favard. You made quite a scene.” She continues my story, or at least Talley’s version of it.

“I didn’t make a scene. I got up from the table and walked out, period.”

“From there you returned to the hotel, got into a cab and went to Île Saint-Louis, where the Chandonne family lives. You walked around after dark, staring up at the Chandonne home, then got a water sample from the Seine.”

What she has just said sends electrical shocks through my every cell. Sweat rolls in cold tickles beneath my blouse. I never told Jay what I did after I left him in the restaurant. How does Berger know all this? How did Jay know if he is the one who told her? Marino. How much has Marino volunteered to her?

“What was your real purpose in finding the Chandonne house? What did you think that might tell you?” Berger asks.

“If I knew what something would tell me, I wouldn’t need to investigate,” I reply. “As for the water sample, as you must know from the lab reports, we found diatoms, or microscopic algae, on the clothing of the unidentified body from the Richmond port—from Thomas’s body. I wanted a water sample from near the Chandonne home to see if there was any chance the same type of diatom might be present in that area of the Seine. And it was. Freshwater diatoms were consistent with those I found on the inside of the clothing on the body, Thomas’s body, and none of this matters. You aren’t trying Jean-Baptiste for the murder of his alleged brother, since that probably happened in Belgium. You’ve already made that clear.”

“But the water sample is important.”

“Why?”

“Anything that happened reveals more to me about the defendant and possibly leads to motive. More importantly, to identity and intent.”

Identity and intent. Those words roar through my mind like a train. I am a lawyer. I know what those words mean.

“Why did you take the water sample? Do you routinely go around collecting evidence that isn’t directly associated with a body? Collecting water samples really isn’t your jurisdiction, in other words, especially in a foreign country. Why did you go to France to begin with? Isn’t that a little out of the ordinary for a medical examiner?”

“Interpol summoned me. You just pointed that out yourself.”

“Jay Talley summoned you, more specifically.”

“He represents Interpol. He’s the ATF liaison.”

“I’m wondering why he really orchestrated your going there.” She pauses to allow that chilly fear to touch my brain. It occurs to me that Jay may have manipulated me for reasons I am not sure I can bear to entertain. “Talley has many layers,” Berger adds cryptically. “If Jean-Baptiste was tried here, I fear Talley would more likely be used by the defense than by the prosecution. Possibly to discredit you as a witness.”

Heat crawls up my neck. My face burns. Fear rips through me like shrapnel, tearing apart any hope I have had that something like this would not happen. “Let me ask you something.” My outrage is complete. It is all I can do to steady my voice. “Is there anything you don’t know about my life?”

“Quite a bit.”

“Why is it I feel that I’m the one about to get indicted, Ms. Berger?”

“I don’t know. Why do you feel that way?”

“I’m trying not to take any of this personally. But it’s getting harder by the minute.”

Berger doesn’t smile. Resolve turns her eyes to flint and hardens her tone. “It’s going to get very personal. I highly recommend you don’t take it that way. You of all people know how it works. The actual commission of a crime is incidental to the real damage its ripples do. Jean-Baptiste Chandonne didn’t inflict a single blow on you at the time he broke into your house. It’s now he begins to hurt you. He has hurt you. He will hurt you. Even though he’s locked up, he will inflict blows on you daily. He has started a deadly, cruel process, the violation of Kay Scarpetta. It’s begun. I’m sorry. It’s a fact of life that you know all too well.”

I silently return her stare. My mouth is dry. My heart seems to beat out of rhythm.

“It isn’t fair, is it?” she says with the sharp edge of a prosecutor who knows how to dismantle human beings as completely as I do. “But then, I’m sure your patients wouldn’t enjoy being naked on your table and under your knife, to have their pockets and orifices explored, if they knew. And yes, there’s a hell of a lot I don’t know about your life. And yes, you aren’t going to like my probing. And yes, you will cooperate if you’re the person I’ve heard you are. And yes, goddamn it, I desperately need your help or this case is fucked to the moon.”

“Because you’re going to try to drag in his other bad acts, aren’t you?” I am out with it. “A Molineux application.”

She hesitates. Her eyes linger on me and light up for an instant, as if I have just said something that fills her with happiness or maybe a new respect. Then just as quickly, those eyes shut me out again, and she says, “I’m not sure what I’ll do yet.”

I don’t believe her. I am the only living witness. The only one. She fully intends to suck me into it—to put every one of Chandonne’s crimes on trial, all magnificently showcased within the small context of one poor woman he murdered in Manhattan two years ago. Chandonne is smart. But he may have made a fatal mistake on videotape. He gave Berger the two weapons she needs to shoot for a Molineux: identity and intent. I can identify Chandonne. I know goddamn well what his intent was when he forced his way into my house. I am the only living person who can counter his lies.

“So now we hammer at my credibility.” The tasteless pun is deliberate. She is swinging at me just as Chandonne did, but for a very different reason, of course. She doesn’t want to destroy me. She wants to make sure I am not destroyed.

“Why did you sleep with Jay Talley?” She is at it again.

“Because he was there, damn it,” I retort.

She erupts in a sudden salvo of laughter, deep throaty laughs that push her back in her chair.

I am not trying to be funny. I am disgusted, if anything. “That’s the banal truth, Ms. Berger,” I add.

“Please call me Jaime.” She sighs.

“I don’t always know the answers even to things I should. Such as why I had my moment with Jay. But I’m ashamed of it. Up until a few minutes ago, I felt guilty about it, so afraid I used him, hurt him. But at least I didn’t kiss and tell.”

To this she has no response.

“I should have known he’s still in the locker room,” I go on as my indignation unfurls brightly before our eyes. “No better than those teenaged boys gawking at my niece in the mall the other night. Walking hormones. So Jay has bragged about it, I’m sure, told everyone, including you. And let me add . . .” I pause. I swallow. Anger is a lump in my throat. “Let me add that some details aren’t your business and will never be your business. I ask you, Ms. Berger, as a matter of professional courtesy, not to go places where you don’t belong.”

“If only others would abide by that.”

I make a point of looking at my watch again. But I can’t leave, not before I ask her the most important question. “You believe he attacked me?” She knows I am referring to Chandonne this time.

“Is there any reason why I shouldn’t believe that?”

“Obviously, my eyewitness account turns everything else he’s said to the bullshit it is,” I reply. “It wasn’t them. There was no them. Only that goddamn son of a bitch pretending to be the police and coming after me with a hammer. I’d like to know how the hell he can explain that. Did you ask him why there were two chipping hammers at my house? I can prove from the hardware store receipt that I bought only one.” I push that point again. “So where did the other one come from?”

“Let me ask you a question instead.” She avoids answering me again. “Is there any possibility you only assumed he was attacking you? That you saw him and panicked? You’re positive he had a chipping hammer and was coming after you with it?”

I stare at her. “Assumed he was attacking me? What possible explanation could there be for him being inside my house?”

“Well, you opened the door. That much we know, right?”

“You aren’t asking me if he was an invited guest, are you?” I stare defiantly at her, the inside of my mouth sticky. My hands are trembling. I push back my chair when she doesn’t answer me. “I don’t have to sit here and take this. It’s gone from the ridiculous to the sublimely ridiculous!”

“Dr. Scarpetta, how would it make you feel if it was publicly suggested that you, in fact, did invite Chandonne into your home and assaulted him? For no reason, except perhaps you panicked? Or worse. That you are part of his conspiracy as he has stated on tape—you and Jay Talley. Which also helps explain why you went to Paris and slept with Talley and then met Dr. Stvan and took evidence from the morgue.”

“How would that make me feel? I don’t know what else to say.”

“You’re the only witness, the only living person who knows that what Chandonne is saying is lies and more lies. If you’re telling the truth, then this case is completely up to you.”

“I’m not a witness in your case,” I remind her. “I had nothing to do with the Susan Pless murder investigation.”

“I need your help. It’s going to be very, very time-consuming.”

“I won’t help you. Not if you’re going to start questioning my veracity or state of mind.”

“Actually, I don’t question either. But the defense will. Seriously. Excruciatingly.” She is cautiously working her way around the edges of a reality she has yet to share with me. Opposing counsel. I suspect she knows who. She knows exactly who is going to finish what Chandonne started: the dismantling, the humiliation of me for all the world to see. My heart beats in sick thuds. I feel dead. My life has just ended right before my eyes.

“I will need you to come to New York at some point,” Berger is saying. “Sooner rather than later. And by the way, let me caution you to be very, very careful who you talk to right now. I don’t recommend, for example, that you talk to anyone about these cases without conferring with me first.” She begins packing up her paperwork and books. “I caution you about having any contact with Jay Talley.” Her eyes flick mine as she snaps shut her briefcase. “Unfortunately, I think we’re all going to get a Christmas present we’re not going to like.” We get up from our chairs and face each other.

“Who?” I go ahead and ask her in a tired voice. “You know who’s going to represent him, don’t you? That’s why you stayed up all night with him. You wanted to get to him before his counsel slams the door shut.”

“All true,” she replies with a hint of irritation. “The question is whether I was suckered into it.” We look at each other across the shiny expanse of the wooden table. “I find it a little too coincidental that within an hour of my last interview with Chandonne, I get word that he’s retained counsel,” she adds. “I suspect he already knew who his counsel was and may, in fact, have already retained him. But Chandonne and the dirtbag he’s hooked up with would believe that this tape”—she pats her briefcase—“would only hurt us and help him.”

“Because jurors either believe him or think he’s paranoid and crazy,” I summarize.

She nods. “Oh sure. They’ll go for insanity, if all else fails. And we don’t want Mister Chandonne at Kirby, now do we?”

Kirby is a notorious forensic psychiatric hospital in New York. It is where Carrie Grethen was incarcerated before she escaped and murdered Benton. Berger has just touched another part of my painful history. “You know about Carrie Grethen, then,” I say in a defeated way as we walk out of a conference room that I will never feel the same about again. It, too, has become a crime scene. My entire world is turning into one.

“I’ve done some research on you,” Berger says almost apologetically. “And you’re right, I do know who’s going to represent Chandonne, and it’s not good news. In fact, it’s pretty damn awful.” She puts on her mink coat as we walk out into the hallway. “Have you ever met Marino’s son?”

I stop and stare at her, dumbfounded. “I don’t know anyone who has ever met his son,” I reply.

“Come on, let’s get you to your party. I’ll explain as we walk out.” Berger cradles her books and files, walking slowly over quiet carpet. “Rocco Marino, affectionately known as ‘Rocky,’ is an exceptionally sleazy criminal defense attorney who has an affinity for representing the mob and others who make it worth his while to get them off the hook by any means. He’s flashy. Loves publicity.” She glances over at me. “Most of all, he loves to hurt people. That’s his power trip.”

I flip off the hallway lights, throwing us briefly into darkness as we approach the first set of stainless steel doors.

“Some years ago—in law school, I’m told,” she continues, “Rocky changed his last name to Caggiano. A final rejection of the father he despises, I suppose.”

I hesitate, facing her in deep shadows. I don’t want her to see the expression on my face, to detect my sense of utter undoing. I have always known that Marino hates his son. I have entertained many theories about why. Maybe Rocky is gay or a drug addict or simply a loser. Certainly it has been clear that Rocky is something of an anathema to his father, and now I know. I am struck by the bitter irony, the shame of it all. My God. “Rocky so-called Caggiano heard about the case and volunteered?” I ask.

“Could be. Could also be that the Chandonne family’s organized crime ties have led him to their son, or hell, maybe Rocky is already connected to them. It may be a combination—personal and Rocky’s own connections. But it does smack a little of throwing father and son into the Colosseum. Patricide in front of the world, albeit indirectly. Marino won’t necessarily be testifying in Chandonne’s trial in New York, but it could happen, depending on how this all unfolds.”

I know how it will unfold. It is all so clear to me. Berger came to Richmond fully intending to insert these cases into the one in New York. I wouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t somehow manage to get the Paris cases included, as well.

“But regardless,” she says, “Chandonne will always feel like Marino’s case. Cops like him care what happens. And Rocky’s representing Chandonne puts me in an unfortunate position. If the case were in Richmond, I would go marching up to the judge ex parte and point out the very obvious conflict of interest. Probably get thrown out of his chambers and reprimanded. But at the very least, I might be able to get the His or Her Honor to request a co-counselor on the defendant’s legal team so son doesn’t actually cross-examine father.”

I push a button and more steel doors open.

“But I would create a storm of protest,” she goes on. “And maybe the court would rule in my favor, or if nothing else, I’d use the situation to get sympathy from the jury, show what bad guys Chandonne and his counsel are.”

“No matter how your case unfolds in New York, Marino won’t be a fact witness.” I see where she is going with this. “Not in the Susan Pless murder. So you aren’t going to have any luck getting rid of Rocky.”

“Exactly right. No conflict. Nothing I can do about it. And Rocky’s poison.”

Our conversation continues into the bay, where we stand in the cold by our cars. The starkness of the bare concrete around us seems a symbol of the realities I now face. Life has turned hard and unforgiving. There is no view, no way out. I can’t imagine how Marino will feel when he finds out that the very monster he has helped apprehend will be defended by Marino’s estranged son. “Clearly, Marino doesn’t know,” I say.

“Maybe I’ve been remiss in not telling him yet,” she replies. “But he’s a big enough pain in the ass already. I thought I’d wait and drop this bomb tomorrow or the next day. You know he wasn’t happy about my interviewing Chandonne.” She adds this with a glint of triumph.

“I could tell.”

“I had a case with Rocky several years ago.” Berger unlocks her car door. She leans inside to start it and get the heat going. “A wealthy man on business in New York is accosted by a kid with a knife.” She straightens up and faces me. “The man struggles and manages to wrestle the kid to the ground, bangs the kid’s head on the pavement, knocking him out, but not before he stabs the man in the chest. The man dies. The kid is hospitalized for a while but recovers. Rocky tried to turn the case on self-defense but fortunately the jury didn’t buy it.”

“I’m sure that made Mr. Caggiano a fan of yours for life.”

“What I couldn’t prevent was him then representing the kid in a civil suit, asking ten million for alleged permanent emotional damage, yada, yada, yada. The murdered man’s family finally settled. Why? Because they just couldn’t take it anymore. There was a lot of shit happening behind the scenes—harassment, weird events. They were burglarized. One of their cars was stolen. Their Jack Russell puppy was poisoned. On and on, and all of it I’m convinced was orchestrated by Rocky Marino Caggiano. I just could never prove it.” She climbs up into her Mercedes sport utility vehicle. “His modus operandi is pretty simple. He gets away with anything he can and puts everybody on trial except the defendant. He is also a very poor loser.”

I remember Marino telling me years ago he wished Rocky were dead. “Might that be part of his motivation then?” I ask. “Revenge. Not just getting the father, but getting you? And doing so very publicly.”

“Might be,” Berger says to me from the high perch of her SUV. “Whatever his motive, I do want you to know I plan to protest anyway. Just can’t tell you how much good it will do since this really doesn’t constitute an ethical violation. It’s up to the judge.” She reaches for her seat belt and pulls it across her chest. “How are you spending Christmas Eve, Kay?”

So now I am Kay. I have to think for a minute. Christmas Eve is tomorrow. “I need to follow up on these cases, the ones with the burns,” I reply.

She nods. “It’s important we go back to Chandonne’s crime scenes while they still exist.”

Including my house, I think.

“Might you find some time tomorrow afternoon?” she asks. “Any time you can give me. I’m working through the holidays. I don’t mean to ruin yours.”

I have to smile at the irony. The holidays. Yes, Merry Christmas. Berger has given me a gift and doesn’t even know it. She has helped me make a decision, an important decision, maybe even the most important decision of my life. I am going to quit my job and the governor will be the first to know. “I’ll call you when I’m finished in James City County,” I tell Berger. “We can try for two o’clock.”

“I’ll pick you up,” she says.

CHAPTER 17

IT IS ALMOST ten when I turn off 9th Street into Capitol Square, cruising past the up-lit statue of George Washington astride his horse, and winding around the south portico of the building Thomas Jefferson designed, where a thirty-foot lighted tree decorated with glass balls rises behind thick white columns. I recall that the governor’s party was a drop-in and not a dinner and am relieved at signs that his guests have left. I find not a single car in spaces designated for legislators and visitors.

The early-nineteenth-century executive mansion is pale yellow stucco with white trim and columns. According to legend, it was saved by a bucket brigade when Richmonders burned their own city at the end of the Civil War. In the understated tradition of Virginia Christmases, candles glow and fresh wreaths hang in every window, and evergreen swags decorate black iron gates. I roll down my window as a capitol police officer steps up to my car.

“May I help you?” he asks with an air of suspicion.

“I’m here to see Governor Mitchell.” I have been to the mansion a number of times, but not at this hour or in a big Lincoln SUV. “I’m Dr. Scarpetta. I’m a little late. If it’s too late, I’ll understand. Please tell him I’m sorry. ”

The officer brightens. “Didn’t recognize you in that car. You get rid of your Mercedes? If you could just wait right here for a minute.”

He gets on the phone inside his booth as I look out at Capitol Square and am touched by ambivalence, then sadness. I have lost this city. I can’t go back. I can blame it on Chandonne, but that isn’t all of it, if I am honest with myself. It is time to do the harder thing. Change. Lucy has inspired courage, or maybe she has made me see myself for what I have become, which is entrenched, static, institutionalized. I have been the chief medical examiner of Virginia for more than a decade. I am edging close to fifty. I don’t like my only sister. My mother is difficult and her health is bad. Lucy is moving to New York. Benton is dead. I am alone.

“Merry Christmas, Dr. Scarpetta.” The capitol police officer leans close to my window and lowers his voice. The name on his brass tag is Renquist. “Just want you to know I hate what happened, but I’m glad you got that S.O.B. That was real quick thinking on your part.”

“I appreciate that, Officer Renquist.”

“You won’t be seeing me down here anymore after the first of the year,” he goes on. “They’ve switched me to plainclothes investigations.”

“I hope that’s good.”

“Oh, yes ma’am.”

“We’ll miss you.”

“Maybe I’ll see you on a case.”

I hope not. If he sees me on a case, that means someone else is dead. He gives me a crisp wave, directing me through the gates. “You can park right in front.”

Change. Yes, change. Suddenly, I am surrounded by it. In thirteen months, Governor Mitchell will be gone, too, and that is unsettling. I like him. I especially like his wife, Edith. In Virginia, governors have a one-term limit, and every four years the world gets turned on end. Hundreds of employees are moved, fired and hired. Phone numbers are changed. Computers get formatted. Job descriptions no longer apply even if the jobs themselves do. Files disappear or are destroyed. Mansion menus are redone or shredded. The only constancy is the mansion staff itself. The same prison inmates do the gardening and small outside tasks, and the same people cook and clean, or at least if they are rotated, it has nothing to do with politics. Aaron, for example, has been the butler for as long as I have lived in Virginia. He is a tall, handsome African American, lean and graceful in a long, spotless white coat and snappy black bow tie.

“Aaron, how are you?” I inquire as I step inside an entry hall that is dazzling with crystal lighting that passes its torch, chandelier to chandelier, through sweeping archways all the way to the back of the house. Between the two ballrooms is the Christmas tree decorated in red balls and white lights. Walls and plaster friezes and trim have been recently restored to their original gray and white and look like Wedgwood. Aaron takes my coat. He indicates he is fine and pleased to see me, using few words because he has mastered the art of being gracious with little noise.

Just off the entry hall, on either side, are two rather stiff parlors of Brussels carpet and formidable antiques. Wallpaper in the men’s parlor has a Greco-Roman border. A floral border is in the women’s. The psychology of these sitting areas is simple. They allow the governor to receive guests without ever really letting them inside the mansion. People are granted an audience at the front door and are not destined to stay long. Aaron guides me past these impersonal historic rooms and up a stairway carpeted in a Federal design of black stars against deep red that leads to the first family’s personal quarters. I emerge in a sitting area of fir hardwood floors and accessible chairs and couches, where Edith Mitchell waits for me in a flowing red silk pants suit. She smells faintly exotic as she gives me a hug.

“When are we playing tennis again?” she asks dryly, staring at my cast.

“It’s a very unforgiving sport if you haven’t done it in a year, have a fractured arm and are doing battle with cigarettes again,” I say.

My reference to the past year is not lost on her. Those who know me are aware that after Benton’s murder, I vanished into a dark vortex of frantic, perpetual motion. I stopped seeing friends. I didn’t go out or have people in. I rarely exercised. All I did was work. I saw nothing that went on around me. I didn’t hear what people said to me. I didn’t feel. Food had no taste. I scarcely noticed the weather. In Anna’s words, I became sensory deprived. Somehow through it all, I didn’t make mistakes in my cases. If anything, I was more obsessive about them. But my absenteeism as a human being was detrimental in the office. I wasn’t a good administrator and it began to show. Certainly, I have been a shitty friend to everyone I know.

“How are you?” she asks, kindly.

“About as well as can be expected.”

“Please sit. Mike’s getting off the phone,” Edith tells me. “I guess he didn’t talk to enough people at the party.” She smiles and rolls her eyes as if she is talking about a naughty boy.

Edith has never really assumed the role of first lady, not in any tradition the Commonwealth of Virginia has ever seen, and although she may have her detractors, she has also become celebrated as a strong, modern woman. She is a historical archaeologist who didn’t give up her career when her husband took office and avoids official events she considers frivolous or a poor use of her time. Yet she is her husband’s devoted partner and has raised three children, now grown or in college. In her late forties, she has deep brown hair that she wears one length, at her collar and brushed straight back. Her eyes are almost amber, and in them thoughts and questions stir. She has something on her mind. “I was going to take you aside at the party. Kay, I’m glad you called. Thank you for dropping by. You know it’s not like me to pry into your cases,” she goes on, “but I have to say I’m really unsettled by the one I just read about in the paper—the man found in that awful motel near Jamestown. Mike and I are both very concerned, well, obviously, because of the Jamestown connection.”

“I’m not aware of a Jamestown connection.” I am puzzled, and my first thought is that information has come in that she knows and I don’t. “No connection to the archaeological excavation. Not that I’m aware of.”

“Perceptions,” she says simply. “If nothing else.”

Jamestown is Edith Mitchell’s passion. Her own profession drew her to the site years ago, and then she became an advocate for it in her present political position. She has unearthed postholes and human bones and tirelessly courted the interest of potential financial backers and the media. “I’ve driven past that motel just about every time I go down there because it’s closer to downtown to take Route Five instead of Sixty-four.” A shadow passes over her face. “A real dump. Can’t say it would surprise me if something bad happened there. Looks like the sort of place drug dealers and hookers would hang out. Did you go to the scene?”

“Not yet.”

“Can I get you anything to drink, Kay? I have some very good whisky I bootlegged back from Ireland last month. I know you like Irish whisky.”

“Only if you’re having some.”

She reaches for the phone and asks Aaron to bring up the bottle of Black Bush and three glasses.

“What’s going on at Jamestown these days?” The air is tainted by a patina of cigar smoke that awakens my frustrating hunger for cigarettes. “I think the last time I was there was three or four years ago,” I tell her.

“When we found JR,” she recalls.

“Yes.”

“It’s been that long since you were there?”

“Nineteen ninety-six, I think.”

“Well, you must come see what we’re doing. It’s amazing how the footprint of the fort has changed, and the artifacts, hundreds of thousands of them, as you probably know from the news. We’ve been doing isotopic studies on some of the bones, which I should think you would find interesting, Kay. JR continues to be our biggest mystery. His isotopic profile wasn’t at all consistent with a diet of either corn or wheat, so we didn’t know what to make of that, except that maybe he wasn’t English. So we sent one of his teeth to a lab in England, for DNA.”

JR stands for Jamestown Rediscovery. It is the prefix given every feature discovered at the excavation site, but in this instance, Edith refers specifically to the one-hundred-and-second feature unearthed in the third or C layer of soil. JR102C is a grave. It has become the most celebrated grave of the excavation because the skeleton inside it is thought to be that of a young man who arrived at Jamestown with John Smith in May 1607 and was shot to death that fall. At the first hint of violence inside the coffin-stained clay, Edith and the chief archaeologist called me to the site, where together we brushed back dirt from a sixty-caliber musket ball and twenty-one shot that had fractured the tibia and rotated it one hundred and eighty degrees, so that the foot was pointing backward. The injury would have torn if not severed the popliteal artery behind the knee, and JR, as he has since become affectionately known, would have bled to death quickly.

Of course, there was acute interest in what was immediately dubbed the first murder in America, a rather presumptuous claim since we can’t say for a fact it is a murder or the first one and the New World was hardly America yet. We did prove from forensic testing that JR was shot with a combat load fired from a European weapon called a matchlock musket and that, based on the spread of the shot, the gun was fired from a distance of approximately fifteen feet. He could not possibly have shot himself accidentally. One might deduce that a fellow settler was to blame, leading to the not so far-fetched notion that America’s karma, sadly, seems to be for us to kill each other.

“Everything’s moved indoors for the winter.” Edith slips out of her jacket and drapes it over the back of the sofa. “Cataloging artifacts, writing up the findings, all the things we can’t get around to while we’re working on the site. And of course, fund-raising. That awful part of life that tends to fall in my lap more and more these days. Bringing me to my point. I got a rather disturbing phone call from one of our legislators who read about the motel death. He’s in an uproar, which is unfortunate, because he’s only going to end up doing the very thing he says he doesn’t want, which is to draw attention to the case.”

“Uproar over what?” I frown. “There was very little information in the newspaper.”

Edith’s expression stiffens. Whoever this legislator is, she obviously has no use for him. “He’s from the Jamestown area,” she tells me. “He seems to think the case might be a hate crime, that the victim was gay.”

Footsteps sound softly on the carpeted stairs and Aaron appears with a tray, a bottle and three tumblers etched with the seal of the commonwealth.

“Needless to say, such a thing could severely compromise what we’re doing out there.” She chooses her words carefully as Aaron pours Black Bush. A door off the sitting area opens and the governor emerges from his private office in a draft of cigar smoke, his tuxedo jacket and tie off.

“Kay, I’m sorry to keep you waiting,” he says to me with a hug. “Brushfires. Maybe Edith has given you the hint.”

“She was just getting around to it,” I reply.

CHAPTER 18

GOVERNOR MITCHELL IS visibly disturbed. His wife gets up to allow us a private conversation and the two of them have a quick exchange about a call that needs to be made to one of their daughters, then Edith tells me good night and leaves. The governor lights another cigar. He is a rugged, good-looking man with a former football player’s strong body and hair as white as Caribbean sand. “I was going to try to get you tomorrow but didn’t know if you might be off somewhere for the holidays,” he begins. “Thanks for coming over.”

Whisky heats up my throat with each swallow as we engage in a polite exchange about Christmas plans and how things are going at the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine. With every breath, I think of Detective Stanfield. The fool. He obviously divulged sensitive case information, and of all people, to a goddamn politician, his brother-in-law, Representative Dinwiddie. The governor is an astute man. More importantly, he began his career as a prosecutor. He knows I am furious and why.

“Representative Dinwiddie has a tendency to stir up a hornet’s nest,” the governor confirms who the troublemaker is. Dinwiddie is a militant pain in the ass who never lets the world forget his lineage can be traced back, albeit very indirectly, to Chief Powhatan, the father of Pocahontas.

“The detective was wrong to have told Dinwiddie anything,” I reply, “and Dinwiddie was wrong to have told you or anyone else. This is a criminal case. This is not about the four-hundredth anniversary of Jamestown. It’s not about tourism or politics. This is about a man who was most likely tortured and left to burn up in a motel room.”

“No question about it,” Mitchell replies. “But there are certain realities we have to consider. A hate crime that might in any shape or fashion seem connected to Jamestown would be catastrophic.”

“I’m not aware of any Jamestown connection, beyond the fact that the victim checked into a Jamestown area motel that offers a business special called the sixteen-oh-seven.” I am getting exasperated.

“With all the publicity Jamestown has already gotten, that information alone is enough to make the media’s antennae go up.” He rolls the cigar in his fingertips and slowly raises it to his lips. “It’s projected that the two-thousand-seven celebration could eventually generate a billion dollars in revenue for the commonwealth. It’s our World’s Fair, Kay. Next year Jamestown is being commemorated on a coin, a quarter. News crews have been coming to the excavation site in droves.”

He gets up to stir the fire and I am taken back in time to his former rumpled suits and harried demeanor, to his cramped office overwhelmed by files and books in the District Courts Building. We tried many cases together, some of them the most painful landmarks in my history, those sorts of random, cruel crimes whose victims still haunt my mind: the newspaper carrier abducted from her route and raped and left to slowly die; the old woman shot to death for the hell of it while she was hanging up clothes; the multiple people executed by the Briley brothers. Mitchell and I anguished over so many awful acts of violence, and I missed him when he moved on to a higher calling. Success separates friends. Politics, especially, is ruinous to relationships, because the very nature of politics is to re-create the person. The Mike Mitchell I knew has been replaced by a statesman who has learned to process his fiery beliefs through safe and meticulously calculated subroutines. He has a plan. He has one for me.

“I don’t like media feeding frenzies any more than you do,” I say to him.

He replaces the poker on its brass stand and smokes with his back to the fire, his face flushed from heat. Wood pops and hisses. “What can we do about it, Kay?”

“Tell Dinwiddie to keep his mouth shut.”

“Mister Headline News?” He smiles wryly. “Who has been very vocal in pointing out that there are those who think Jamestown was the original hate crime—against the Native Americans?”

“Well, I think it’s also rather hateful to kill, scalp and starve people to death. Seems there’s always been plenty of hate to go around since the beginning of time. It won’t be me using the term ‘hate crime,’ Governor. It’s not on any form I fill out, not a box to check on a death certificate. As you very well know, such a label is up to the prosecution, the investigators, not the medical examiner.”

“What about your opinion?”

I tell him about the second body found in Richmond late this afternoon. I worry the deaths are related.

“Based on?” His cigar smolders in an ashtray. He rubs his face and massages his temples as if he has a headache.

“Bondage,” I reply. “Burns.”

“Burns? But the first guy was in a fire. Why does the second guy have burns?”

“I suspect torture.”

“Gay?”

“No obvious evidence of it in the second victim. But we can’t rule it out.”

“Do we know who he is or if he’s local?”

“So far, no. Neither victim has personal effects.”

“Suggesting someone involved doesn’t want them identified. Or robbery. Or both.”

“Possibly.”

“Tell me more about the burns,” the governor says.

I describe them. I mention the case Berger had in New York, and the governor’s anxieties become more palpable. Anger flashes across his face. “This sort of speculation needs to stay in this room,” he says. “Last thing we need is another New York connection. Jesus God.”

“There’s no evidence of a connection, unless someone simply got the idea from the news,” I reply. “I can’t say for a fact a heat gun was used in the cases here, for that matter.”

“Do you find it a little strange that Chandonne’s murders have a New York connection? So the trial moves up there. Now we suddenly have two murders here that are similar to yet another New York murder?”

“Strange, yes. Very strange. Governor, all I can tell you with certainty is I’ve no intention of making the autopsy reports a major element in fueling other people’s political agendas. I will, as always, stick to the facts and avoid speculating. I suggest we think in terms of managing rather than suppressing.”

“Goddamn. All hell’s going to break loose,” he mutters in a cloud of smoke.

“I hope not,” I tell him.

“And your case? The French Werewolf, as some people are calling him?” Mitchell finally gets around to that. “What’s all that going to do to you, hmmm?” He sits down again and gives me one of his earnest looks.

I sip my whisky, wondering how to tell him. There really is no graceful way to launch it. “What’s that going to do to me?” I smile ruefully.

“Has to be awful. I’m just glad you nailed the son of a bitch.” Tears brighten his eyes and he quickly looks away. Mitchell is the prosecutor again. We are comfortable. We are old colleagues, old friends. I am touched, very touched, and at the same time, depressed. The past is past. Mitchell is the governor. He will probably land in Washington next. I am the chief medical examiner of Virginia and he is my boss. I am about to tell him I have to give up my position as chief.

“I don’t think it’s in my best interest or the best interest of the commonwealth for me to continue to serve in my position.” I am out with it.

He just stares at me.

“I’ll submit this more formally, of course, in writing. But I’ve made my decision. I am resigning as of January first. Of course I’ll stay on as long as you need me, while you search for my replacement.” I wonder if he was expecting this. Maybe he is relieved. Maybe he is angry.

“You’re not a quitter, Kay,” he says. “That’s one thing you’ve never been. Don’t let assholes run you off, goddammit.”

“I’m not quitting my profession. Just changing the boundaries. No one’s running me off.”

“Oh yes, boundaries,” the governor observes, leaning back against the cushions and studying me. “Sounds like you’re becoming a hired gun.”

“Please.” We both share the same contempt for experts whose choice of which side to represent is based on money, not justice.

“You know what I mean.” He relights his cigar and stares off, already forming a new plan. I can see his mind working.

“I’ll go to work as a private contractor,” I say. “But I will never be a hired gun. Actually, what I’ve got to do first won’t earn me a dime, Mike. The case. New York. I’ve got to help and it’s going to take a lot of my time.”

“All right. Then it’s simple. You go to work as a private contractor, Kay, and the commonwealth will be your first client. We’ll hire you as acting chief until there’s a better solution for Virginia. I hope your rates are reasonable,” he drolly adds.

This isn’t at all what I expected to hear.

“You look surprised,” he observes.

“I am.”

“Why?”

“Maybe Buford Righter could explain,” I start to say, and indignation rises again. “We have two women horrendously murdered in this city, and no matter what, I don’t feel it’s right that their killer is now in New York. I can’t help it, Mike. I feel it’s my fault. I feel I’ve compromised the cases here because Chandonne came after me. I feel as if I’ve turned into a liability.”

“Ah, Buford,” Mitchell blandly comments. “Well, he’s a good enough guy but a lousy commonwealth’s attorney, Kay. And I don’t think letting New York have the first crack at Chandonne is all that bad an idea in light of the circumstances.” His words have the weight of many considerations, not the least of which, I suspect, is the way Europeans would react if Virginia executed a French native, and Virginia is known for the number of people it puts to death every year. I autopsy every one of them. I know the statistics all too well. “Even I would be a little at odds as to how to handle this case,” Mitchell adds with a drawn-out pause.

I have the sensation that the sky is about to fall. Secrets crackle like static electricity, but there is no point in my prying. Governor Mitchell will not be coaxed into relaying any information he isn’t ready to give. “Try not to take all this too personally, Kay,” he gives me advice. “I support you. I’ll continue to do so. I’ve worked with you a long time and know you.”

“Everybody tells me not to take any of this personally.” I smile a little. The ominous feeling strengthens. He will continue to support me, as if to imply there are reasons he shouldn’t.

“Edith, my kids, staff, all tell me the same thing,” he is saying. “And I still take things personally. I just don’t let on that I do.”

“Then you had nothing to do with Berger—with this rather remarkable change of venue, so to speak?” I have to ask.

He sharpens his ash to a point, slowly rolling the cigar, puffing, buying time. He did have something to do with it. He had everything to do with it, I am convinced. “She’s really good, Kay.” His non-answer is an answer.

I accept this. I resist prying. I simply ask him exactly how he is acquainted with her.

“Well, you know we both went to UVA law school,” he says. “Then when I was AG, I had a case. You should remember since it had to do with your office. The socialite from New York who took out a huge life insurance policy on her husband one month before she murdered him in a Fairfax hotel. She tried to pass it off as a suicidal shooting.”

I remember all too well. She later named my office and me in a lawsuit, accusing us of racketeering, among other things, for allegedly colluding with the insurance company to falsify records so no claim was paid to her.

“Berger got involved because it turns out the woman’s first husband had died under suspicious circumstances in New York some years earlier,” Mitchell says. “Seems he was an older man, frail, and drowned in the bathtub just one month after the wife had taken out a huge life insurance policy. The medical examiner found bruises that might have indicated a struggle, and pended the case for a very long time, hoping the investigation would turn up something conclusive. It didn’t. The D.A.’s office just couldn’t make the case. Then the woman sues the medical examiner there, too. For slander, emotional duress, baloney like that. I had numerous conversations with the people up there, mostly Bob Morgenthau, the D.A., but also with Jaime, comparing notes.”

“Guess I’m wondering if the feds might try to make Chandonne flip and snitch on his cartel family. Let’s make a deal,” I say. “And then what?”

“I think you can bank on that,” Mitchell replies solemnly.

“So that’s it.” Now I know. “He is guaranteed not to get the death penalty? That’s the deal.”

“Morgenthau’s not known for putting people to death,” he says. “But I am. I’m a tough old bird.”

The governor has just clued me in on the negotiations that have gone on. The feds get to work on Chandonne. In exchange, Chandonne is tried in New York, where he is assured he will not get the death penalty. No matter what happens, Governor Mitchell doesn’t look bad. It is no longer his problem. It is no longer Virginia’s problem. We won’t incite an international incident by sticking a needle in Chandonne’s arm.

“That’s a shame,” I sum it up. “Not that I believe in capital punishment, Mike, but it’s a shame that politics have gotten into the mix. I just listened to several hours of Chandonne’s lies. He’s not going to help anyone take down his family. Never. And I’ll tell you something else, if he ends up in Kirby or Bellevue, he’ll somehow get out. He’ll kill again. So on the one hand, I’m glad there’s an excellent prosecutor on the case and not Righter. Righter’s a coward. But on the other hand, I’m sorry we’ve lost control of Chandonne.”

Mitchell leans forward and places his hands on his knees, a ready position signaling our conversation has ended. He isn’t going to discuss the matter further with me, and that also speaks volumes. “Good of you to come, Kay,” he says. He holds my stare. This is his way of saying, “Don’t ask.”

CHAPTER 19

AARON LEADS ME back down the stairs and gives me a slight smile as he opens the front door. The trooper waves at me as I drive through the gates. There is a sense of closure, of finality as I wind through Capitol Square, the mansion disappearing in my rearview mirror. I have left something. I have just walked away from my life as I have known it, and I have discovered a wrinkle of distrust for a man I have always admired so much. No, I don’t think Mitchell has done anything wrong. But I know he hasn’t been forthright with me, not totally. He is directly responsible for Chandonne’s leaving our jurisdiction, and the reason is politics, not justice. I sense it. I am sure of it. Mike Mitchell is not the prosecutor anymore. He is the governor. Why should I be surprised? What the hell did I expect?

Downtown seems unfriendly and foreign as I follow 8th Street to get on the expressway. I watch the faces of people driving past and marvel that virtually none of them is present in the moment they occupy. They drive and look in the mirror and reach for something on the seat or fool with the radio or talk on the phone or to their passengers. They don’t notice the stranger watching them. I see faces so clearly that I can determine if they are handsome or pretty or have scars from acne or good teeth. I realize that at least one big difference between killers and their victims is killers are present. They live entirely in the moment, taking in their surroundings, intensely aware of every detail and how it might benefit or compromise them. They watch strangers. They fix on a face and decide to follow the person home. I wonder if this is how the two young men, my latest patients, were selected. I wonder what sort of predator I am dealing with here. I wonder what the governor’s real agenda is for wanting to see me tonight and why he and the first lady questioned me about the James City County case. Something is going on. Something bad.

I call my home phone and have seven messages. Three of them are from Lucy. She doesn’t tell me what she wants, only that she is trying to reach me. I try her on her mobile phone and when she answers, I feel tension. I sense she is not alone. “Is everything all right?” I ask her.

She hesitates. “Aunt Kay, I’d like to bring Teun by.”

“McGovern’s in Richmond?” I say in surprise.

“We can be at Anna’s house in about fifteen minutes,” Lucy tells me.

Signals are coming fast and strong. I can’t identify what it is that taps my subconscious, trying to make me recognize a very important truth. What is it, damn it? I am so unsettled I am jumpy and confused. A motorist behind me blares his horn and my heart jerks. I gasp. I realize the light has turned green. The moon is incomplete and shrouded by clouds, the James River a plain of darkness below the Huguenot Bridge as I pass into the south side of the city. I park in front of Anna’s house behind Lucy’s Suburban, and instantly Anna’s front door opens. It appears that Lucy and McGovern have arrived only a moment before me. Both of them and Anna are in the foyer beneath the sparkling crystal chandelier. McGovern’s eyes meet mine and she smiles reassuringly, as if to let me know I will be all right. She has cut her hair short and is still a very attractive woman, slender and boyish in black leggings and a long leather jacket. We hug and I am reminded she is firm and in charge, but gentle. I am glad to see her, immensely glad.

“Come in, come in,” Anna says. “Merry Christmas Eve, almost. Isn’t this fun!” But her expression is anything but fun. Her face is drawn, her eyes bruised by worry and fatigue. She catches me staring and tries to smile. All of us head toward the kitchen at the same time. Anna is asking about drinks and snacks. Has everyone eaten? Do Lucy and McGovern want to stay here for the night? No one should be in a hotel on Christmas Eve—that is criminal. On and on she talks, and her hands are unsteady as she pulls out bottles from a cabinet, lining up whiskies and liquors. The signals are firing so rapidly now I barely hear what anyone is saying. Then, the moment of recognition thunders in my psyche. I get it. The truth runs through me in a jolting current as Anna pours me a Scotch.

I told Berger I have no deep, dark secrets. What I meant was I have always been private. I don’t tell people anything that could be used against me. I am by nature cautious. But lately I have talked to Anna. We have spent hours exploring the deepest crevices of my life. I have told her things I am not sure I even knew, and I have never paid her for these sessions. They are not protected by doctor-patient confidentiality. Rocky Caggiano could subpoena Anna, and as I look at her now, I assume this is what has occurred. I take the tumbler of Scotch from her, our eyes locked.

“Something’s happened,” I say.

She glances away. I play out the scenario. Berger will get the subpoena quashed. It is ridiculous. Caggiano is harassing me, trying to intimidate me, plain and simple, and it won’t work. Fuck him. I have everything figured out and resolved, just that fast, because I am a pro at ducking any truth that directly impacts my inner self, my well being, my feelings. “Tell me, Anna,” I say.

Silence fills the kitchen. Lucy and McGovern have stopped talking. Lucy comes over and hugs me. “We’re here for you,” she says.

“You bet.” McGovern gives me a thumbs up.

Their efforts to reassure me leave a wake of foreboding as they disappear into the living room. Anna looks at me and it is the first time I have ever seen even a hint of tears in my stoical, Austrian friend. “I have done a terrible thing, Kay.” She clears her throat and woodenly fills another tumbler with ice from the refrigerator icemaker. She drops an ice cube on the floor and it slides out of reach behind the trash can. “This sheriff’s deputy. I could not believe it when the buzzer sounded at my gate this morning. And here is a deputy with a subpoena. To do this to me at home is bad enough. Always I get subpoenas at my office. That is not so unusual, I do get called in as an expert witness from time to time, as you know. I cannot believe he did this to me. I trusted him.”

Doubt. Denial quakes. The first breath of fear touches my central nervous system. “Who did this to you?” I say. “Rocky?”

“Who?” She looks bewildered.

“Oh God,” I mutter. “Oh God.” I lean against the countertop. This isn’t about Chandonne. It can’t be. If Caggiano didn’t subpoena Anna, then that leaves only one other possibility, and it isn’t Berger. Of course, the prosecution would have no reason to talk to Anna. I think of the odd phone call from my bank, the message from AT&T and of Righter’s behavior and the look on his face when he saw me in Marino’s truck last Saturday night. I play through the governor’s sudden need to see me, his evasiveness, even Marino’s sour moods and the way he has been avoiding me, and I take another look at Jack’s sudden loss of hair and fears about being the chief. Everything slips into place and forms an unbelievable composite. I am in trouble. Dear God, I am in serious trouble. My hands begin to shake.

Anna is rambling, stuttering, tripping over her words as if she has involuntarily resorted to what she learned first in life, which is not English. She struggles. She confirms what I now am forced to suspect. Anna has been subpoenaed by a special grand jury. A Richmond special grand jury is investigating me to see if there is sufficient evidence to indict me in the murder of Diane Bray. Anna has been used, she says. She has been set up.

“Who set you up? Righter? Buford’s behind this?” I ask.

Anna nods affirmatively. “I never will forgive him. I told him,” she swears.

We go into the living room, where I reach for a cordless phone on an elegant yew wood stand. “You realize, you don’t have to be telling me all this, Anna.” I try Marino’s home number. I will myself to be remarkably calm. “I’m sure Buford wouldn’t appreciate it. So maybe you shouldn’t talk to me.”

“I do not care what I should or should not do. The moment I got the subpoena, Buford called and explained what he needed from me. I called Lucy right away.” Anna continues speaking in fractured English as she stares blankly at McGovern. It seems to occur to Anna that she has no idea who McGovern is or why she is in her house.

“What time did the deputy show up at your house with the subpoena?” I ask Anna. Marino’s phone cuts straight into his voice mail. “Dammit,” I mutter. He is on the line. I leave him the message to call me. It is urgent.

“About ten o’clock this morning,” Anna answers my question.

“Interesting,” I reply. “About the same time Chandonne was transported out of here to New York. And then Bray’s memorial service and when I first met Berger.”

“In your mind, how does all of this connect?” McGovern is listening carefully with her astute, experienced eyes fastened on me. She was one of ATF’s most gifted certified fire investigators before she got promoted to supervision by the very people who would eventually cause her to quit.

“I’m not sure,” I reply. “Except Berger was interested in seeing who showed up at Bray’s service. I’m now wondering if she wanted to see if I would, and if that might indicate she knows I’m being investigated and is checking me out on her own.” Anna’s phone rings. “Zenner residence,” I answer.

“What’s going on?” Marino says loudly over his television.

“I’m just beginning to figure that out,” I reply.

He knows instantly by my tone not to ask questions but to get in his truck and drive over here right now. It is time for truth. No games and no secrets, I tell him. We wait for him in front of the fire in Anna’s living room, where a tree is wrapped in white lights and garlands and decorated with glass animals and wooden fruit, with presents underneath. I am silently going through every word I have said to Anna, trying to remember what she surely will when Righter asks her under oath about me in front of jurors who have been seated and sworn to decide if I should go on trial for murder. My heart is seized by frigid fingers of raw fear, yet I sound reasonable when I speak. I am outwardly steady as Anna goes into detail about how she has been set up. It began when Righter contacted her on Tuesday, December 14. She spends a good fifteen minutes explaining that Righter called as a friend, a concerned friend. People were talking about me. He was hearing things that he felt he must check out and he knew Anna and I are close.

“This isn’t making any sense,” Lucy says. “Diane Bray hadn’t even been murdered yet. Why was Righter talking to Anna that early on?”

“I don’t get it,” McGovern agrees. “Something really stinks about this.”

She and Lucy sit on the floor in front of the fire. I am in my usual rocking chair and Anna is on the ottoman, sitting rigidly.

“When Righter called on the fourteenth, what exactly did he say to you?” I ask Anna. “How did he introduce the conversation?”

She meets my eyes. “There was concern about your mental health. That is what he said right off.”

I simply nod. I am not offended. Although it is true I wobbled badly after Benton was murdered, I have never been mentally ill. I am secure in my sanity and my ability to reason and think. I have been guilty only of running from pain. “I know I didn’t handle Benton’s death well,” I admit.

“How do you handle something like that well?” Lucy replies.

“No, no. That is not what Buford meant,” Anna says. “He wasn’t calling about how you’ve managed grief, Kay. He was calling about Diane Bray, about your relationship with her.”

“What relationship?” I instantly wonder if Bray called Righter—yet one more trap she set for me. “I hardly knew her.”

Anna’s eyes are steady on mine, the shadow from the fire wavering on her face. I am startled again by how old she looks, as if she has aged ten years in a day. “You’d had a series of confrontations with her. You told me so,” she replies.

“Instigated by her,” I am quick to say. “We didn’t have a personal relationship. Not even a social one.”

“I think when you go to war against someone, that is personal. Even people who hate each other have a personal relationship, if you see what I am saying. Certainly, she had gotten very personal with you, Kay. Starting rumors. Lying about you. Creating a bogus medical column on the Internet that made it appear you were the one writing it, making a fool out of you and getting you into trouble with the secretary of public safety, even with the governor.”

“I was just with the governor. I don’t feel I’m in trouble with him at all.” I say this and at the same time find it curious. If Mitchell knows I am being investigated by a special grand jury, and I know he must, then why didn’t he accept my resignation and thank God to be rid of me and my messy life?

“She also put Marino’s career in jeopardy because he is your sidekick,” Anna goes on.

The only thought that flashes is Marino would not appreciate being called my sidekick. As if on cue, the intercom blares, announcing that he is at the front gates.

“Sabotaging your career, in other words.” Anna gets up. “Correct? Isn’t that what you have told me?” She pushes a button on a console on the wall, suddenly energized. Anger burns off her depression. “Yes? Who is it?” she snaps into the speaker.

“Me, baby.” The rude sounds of Marino and his truck fill the living room.

“Oh, he calls me baby again I will kill him.” Anna throws her hands up in the air.

She goes to the door, and then Marino is walking into the living room. He left his house in such a hurry he didn’t bother with a coat, only a gray sweat suit and tennis shoes. He is dumbstruck when he sees McGovern sitting by the fire, looking up at him from her Indian-style position on the floor.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Marino says. “Look what the cat drug in.”

“Great to see you, too, Marino,” McGovern replies.

“Someone want to tell me what the hell’s going on?” He moves a wing chair closer to the fire and sits, going from one face to the other, trying to read the situation, acting obtuse, as if he doesn’t already know. I believe he knows. Oh yes, now it is clear why he has been acting so strange.

We get into it. Anna continues to unravel what happened in the days preceding Jaime Berger’s coming to Richmond. Berger continues to dominate, as if she is sitting in our midst. I don’t trust her. And at the same time, I feel my life may very well be in her hands. I try to remember where I was on December fourteenth, moving backward from today, December 23, until I land on that Tuesday. I was in Lyon, France, at Interpol’s headquarters, where I met Jay Talley for the first time. I run through that encounter, reconstructing the two of us alone at a table in Interpol’s cafeteria. Marino took an instant dislike to Jay and stalked off. During lunch, I told Jay about Diane Bray, about my problems with her and that she was doing all she could to persecute Marino, including throwing him back into uniform and on midnight shift. What was it Jay called her? Toxic waste in tight clothes. Apparently, the two of them had run-ins when she was with the D.C. police and he was briefly assigned to ATF headquarters. He seemed to know all about her. Can it be coincidence that the very day I discussed her with him, Righter called Anna and questioned her about my relationship with Bray and made implications about my mental health?

“I wasn’t going to tell you this,” Anna continues in a hard voice. “I shouldn’t tell you this, but now that I am clearly going to be used against you . . .”

“What do you mean, used against her?” Marino butts in.

“Originally, I was hoping to guide you, to help allay these allegations about your mental health,” Anna says to me. “I did not believe it. And if I had any doubt, and maybe there was just a slight doubt because I had not seen you in so long, then I wanted to talk to you anyway, out of concern. You are my friend. Buford assured me that anything I could find out was not something he planned to do anything with. Our conversations were supposed to be private, his and mine. He said nothing, absolutely nothing, about accusing you.”

“Righter?” Marino scowls. “He ask you to be some kind of fucking snitch?”

Anna shakes her head. “A guide,” she uses that word again.

“That fucking figures. The loser.” Marino’s anger springs forth.

“He had to know if Kay was mentally stable. Certainly you can see why he needs to know that if she was going to be his star witness. I always thought this was about your being a star witness, not a suspect!”

“Suspect my ass.” Marino scowls. He makes no pretenses now. He knows exactly what is going on.

“Marino, I know you’re not supposed to tell me I’m being investigated by a special grand jury for the murder of Diane Bray,” I say to him, evenly. “But out of curiosity, I’m wondering, how long have you known? For example, when you ushered me out of my house on Saturday night, you knew then, didn’t you? That’s why you watched me like a hawk inside my own house. So I didn’t do something sneaky like dispose of evidence, or God knows what? That’s why you wouldn’t let me drive my car, right? Because you guys needed to see if there might be evidence in it, maybe Diane Bray’s blood? Fibers? Hair? Something that would put me at her house the night she was killed?” My tone is cool but searing.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Marino erupts. “I know you didn’t do nothing. Righter’s the biggest fuckhead, and I told him that. I’ve been telling him that every day. What’d you ever do to him, huh? You want to tell me why the hell he’s doing this to you?”

“You know what?” I stare hard at him. “I’m not going to hear one more time that everything is my fault. I didn’t do a damn thing to Righter. I don’t know what’s gotten him on this ridiculous kick unless it’s Jay planting stuff.”

“And I guess that ain’t your fault, either. Sleeping with him.”

“He’s not doing this because I slept with him,” I fire back. “If he’s doing anything, it’s because I only slept with him once.”

McGovern is frowning, leaning against the hearth. She says, “Dear ol’ Jay. Mister Squeaky Clean, pretty boy. Funny, I’ve never had a good feeling about him.”

“I told Buford that you are definitely not mentally ill.” Anna sets her jaw squarely and looks at me fiercely. “He wanted to know if I thought you were competent to assist him, if I think you are stable. See, he lied. This was supposed to be about our assisting him in the trial of Chandonne. I never imagined. I cannot believe Buford would slither out from under a rock and subpoena me like this.” She places a hand on her breast as if her heart is bothering her and briefly shuts her eyes.

“Are you all right, Anna?” I start to get up.

She shakes her head from side to side. “I will never be all right again. I would never have talked to you, Kay, if I thought such a thing would happen.”

“Did you tape her, take notes?” McGovern asks.

“Of course not.”

“Good.”

“But if I am asked . . .” she starts to say.

“I understand,” I reply. “Anna, I understand. What’s done is done.” It is now that I must tell Marino the other news. While we are on such dreadful subjects, he may as well hear it all. “Your son, Rocky,” I say his name and nothing more. Maybe I am trying to see if Marino already knows this, too.

He turns to stone. “What about him?”

“It appears he is representing Chandonne,” I reply.

Marino’s face darkens to a deep, scary red. For a moment, no one speaks. He doesn’t know. Then Marino says in a flat, hard tone, “He would do something like that. Probably has something to do with what’s happening to you, too, if that’s possible. Funny thing about it, I halfway wondered if he had something to do with Chandonne’s ending up here.”

“Why would you wonder that?” McGovern asks in amazement.

“He’s a mob boy, that’s why. Probably knows Big Papa Chandonne over there in Paris and would like nothing better than causing me trouble here.”

“I think it’s time you talk about Rocky,” I tell him.

“You got any bourbon in this house?” Marino asks Anna.

She gets up and leaves the room.

“Aunt Kay, you can’t stay here anymore,” Lucy says to me in a quiet, urgent voice.

“You can’t talk to her anymore, Kay,” McGovern adds.

I don’t answer. Of course, they are right. Now, on top of it all, I have lost my friend.

“So, did you tell her anything?” Marino says to me in an accusing tone that has become all too familiar.

“I told her the world was better off without Diane Bray,” I reply. “In other words, I basically said I’m glad she’s dead.”

“So’s everybody who knew her,” Marino retorts. “And I’ll be glad to tell the fucking special grand jury that.”

“Not a helpful statement, but doesn’t mean you murdered anybody,” McGovern says to me.

“Not helpful is right,” Marino mutters. “Damn, I hope Anna don’t tell Righter you’re glad Bray was whacked,” he says to me.

“This is so absurd,” is my response.

“Well,” Marino replies, “yes and no, Doc.”

“You don’t have to talk to me about this,” I tell him. “Don’t put yourself in a bad spot, Marino.”

“Oh fuck it!” He waves me off. “I know you didn’t kill that damn bitch. But you gotta look at it from the other side. You had problems with her. She was trying to get you fired. You’ve been acting a little hinky ever since Benton died, or at least that’s what people have been saying, right? You have a confrontation with Bray in a parking lot. The theory is you was jealous of this new big-shot police lady. She was making you look bad and complaining about you. So you killed her and disguised it to look like it was the same guy who whacked Kim Luong, and who better to do that than you, right? Who more capable of the perfect murder than you, right? And you had access—first dibs on all the evidence. You could have beaten her to death and planted Wolfman’s hairs on her body, even switched swabs so they come up with his DNA. And it don’t look good that you took that evidence from the Paris morgue and brought it over here, either. Or took that water sample. Righter thinks you’re a nut case, I hate to tell you. And I gotta add that he don’t like you personally and never has because he’s got the balls of a soprano and don’t like powerful women. He don’t even like Anna, if the truth be known. The Berger thing’s kind of the best revenge. He really hates her.”

Silence.

“I wonder if they’re going to subpoena me,” Lucy says.

CHAPTER 20

RIGHTER THINKS YOU’RE a nut case, too,” Marino tells my niece. “The only point we’re in agreement on.” “Any chance Rocky’s been involved with the Chandonne family?” McGovern looks at Marino. “In the past? You’re serious when you say you wondered it?”

“Huh.” Marino snorts. “Rocky’s been involved with criminals most of his goddamn life. But do I know details about what he does with his fucking time, day to day, month to month? No. I can’t honestly swear to that. I just know what he is. Scum. He was born bad. Bad seed. As far as I’m concerned, he ain’t my son.”

“Well, he is your son,” I tell him.

“Not in my book. He took after the wrong side of my family,” Marino insists. “In New Jersey, we had good Marinos and bad Marinos. I had an uncle who was with the mob, another uncle who was a cop. Two brothers different as night and day. And then when I turned fourteen, Uncle Asshole Louie had my other uncle whacked—my other uncle being the cop, also named Pete. I was named after Uncle Pete. Shot down when he was in his own front yard picking up his fucking newspaper. We never could prove Uncle Louie had it done, but everyone in the family believed it. I still believe it.”

“Where’s your Uncle Louie now?” Lucy asks as Anna returns with Marino’s drink.

“I heard he died a couple years back. I didn’t keep up with him. Never had nothing to do with him.” He takes the glass from Anna. “But Rocky’s his spittin’ image. Even looked like him when he was growing up, and from day one was bent, warped, just a piece of living shit. Why do you think he took the name Caggiano? Because that’s my mother’s maiden name, and Rocky knew it would really piss me off if he crapped on my mother’s name. There’s some people who can’t be fixed. There’s some just born bad. Don’t ask me to explain it, because Doris and I did everything we could for that boy. Even tried sending him off to military school, which was a mistake. He ended up liking it, liked the hazing part, doing really crappy things to the other boys. Nobody picked on him, not even on the first damn day. He was big like me and just so goddamn mean the other kids didn’t dare touch a hair on his head.”

“This is not right,” Anna mutters as she sits back down on the ottoman.

“What’s Rocky’s motive for taking this case?” I know what Berger said. But I want to hear Marino’s slant. “To spite you?”

“He’ll get off on the attention. A case like this will create a circus.” Marino doesn’t want to say the obvious, that just maybe Rocky wants to humiliate, to best his father.

“Does he hate you?” McGovern asks him.

Marino snorts again and his pager vibrates.

“What eventually happened to him?” I ask. “You sent him off to military school, then what?”

“I kicked his ass out. Told him if he couldn’t follow the rules of the house, he wasn’t living under my roof. That was after his freshman year at the military school. So you know what the little psycho did?” Marino reads the display on his pager and gets up. “He moves up to Jersey, moves in with Uncle Louie, the fucking Mafia. Then has the balls to come back here for school, including law school, William and Mary, so yeah, he’s smart as shit.”

“He passed the bar in Virginia?” I ask.

“Here, practices all the hell over the place. I ain’t seen Rocky in seventeen years. Anna, you mind if I make a call? Don’t look like I want to be using the cell phone on this one.” He glances at me as he walks out of the living room. “It’s Stanfield.”

“What about the ID he called you about earlier?” I ask.

“Hopefully what this is about,” Marino says. “Another real strange one, if it’s true.”

While he is on the phone, Anna vanishes from her own living room. I supposed she was going to the bathroom, but she does not come back and I can only imagine how she feels. In many ways, I am more worried about her than about me. I now know enough about her life to appreciate her intense vulnerability and realize the terribly barren, scarred spots on her emotional landscape. “This isn’t fair,” I begin to lose my composure. “It’s not fair to anyone.” Everything that has piled up on me begins to unsettle and slide downhill. “Someone please tell me how this happened? Did I do something wrong in a former life? I don’t deserve this. None of us do.”

Lucy and McGovern listen to me ventilate. They seem to have their own ideas and plans but are not inclined to offer them right away.

“Well, say something,” I tell them. “Go ahead and let it out.” Mostly, I say this for my niece’s benefit. “My life is wrecked. I haven’t handled anything the way I should. I’m sorry.” Tears threaten. “Right now I want a cigarette. Does anybody have a cigarette?” Marino does, but he is in the kitchen on the phone, and I’ll be damned if I am going to creep in there and interrupt him for a cigarette, as if I need one to begin with. “You know, what hurts me most is to be accused of the very thing I’m so against. I don’t abuse power, goddamn it. I would never murder somebody in cold blood.” I talk on and on. “I hate death. I hate killing. I hate every goddamn thing I see every goddamn day. And now the world thinks I did something like this? A special grand jury thinks maybe I might have?” I let the questions hang. Neither Lucy nor McGovern responds.

Marino is loud. His voice is muscular and big like he is and tends to shove rather than guide, confront rather than fall in stride. “You sure she’s his girlfriend?” he is saying over the telephone. I presume he is speaking to Detective Stanfield. “Versus just friends. Tell me how you know that for a fact. Yeah, yeah. Uh huh. What? Do I get it? Hell no, I don’t get it. It don’t make a shit’s worth of sense, Stanfield.” Marino is walking around the kitchen as he talks. He is on the verge of snapping Stanfield’s head off. “You know what I tell people like you, Stanfield?” Marino snaps. “I tell them to get out of my fucking way. I don’t give a rat’s ass who your fucking brother-in-law is, got it? He can kiss my butt and tuck it in bed, tell it a beddy-bye story.” Stanfield is obviously trying to get in a word or two, but Marino won’t let him.

“Oh boy,” McGovern mutters, returning my attention to the living room, to my own mess. “He’s the investigator for these two men who were probably tortured and killed? Whoever Marino’s talking to?” McGovern inquires.

I give her a strange look as an even stranger sensation ripples through me. “How do you know about the two men who were killed?” I grope for an answer that I must be missing. McGovern has been in New York. I haven’t even autopsied the second John Doe yet. Why does everybody seem to be omniscient all of a sudden? I think of Jaime Berger. I think of Governor Mitchell and Representative Dinwiddie and Anna. A strong breath of fear seems to foul the air like Chandonne’s body odor, and I imagine I smell him again and my central nervous system has an involuntary reaction. I begin to tremble as if I have drunk a pot of strong coffee or half a dozen of those heavily sugared Cuban espressos called coladas. I realize I am more afraid than I have ever been in my life and begin to entertain the unthinkable: Maybe Chandonne was offering a hint of truth when he persisted in his seemingly absurd claim that he is the victim of some huge political conspiracy. I am paranoid, justifiably. I try to reason with myself. I am, after all, being investigated for the murder of a corrupt policewoman who probably was involved with organized crime.

I realize Lucy is talking to me. She has gotten up from her spot before the fire and is pulling a chair close to me. She sits and leans over, touching my good arm, as if trying to wake me up. “Aunt Kay?” she says. “You with us, Aunt Kay? Are you listening?”

I focus on her. Marino is telling Stanfield over the phone that they will meet in the morning. It sounds like a threat. “He and I rendezvoused at Phil’s for a beer.” She glances toward the kitchen and I remember Marino telling me late this morning that he and Lucy were getting together this afternoon because she had news for him. “We know about the guy from the motel.” Now she refers to McGovern, who sits very still by the fire, looking at me, waiting to see how I will react when Lucy tells me the rest. “Teun’s been here since Saturday,” Lucy then says. “When I called you from the Jefferson, remember? Teun was with me. I asked her to get here right away.”

“Oh,” is all I can think to say. “Well, that’s good. It bothered me to think of you alone in a hotel.” Tears flood my eyes. I am embarrassed and look away from Lucy and McGovern. I am supposed to be strong. I am the one who has always rescued my niece from trouble, most of it of her own making. I have always been the torchbearer who guided her along the right path. I put her through college. I bought her books, her first computer, sent her to any special course she wanted to attend anywhere in the country. I took her to London with me one summer. I have stood up to anyone who tried to interfere with Lucy, including her mother, who has rewarded my efforts with nothing but abuse. “You’re supposed to respect me,” I say to my niece as I wipe tears with my palm. “How can you anymore?”

She stands up again and looks down at me. “That’s total bullshit,” she says with feeling, and now Marino is returning to the living room, another bourbon in hand. “This isn’t about my not respecting you,” Lucy says. “Jesus Christ. Nobody in the room has any less respect for you, Aunt Kay. But you need help. For once, you’ve got to let other people help you. You sure as hell can’t deal with this all by yourself, and maybe you need to sit on your pride a little and let us help, you know? It’s not like I’m still ten years old. I’m twenty-eight, okay? I’m not a virgin. I’ve been an FBI agent, an ATF agent and am fucking rich. I could be any kind of fucking agent I want.” Her wounds inflame before my eyes. She does care about being put on administrative leave; of course she cares. “And now I’m being my own agent, doing things my own way,” she goes on.

“I resigned tonight,” I tell her. A stunned silence follows.

“What did you say?” Marino asks me, standing in front of the fire, drinking. “You did what?”

“I told the governor,” I reply, and an inexplicable calm begins to settle over me. It feels good to consider that I did something instead of everything being done to me. Maybe quitting my job makes me less a victim, if I am willing to finally admit that I am a victim. I suppose I am one, and the only comeback is to finish what Chandonne started: end my life as I have known it and start all over. What a weird and stunning thought. I tell Marino, McGovern and Lucy all about my conversation with Mike Mitchell.

“Hold on.” Marino is sitting on the hearth. It is getting close to midnight and Anna is so quiet I forgot for a moment that she was in the house. Maybe she has gone to bed. “This mean you can’t work cases no more?” Marino says to me.

“Not at all,” I reply. “I’ll be acting chief until the governor decides otherwise.” No one asks me what I plan to do with the rest of my life. It really doesn’t make sense to worry about some distant future when the present is shot. I am grateful not to be asked and probably am sending out my usual signals that I don’t want to be asked. People sense when to remain silent, or if nothing else, I deflect their interest and they don’t even realize I have just manipulated them into not probing for information that I prefer to keep to myself. I became an expert at this maneuver at a very young age when I didn’t want my classmates asking me about my father and if he was still sick or would ever get better or what it is like to have your father die. I was conditioned not to tell, and I was conditioned not to ask, either. The last three years of my father’s life were spent in absolute avoidance by my entire family, including him, especially him. He was a lot like Marino, both of them macho Italian men who seem to assume their bodies will never part company with them, no matter how ill or out of shape. I envision my father as Lucy, Marino and McGovern talk about all they plan to do and are already doing to help me, including background checks already in the works and all sorts of things The Last Precinct has to offer me.

I really am not listening. Their voices may as well be the chatter of crows as I remember the thick Miami grass of my childhood, and dried-out chinch bug husks and the key lime tree in my small backyard. My father taught me how to crack coconuts on the driveway with a hammer and a screwdriver, and I would spend an inordinate amount of time prying the fleshy, sweet white meat from the hard, hairy shell, and he got a lot of amusement from observing my obsessive labors. The coconut meat would go in the squat white refrigerator, and no one, including me, ever ate it. During blistering summer Saturdays, my father would surprise Dorothy and me now and then by bringing home two big blocks of ice from his neighborhood grocery store. We had a small, inflatable pool we filled with the hose, and my sister and I would sit on the ice, getting scorched by the sun while we froze our asses off. We would jump in and out of the pool to thaw, then perch on our frigid, slick thrones again like princesses while my father laughed at us through the living room window, laughed hilariously and tapped on the glass, playing Fats Waller full blast on the hi-fi.

My father was a good man. When he felt halfway decent he was generous, thoughtful and full of humor and fun. He was handsome, of medium height, blond and broad-shouldered when he wasn’t wasted by cancer. His full name was Kay Marcellus Scarpetta III, and he insisted that his firstborn take this name, which has been in the family since Verona. It didn’t matter that I happened to arrive first, a girl. Kay is one of those names that can be assigned to either gender, but my mother has always called me Katie. In part, according to her, it was confusing to have two Kays in the house. Later, when that was no longer an issue because I was the only Kay left, she still called me Katie, refusing to accept my father’s death, to get over it, and she still isn’t over it. She won’t let him go. My father died more than thirty years ago, when I was twelve, and my mother has never gone out with another man. She still wears her wedding band. She still calls me Katie.

LUCY AND MCGOVERN go over plans until past midnight. They have given up trying to include me in their conversations and no longer even seem to notice that I have slipped away to the Old Country in my mind, staring into the fire, absently massaging my stiff left hand and worming a finger under plaster to scratch my miserable, air-starved flesh. Finally, Marino yawns like a bear and pulls himself to his feet. He is made slightly unsteady by bourbon and smells like stale cigarettes, and regards me with a softness in his eyes that I might call sad love if I were willing to accept his true feelings for me. “Come on,” he says to me. “Walk me out to my truck, Doc.” This is his way of calling for a treaty between us. Marino is not a brute. He is feeling bad about the way he has been treating me since I was almost murdered, and he has never seen me so distant and strangely quiet.

The night is cold and still, and stars are shy behind vague clouds. From Anna’s driveway, I take in the glow of her many candles in the windows and am reminded that tomorrow is Christmas Eve, the last Christmas Eve of the twentieth century. Keys disturb the peace as Marino unlocks his truck and hesitates awkwardly before opening the driver’s door. “We got a lot to do. I’ll meet you at the morgue early.” This is not what he really wants to say. He stares up at the dark sky and sighs. “Shit, Doc. Look, I’ve known for a while, okay? By now you’ve figured that out. I’ve known what that son of a bitch Righter was up to and I had to let it run its course.”

“When were you going to tell me?” I don’t ask this accusingly, simply curiously.

He shrugs. “I’m glad Anna brought it up first. I know you didn’t kill Diane Bray, for God’s sake. But I wouldn’t blame you if you had, truth be told. She was the biggest fucking bitch ever born. In my book, if you’d done her in, it would have been damn self-defense.”

“Well, it wouldn’t have been.” I address the possibility seriously. “It wouldn’t have been, Marino. And I didn’t kill her.” I look closely at his hulking shape in the castoffs of carriage lamps and holiday lights in trees. “You’ve never really thought . . . ?” I don’t finish the question. Maybe I really don’t want to know his answer.

“Hell, I’m not sure what I’ve been thinking lately,” he says. “That’s the truth. But what am I going to do, Doc?”

“Do? About what?” I don’t know what he means.

He shrugs and gets choked up. I can’t believe it. Marino is about to cry. “If you quit.” His voice rises and he clears his throat and fumbles for his Lucky Strikes. He cups his huge hands around my hand and lights a cigarette for me, his skin rough against mine, the hairs on the back of his wrists whispering against my chin. He smokes, staring off, heartbroken. “Then what? I’m supposed to go down to the fucking morgue and you ain’t there anymore? Hell, I wouldn’t go down to that stink-hole half as much as I do if it wasn’t for you being there, Doc. You’re the only damn thing that gives any life to that joint, no kidding.”

I hug him. I barely come up to his chest, and his belly separates the beat of our hearts. He has raised his own barriers in this life and I am overwhelmed by an immeasurable compassion and need for him. I pat his broad chest and let him know, “We’ve been together for a long time, Marino. You’re not rid of me yet.”

CHAPTER 21

TEETH HAVE THEIR own stories. Your dental habits often reveal more about you than jewelry or designer clothes and can identify you to the exclusion of all others, providing you have premortem records for comparison. Teeth tell me about your hygiene. They whisper secrets about drug abuse, early childhood antibiotics, disease, injury and how important your appearance was to you. They confess if your dentist was a crook and billed your insurance company for work that was never done. They tell me, for that matter, if your dentist was competent.

Marino meets me at the morgue before daylight the next morning. He has in hand the dental records of a twenty-two-year-old James City County man who went out jogging yesterday near the campus of William & Mary and never returned home. His name is Mitch Barbosa. William & Mary is but a few miles from The Fort James Motel, and when Marino talked to Stanfield last night and was given this latest information, my first thought was, “How odd.” Marino’s shifty attorney son, Rocky Caggiano, went to William & Mary. Life offers up yet one more eerie coincidence.

It is six-forty-five when I roll the body out of the X-ray room and over to my station inside the autopsy suite. Again, it is quiet. It is Christmas Eve and all state offices are closed. Marino is suited up to assist me, and I don’t expect another living person—except the forensic dentist—to show up here right now. Marino’s part will be to help me undress the stiff, unwilling body and lift it to and from the autopsy table. I would never allow him to assist in any medical procedure—not that he has ever volunteered. I have never asked him to scribe and won’t because his slaughter of Latin medical words and terms is remarkable.

“Hold him on either side,” I direct Marino. “Good. Just like that.”

Marino grips either side of the dead man’s head, trying to hold it still as I work a thin chisel into the side of the mouth, sliding it between molars to pry open the jaws. Steel scrapes against enamel. I am careful not to cut the lips, but it is inevitable that I chip the surfaces of the back teeth.

“It’s just a damn good thing people are dead when you do shit like this to them,” Marino says. “Bet you’ll be glad when you got two hands again.”

“Don’t remind me.” I am so sick of my cast, I have had thoughts of cutting it off myself with a Stryker saw.

The dead man’s jaws give up and open, and I turn on the surgical lamp and fill the inside of his mouth with white light. There are fibers on his tongue, and I collect them. Marino helps me break the rigor mortis in the arms so we can get the jacket and shirt off, and then I take off shoes and socks, and finally the warm-up pants and running shorts. I PERK him and find no evidence of injury to his anus, nothing so far to suggest homosexual activity. Marino’s pager goes off. It is Stanfield again. Marino has not said a word about Rocky this morning, but the specter of him hovers. Rocky is in the air, and the effect this has on his father is subtle but profound. A heavy, helpless anguish radiates from Marino like body heat. I should be worried about what Rocky has in store for me, but all I can think about is what will happen to Marino.

Now that my patient is naked before me, I take in the full picture of who he was physically. He is five-foot-seven and a lean one hundred and thirty-eight pounds. He has muscular legs but little muscle development in his upper body, which is consistent with a runner. He has no tattoos, is circumcised and clearly cared about his grooming, based on his neatly manicured fingernails and toenails and clean-shaven face. So far, I find no evidence of injury externally, and X rays reveal no projectiles, no fractures. He has old scars on his knees and left elbow, but nothing fresh except the abrasions from being bound and gagged. What happened to you? Why did you die? He remains silent. Only Marino is talking in a blunt, loud way to disguise how unsettled he is. He thinks Stanfield is a dolt and treats him as such. Marino is more impatient, more insulting than usual.

“Yeah, well, it sure would be nice if we knew that,” Marino blasts sarcasm into the wallphone. “Death don’t take no holiday,” he adds a moment later. “You tell whoever I’m coming and they will let me in.” Then, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. ’Tis the season. And Stanfield? Keep your mouth shut, okay? You got that? I read about this in the goddamn paper one more time . . . Oh really, well, maybe you didn’t see the Richmond paper yet. I’ll make sure and tear out this morning’s article for you. All this Jamestown shit, hate crime shit. One more peep and I’m gonna get tear-ass. You never seen me tear-ass and you don’t want to.”

Marino pulls on fresh gloves as he returns to the gurney, his gown flapping around his legs. “Well, it just gets more squirrelly, Doc. Assuming this guy here’s our disappeared jogger, it appears we’re dealing with a garden-variety truck driver. No record. No trouble. Lived in a condo with a girlfriend who’s ID’ed him by photo. That’s who Stanfield talked to late last night, apparently, but she ain’t answering the phone so far this morning.” He gets a lost look on his face, not certain how much he has already told me.

“Let’s get him on the table,” I say.

I parallel-park the gurney next to the autopsy table. Marino gets the feet, I grab an arm, and we pull. The body bangs against steel and blood trickles from the nose. I turn on water and it drums into the steel sink, the dead man’s X rays glowing from light boxes on the wall, revealing perfectly pristine bones, and the skull from different angles, and the zipper of the warm-up jacket snaking down each side of gracefully bowed ribs. The buzzer sounds out in the bay as I run a scalpel from shoulder to shoulder, then down to the pelvis, making a small detour around the navel. I observe Dr. Sam Terry’s image on closed-circuit TV and hit a button with my elbow to open the bay door. He is one of our odontologists, or forensic dentists, whose bad luck it is to be on call Christmas Eve.

“I’m thinking we need to drop by and pay her a visit while we’re in the area,” Marino goes on. “I got her address, the girlfriend. The condo where they live.” He glances down at the body. “Lived, I guess.”

“And you think Stanfield can keep his mouth shut?” I reflect back tissue with staccato cuts of the scalpel, awkwardly gripping forceps in the gloved fingertips of my plaster-bound left hand.

“Yeah. Says he’ll meet us at the motel, which ain’t being real friendly, moaning and groaning it’s Christmas Eve and they don’t want any more attention because it’s already hurt their business. Something like ten cancellations because of people hearing about it on the news. Yeah, like bullshit, is what I say. Most the people who stay in that dump probably don’t know shit about what’s happened around here or care.”

Dr. Terry walks in, his scuffed black doctor’s bag in hand, a fresh surgical gown untied in back and billowing as he heads to the counter. He is our youngest and newest odontologist and is almost seven feet tall. Legend has it that he could have had a career with the NBA but wanted to continue his education. The truth, and he’ll tell you if you ask, is he was a mediocre guard at Virginia Commonwealth University, that the only good shooting he has ever done is with guns, the only good rebounding is with women and he only went into dentistry because he couldn’t get into medical school. Terry desperately wanted to be a forensic pathologist. What he’s doing as basically a volunteer is as close as he will ever get.

“Thank you, thank you,” I tell him as he begins arranging his paperwork on a clipboard. “You are a good man to come help us out this morning, Sam.”

He grins, then jerks his head at Marino and says in his most exaggerated New Jersey accent, “How’ya doin’, Marino?”

“You ever seen the Grinch steal Christmas? ’Cause if you haven’t, just hang out with me for a while. I’m in a mood to take back little kids’ toys and pat their mamas on the ass on my way up the chimney.”

“Don’t you be trying to go up no chimneys. You’ll get stuck for sure.”

“Hell, you could look out the top of a chimney and still have your feet in the fireplace. You still growing?”

“Not as much as you are, man. What you weighing in these days?” Terry thumbs through the dental charts Marino brought in. “Well, this won’t take long. He’s got a rotated right maxillary second premolar, the distal surface lingual. Annnndddd . . . lots of restorations. Saying this guy”—he holds up the charts—“and your guy are one and the same.”

“How about them Rams beating Louisville?” Marino calls out above the drumming of running water.

“Were you there?”

“Nope, and you wasn’t either, Terry, which is why they won.”

“Probably true.”

I pluck a surgical knife off the cart as the phone rings.

“Sam, you mind getting that?” I ask.

He trots to the corner, snaps up the phone and announces, “Morgue.” I cut through the costochondral cartilage junctions, removing a triangle of sternum and parasternal ribs. “Hold on,” Terry says to whoever has him on the line. “Dr. Scarpetta? Can you talk to Benton Wesley?”

The room becomes a vacuum that sucks out all light and sound. I freeze, staring, stunned, the steel surgical knife poised in my bloody, gloved right hand.

“What the fuck?” Marino blurts out. He strides over to Terry and snatches the phone from him. “Who the hell is this?” he yells into the mouthpiece. “Shit.” He tosses the receiver back into the cradle on the wall. Obviously, the person hung up. Terry looks stricken. He has no idea what just happened. He hasn’t known me long. There is no reason for him to know about Benton unless someone else told him, and apparently no one has.

“What exactly did the person say to you?” Marino asks Terry.

“I hope I didn’t do something wrong.”

“No, no.” I find my voice. “You didn’t,” I reassure him.

“Some man,” he replies. “All he said is he wanted to speak to you and he said his name was Benton Wesley.”

Marino picks up the phone again and swears and fumes because there is no Caller ID. We have never had occasion to need Caller ID in the morgue. He hits several buttons and listens. He writes down a number and dials it. “Yeah. Who’s this?” he demands over the line to whoever has picked up. “Where? Okay. You see someone else using this phone just a minute ago? The one you’re talking on. Uh huh. Yeah, well, I don’t believe you, asshole.” He slams down the receiver.

“You think it’s the same one who just called?” Terry asks him in confusion. “What’d you do, hit star sixty-nine?”

“A pay phone. At the Texaco on Midlothian Turnpike. Supposedly. I don’t know if it’s the same person who called. What was his voice like?” Marino pins Terry with a stare.

“He sort of sounded young. I think. I don’t know. Who’s Benton Wesley?”

“He’s dead.” I reach for the scalpel, pushing the point down on a cutting board, snapping in a new blade and dropping the old in a bright red biohazard plastic container. “He was a friend, a close friend.”

“Some squirrel playing a sick joke. How would anybody know the number down here?” Marino is upset. He is furious. He wants to find the caller and pound him. And he is considering that his malevolent son may be behind this. I can read it in Marino’s eyes. He is thinking about Rocky.

“Under state government listings in the phone book.” I begin cutting blood vessels, severing the carotids very low at the apex, moving down to the iliac arteries and veins of the pelvis.

“Don’t tell me it says morgue in the goddamn phone book.” Marino starts up his old routine again. He is blaming me.

“I think it’s listed under funeral information.” I cut through the thin flat muscle of the diaphragm, loosening the bloc of organs, freeing it from the vertebral column. Lungs, liver, heart, kidneys, and spleen shimmer different hues of red as I lay the bloc on the cutting board and wash off blood with a gentle hosing of cold water. I notice petechial hemorrhages, dark areas of bleeding no bigger than pin pricks scattered over the heart and lungs. I associate this with persons who had difficulty breathing at or about the time of death.

Terry carries his black bag over to my station and sets it on the surgical cart. He gets out a dental mirror and goes inside the dead man’s mouth. We work in silence, the weight of what has just occurred pressing down hard. I reach for a bigger knife and cut sections of organs, slicing through the heart. The coronary arteries are open and clear, the left ventricle one centimeter wide, the valves normal. Other than a few fatty streaks in the aorta, the heart and vessels are healthy. The only thing wrong with it is the obvious: It quit. For some reason, this man’s heart stopped. I find no explanation anywhere I look.

“Like I said, this one’s easy,” Terry says as he makes notes on a chart. His voice is nervous. He wishes he had never answered the phone.

“He’s our guy?” I ask him.

“Sure is.”

The carotid arteries lie like rails in the neck. Between them are the tongue and neck muscles, which I flip down and peel away so I can examine them closely on the cutting board. There are no hemorrhages in deep tissue. The tiny, fragile U-shaped hyoid bone is intact. He wasn’t strangled. When I reflect back his scalp, I find no contusions or fractures hiding underneath. I plug a Stryker saw into the overhead cord reel and realize I need more than one hand. Terry helps me steady the head as I push the whining, vibrating semicircular blade through the skull. Hot, bony dust drifts on the air, and the skullcap lifts off with a soft sucking sound, revealing the convoluted horizon of the brain. On gross examination, there is nothing wrong with it. Slices gleam like creamy agate with gray ruffled edges as I rinse them on the cutting board. I will save the brain and heart for further special studies, fixing them in formalin and sending them to the Medical College of Virginia.

My diagnosis this morning is one of exclusion. Having found no obvious, pathological cause of death, I am left with one that is based on whispers. Tiny hemorrhages on heart and lungs and burns and abrasions from bondage suggest Mitch Barbosa died from stress-induced arrhythmia. I also postulate that at some point he was holding his breath or his airway was obstructed—or for some reason his breathing was compromised to the extent that he partially asphyxiated. Perhaps the gag, which would have gotten wet from saliva, is to blame. Whatever the truth, I am getting a picture that is simple and ghastly and calls for demonstration. Terry and Marino are handy.

First I cut off several lengths of the thick white twine that we routinely use to suture up Y-incisions. I tell Marino to push up the sleeves of his surgical gown and hold out his hands. I tie one segment of twine around one wrist and a second strand around the other, not too tight, but snug. I instruct him to hold his arms up in the air and direct Terry to grab the loose ends of twine and pull up. Terry is tall enough to do this without a chair or footstool. The bindings immediately dig into the underside of Marino’s wrists and are angled up toward the knots. We try this in different positions, with variations of the arms close together and spread wide crucifixion-style. Of course, Marino’s feet remain squarely on the floor. In no instance is he hanging or even dangling.

“The weight of a body on outstretched arms interferes with exhalation,” I explain. “You can inhale but it’s difficult exhaling because the intercostal muscles are compromised. Over a period of time, this would lead to asphyxia. You add that to the shock of pain from torture, you add fear and panic, and you could certainly suffer from an arrhythmia.”

“What about the nosebleed?” Marino holds out his wrists and I examine the indentations the twine has left in his skin. They are angled up similarly to those on the dead man.

“Increased intracranial pressure,” I say. “In a breath-holding situation, you can get nosebleeds. In the absence of injury, that’s a good guess.”

“My question is whether someone meant to kill him?” Terry poses.

“Most people aren’t going to string someone up and torture him and then let him go to tell the story,” I reply. “I’ll pend his cause and manner for now until we see what tox has to say.” My eyes light on Marino’s. “But I believe you’d best treat this as a homicide, a very awful one.”

We contemplate this later in the morning as we drive toward James City County. Marino wanted to take his truck, and I suggested we follow Route 5 east along the river, through Charles City County where eighteenth-century plantations fan out from the roadside in vast fallow fields that lead to the awesome brick mansions and outbuildings of Sherwood Forest, Westover, Berkeley, Shirley and Belle Air. There isn’t a tour bus in sight, no logging trucks or roadwork, and country stores are closed. It is Christmas Eve. The sun shines through endless arches of old trees, shadows dapple pavement and Smoky the Bear asks for help from a sign in a gracious part of the world where two men have died barbarically. It does not seem that anything so heinous could happen here until we get to The Fort James Motel and Camp Ground. Tucked off Route 5 in the woods, it is a hodgepodge of cabins, trailers and motel buildings that are rusting and paint-peeled, reminding me of Hogan’s Alley at the FBI Academy: cheaply constructed facades where shady people are about to get raided by the law.

The rental office is in a small frame house overwhelmed by scrubby pines that have carpeted the roof and earth in brown tags. Soft-drink and ice machines in front glow through overgrown bushes. Children’s bicycles lie wounded in leaves, and ancient seesaws and swings aren’t to be trusted. A homely mixed-breed dog that sags with a history of chronic breeding rises to her old feet and stares at us from the sloping porch.

“I thought Stanfield was meeting us here.” I open my door.

“Go figure.” Marino climbs out of the truck, his eyes moving everywhere.

A veil of smoke drifts out the chimney and streams almost horizontally with the wind, and through a window I catch winking, gaudy Christmas lights. I feel eyes on us. A curtain moves, the sounds of a television muted from deep within the house as we wait on the porch and the dog sniffs my hand and licks me. Marino announces our arrival with a fist pounding the door, and finally calls out, “Anybody home? Hey!” Banging his fist hard. “Police!”

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” an impatient woman’s voice sings out. A hard, tired face fills the space of the opening door, the burglar chain still anchored and taut.

“You Mrs. Kiffin?” Marino asks her.

“Who are you?” she asks him back.

“Captain Marino, Richmond P.D. This is Dr. Scarpetta.”

“What you bringing a doctor for?” Brow furrowing, she glances at me from her shadowy crack. A stirring at her feet, and a child peeks out at us and smiles like an imp. “Zack, you go back inside.” Small bare arms, hands with dirty nails wrap around mama’s knee. She shakes him loose. “Go on!” He disconnects and is gone.

“Going to need you to show us the room where the fire was,” Marino tells her. “Detective Stanfield with James City County should be here. You seen him?”

“No police been here this morning.” She pushes the door shut and the burglar chain rattles as she removes it, then the door opens again, this time wide, and she steps out on the porch, pushing her arms into the sleeves of a lumberjack’s red plaid coat, a ring of keys jingling in her hand. She yells into the house, “Y’all stay! Zack, don’t you get into the cookie dough! I’ll be right back.” She shuts the door. “Never seen anybody love cookie dough like that boy,” she tells us as we go down the steps. “Sometimes I buy the premade in rolls and one day I catch Zack eating one, wrapper peeled down like a banana. Ate half of it by the time I caught him. I told him, You know what’s in it? Raw eggs, that’s what.”

Bev Kiffin is probably no more than forty-five, her prettiness hard and garish like truck-stop cafes and late-night diners. Her hair is dyed bright blond and is curly like a French poodle, her dimples deep, her figure ripe on the way to matronly. She has a defensive, obstinate air about her that I associate with people who are used to being worn down and in trouble. I would also call her shifty. I am about to distrust every word she says.

“I don’t want problems out here,” she lets us know. “As if I don’t have enough going on, especially this time of year,” she says as she walks. “All these people pulling in here morning, noon and night to gawk and take pictures.”

“What people?” Marino asks her.

“Just people in cars, pulling up in the drive, staring. Some of them getting out and roaming around. Last night I woke up when someone drove through. It was two A.M.”

Marino lights a cigarette. We follow Kiffin through the shade of pines along an overgrown path of churned-up snow, past old campers that list like unseaworthy ships. Near a picnic table is a nest of personal belongings that at first glance look like trash from a campsite someone didn’t clean up. But then I see the unexpected: an odd collection of toys, dolls, paperback books, sheets, two pillows, a blanket, a double baby carriage—items that are soggy and dirty not because they were worthless and deliberately pitched but because they have been inadvertently exposed to the elements. Scattered throughout are shredded plastic wrappers that instantly connect with the fragment I found clinging to the first victim’s burned back. The fragments are white, blue and bright orange and are ripped in narrow strips, as if whoever did it has a nervous habit of picking things to pieces.

“Someone sure left in a hurry,” Marino comments.

Kiffin is watching me.

“Maybe skipped without settling the bill?” Marino says.

“Oh no.” She seems in a hurry to move on to the small tawdry motel showing through trees ahead. “They paid up front like everyone else. A family with two little ones staying in a tent and all of a sudden they hightailed it out of here. Don’t know why they left all that. Some of it, like the baby buggy’s pretty nice. Course, then it snowed on everything.”

A gust of wind scatters several bits of wrappers like confetti. I wander closer and nudge a pillow with my foot, turning it over. A pungent, sour odor rises to my nostrils as I squat and take a closer look. Clinging to the underside of the pillow is hair—long, pale hair, very fine hair that has no pigmentation. My heart thuds like the sudden, unexpected kick of a bass drum. I move the shredded wrappers around with my finger. The plasticized material is pliable but tough, so it doesn’t tear easily unless you start at a crinkled edge where the wrapper was heat-sealed together. Some of the fragments are large and easily recognizable as having come from PayDay peanut-caramel candy bars. I can even make out the website address for Hershey’s Chocolate. More hair on the blanket, short, dark hair, a pubic hair. And several more of the long, pale hairs.

“PayDay candy bars,” I say to Marino. I look at Kiffin as I open my satchel. “Know anybody out here who eats a lot of PayDay candy bars and picks apart the wrappers?”

“Well, it didn’t come from my house.” As if we have accused her, or maybe Zack and his sweet tooth.

I do not carry my aluminum crime scene case to scenes where there is no body. But I always keep an emergency kit in my satchel, a heavy-duty freezer bag filled with disposable gloves, evidence bags, swabs, a tiny vial of distilled water and gunshot residue (GSR) kits, among other items. I remove the cap from a GSR kit. It is nothing more than a small, clear plastic stub with an adhesive tip that I use to collect three hairs from the pillow and two from the blanket. I seal the stub and the hairs inside a small transparent plastic evidence bag.

“You don’t mind my asking?” Kiffin says to me. “What are you doing that for?”

“Think I’ll just bag all this crap, the whole campsite, and take it in to the labs.” Marino is suddenly low-key, calm like a seasoned poker player. He knows how to handle Kiffin, and now she has to be handled because he also knows all too well that hypertrichotic people have unique hair, fine, unpigmented, rudimentary, baby-like hair. Only baby hair is not six or seven inches long like the hair Chandonne shed at his crime scenes. It is possible that Jean-Baptiste Chandonne has been to this campground. “You manage this place by yourself?” Marino asks Kiffin.

“Pretty much.”

“When did the family in the tent leave? It’s not exactly tent weather.”

“They were here right before it snowed. Late last week.”

“You ever find out why they left in such a hurry?” Marino keeps probing in his bland tone.

“Haven’t heard from them, not a word.”

“We’re going to need to take a better look at what all they left behind.”

Kiffin blows on her bare hands to warm them and hugs herself, turning away from the wind. She looks back at her house and you can almost see her contemplating what kind of trouble life holds for her and her family this time. Marino motions for me to follow him. “Wait here,” he tells Kiffin. “We’ll be right back. Just gonna get something out of my truck. Don’t touch nothing, all right?”

She watches us walk off. Marino and I talk in low voices. Hours before Chandonne appeared at my front door, Marino was out with the response team searching for him, and they discovered where he was hiding in Richmond in the mansion under major renovation on the James River, very close to my neighborhood. Since he rarely if ever went out during daylight hours, we assume, his comings and goings went undetected as he hid in the house and helped himself to whatever was there. Until this moment, it never occurred to any of us that Chandonne might have stayed anyplace else.

“You think he scared off whoever was in that tent so he could use it?” Marino unlocks his truck and reaches in the back of the cab where I know, for one thing, he keeps a pump-action shotgun. “Because I gotta tell ya, Doc. Something we noticed when we went inside that house on the James was junk food wrappers everywhere. A lot of candy bar wrappers.” He lifts out a red tool box and shuts the door of the truck. “Like he’s got a real sugar thing.”

“Do you remember what kind of junk food?” I remember all the Pepsis Chandonne drank while Berger was interviewing him.

“Snickers bars. I don’t remember if there were PayDays. But candy. Peanuts. Those little bags of Planter’s peanuts, and now that I think of it, the wrappers were all tore up.”

“Christ,” I mutter, suddenly chilled to the marrow. “I wonder if he might have low blood sugar.” I try to be clinical, to regain my balance. Fear returns like a swarm of bats.

“What the hell was he doing out here?” Marino says, and he keeps staring in the direction of Kiffin in the distance, making sure she isn’t tampering with anything in a campsite that has now become part of a crime scene. “And how the hell did he get here? Maybe he did have a car.”

“Any vehicles at the house where he was hiding?” I ask as Kiffin watches our return, a solitary figure in red plaid, breath emerging in smoky puffs.

“The people that own the mansion, they didn’t keep any cars there while all the work was going on,” Marino tells me in a voice Kiffin can’t hear. “Maybe he stole something and kept it parked somewhere it wasn’t going to be noticed. I just assumed the squirrel didn’t even know how to drive, seeing as how he pretty much lived in the dungeon in his family’s house in Paris.”

“Yes. More assumptions,” I mutter, remembering Chandonne’s claiming he drove one of those green motorcycles to clean Paris sidewalks, doubting the story but not much else any longer. We are back at the picnic table, and Marino sets down the toolbox and opens it. He gets out leather work gloves and puts them on, then shakes open several fifty-gallon heavy-duty garbage bags and I hold them open. We fill three bags, and he cuts open a fourth and drapes sections of black plastic over the baby carriage and tapes them together. While he is doing this, he explains to Kiffin that it is possible someone scared off the family who was staying in this tent. He suggests that maybe a stranger claimed squatter’s rights at this site, even if for only a night. Did she at any point have a sense of anything out of the ordinary, including an unfamiliar vehicle in the area prior to last Saturday? He poses all this as if it would never occur to him that she would tarnish the truth.

We know, of course, that Chandonne could not have been here after Saturday. He has been in custody since then. Kiffin is no help. She claims she was aware of nothing out of the ordinary except that early one morning she went out for firewood and noticed the tent was gone but the family’s belongings were still here, or at least part of them. She can’t swear to it, but the more Marino prods her, the more she believes she noticed the tent gone around eight A.M., last Friday. Chandonne murdered Diane Bray on Thursday night. Did he then flee afterward to James City County to hide? I imagine him appearing at the tent, a couple and their small children inside. One look at him and it is believable they would have jumped into their car and sped off without bothering to pack.

We carry the trash bags to Marino’s truck and put them in back. Again, Kiffin awaits our return, hands in the pockets of her jacket, her face rosy from the cold. The motel is straight ahead through pine trees, a small, boxy white structure, two stories with doors painted the color of evergreens. Behind the motel are more woods, then a wide creek that branches off from the James River.

“How many people you got staying here right now?” Marino asks the woman who runs this dreadful tourist trap.

“Right now? Maybe thirteen, depending on whether anybody else’s checked out. Lot of people just leave their key in the room and I don’t know they’re gone until I go in to clean up. You know, I left my cigarettes in the house,” she says to Marino without looking at him. “You mind?”

Marino sets down his toolbox on the path. He shakes a cigarette loose from the pack and lights it for her. Her upper lip crinkles like crepe paper when she sucks in smoke, inhaling deeply and blowing out one side of her mouth. My lust for tobacco stirs. My fractured elbow complains about the cold. I can’t stop thinking about the family in the tent and their terror—if it is true that Chandonne showed up and the family exists. If he did come directly here after murdering Bray, what happened to his clothes? He had to have gotten blood all over himself. Did he leave Bray’s house and come out here covered with blood and frighten strangers out of their tent, and no one called the police or said a word to anyone?

“How many people were staying here night before last, when the fire started?” Marino picks up his toolbox and we start walking again.

“I know how many were checked in.” She is vague. “Don’t know who was still here. Eleven had checked in, including him.”

“Including the man who died in the fire?” It is my turn to ask questions.

Kiffin throws a look at me. “That’s right.”

“Tell me about his checking in,” Marino says to her as we walk and pause to look around, and then walk on. “You see him drive up like we just did? Appears to me cars just pull right up to the front of your house.”

She starts shaking her head. “No sir. Didn’t see no car. There was a knock on the door and I opened it. Told him to go next door to the office and I’d meet him there. He was a nice-looking man, well-dressed, didn’t look like the usual I get, that much stands out clear as day.”

“He tell you his name?” Marino asks her.

“Paid cash.”

“So if someone pays cash, you don’t get them to fill out nothing.”

“Can if they want. Don’t have to. I have a registration pad you can fill out and then I tear off the receipt. He said he didn’t need a receipt.”

“He have an accent or anything?”

“He didn’t sound like he was from these parts.”

“Could you place where he sounded from? Northern? Maybe foreign?” Marino keeps on as we pause again beneath pines.

She looks around, thinking and smoking as we follow her along a muddy path that leads to the motel parking lot. “Not deep South,” she decides. “But he didn’t sound like he was from a foreign country. You know, he didn’t say much. Said as little as he had to. I got a feeling, you know. like he was in a hurry and sort of nervous, and he sure wasn’t chatty.” This sounds completely fabricated. Her tone of voice actually changes.

“Anybody staying in these campers?” Marino then asks.

“I rent ’em out. People don’t come with their own campers right now. It’s off-season for camping.”

“Anybody renting them now?”

“No. Nobody.”

In front of the motel, a chair with ripped upholstery has been placed near a Coke machine and pay phone. There are several cars in the lot, American-made, not new. A Granada, an LTD, a Firebird. There is no sign of whoever might own them.

“Who do you get this time of year?” I inquire.

“A mixture,” Kiffin goes on as we cross the parking lot to the south end of the building.

I scan wet asphalt.

“Folks who aren’t getting along. That’s a lot of it this time of year. People fussing and one or the other walks out or gets kicked out and needs a place to stay. Or people driving a long distance to visit family and need a place for the night. Or when the river floods like it did a couple months back, some people come here because I allow pets. And I get tourists.”

“People seeing Williamsburg and Jamestown?” I ask.

“A fair number of people here to see Jamestown. That’s picked up quite a bit since they started digging up the graves out there. Funny how people are.”

CHAPTER 22

ROOM SEVENTEEN IS on the first level at the very end. Crime scene tape is a bright yellow ribbon across the door. The location is remote, at the edge of thick woods that buffer the motel from Route 5.

I am especially interested in any vegetation or debris that might be on the asphalt directly in front of the room, where rescuers would have dragged the body. I note dirt and bits of dead leaves and cigarette butts. I am wondering if the fragment of candy bar wrapper I found adhering to the dead man’s back came from inside the room or from out here in the parking lot. If it came from inside the room, that could mean the killer tracked it in, or it could mean that the killer walked through or close to the abandoned campsite at some point prior to the murder, unless the bit of paper had been inside the room for a while, perhaps tracked in by Kiffin herself when she came in to clean after the last guest checked out. Evidence is tricky. You always have to consider its origin and not draw conclusions based on where the evidence ended up. Fibers on a body, for example, might have been transferred from the killer, who picked them up from a carpet where they were deposited originally by someone who tracked them into a house after yet another individual left them on a car seat.

“Did he ask for a particular room?” I ask Kiffin as she goes through keys on the ring.

“Said he wanted something private. Seventeen didn’t have anybody on either side or above, so that’s what I gave him. What’d you do to your arm?”

“Slipped on ice.”

“Oh, that’s too bad. You got to wear that cast a long time?”

“Not much longer.”

“You get the sense he might have had anybody with him?” Marino asks her.

“Didn’t see anybody else.” She speaks tersely with Marino but is friendlier toward me. I feel her glancing at my face frequently and have the sinking feeling she has seen my photograph in the papers or on television. “What kind of doctor did you say you are?” she quizzes me.

“I’m a medical examiner.”

“Oh.” She brightens. “Like Quincy. Used to love that show. You remember that one where he could tell everything about a person from one bone?” She turns the key in the lock and opens the door and the air turns acrid with the dirty stench of fire. “I just thought that was the most amazing thing. Race, gender, even what he did for a living and how big he was, and exactly when and how he died, all from one little bone.” The door opens wide onto a scene that is as dark and filthy as a coal mine. “Can’t tell you how much this is going to cost me,” she says as we move past her and step inside. “Insurance won’t ever cover something like this. Never does. Damn insurance companies.”

“I’m going to need you to wait outside,” Marino says to Kiffin.

The only light is what spills through the open doorway, and I make out the shape of the double bed. In the center of it is a crater where the mattress burned down to the bed springs. Marino turns on a flashlight and a long finger of light moves through the room, starting with the closet just right of where I am standing near the doorway. Two bent wire hangers dangle from the wooden rod. The bathroom is just left of the door, and against the wall opposite the bed is a dresser. Something is on top of the dresser, a book. It is open. Marino walks closer to illuminate the pages. “Gideon Bible,” he says.

The light moves on to the far end of the room, where there are two chairs and a small table before a window and a back door. Marino opens the curtains and wan sunlight seeps into the room. The only fire damage I can see is to the bed, which smoldered and produced a lot of dense smoke. Everything inside the room is covered with soot, and this is an unexpected forensic gift. “The entire room’s been smoked,” I marvel out loud.

“Huh?” Marino shines the light around as I dig out my portable phone. I see no evidence that Stanfield tried looking for latent prints in here, not that I blame him. Most investigators would assume the intense soot and smoke damage would obliterate fingerprints, when in fact, the opposite is true. Heat and soot tend to process latent prints, and there is an old laboratory method called smoking used on nonporous objects such as shiny metals, which tend to have a Teflon effect when traditional dusting powders are applied. Latent prints are actually transferred to an object because the friction ridge surfaces of fingers and palms have oily residues on them. It is these residues that end up on some surface: a doorknob, a drinking glass, a window pane. Heat softens the residues, and smoke and soot then adhere to them. During cooling the residues become fixed or firm and the soot can be gently brushed away like dusting powder. Before Super Glue fuming and alternate light sources, it was not uncommon to conjure up prints by burning tarry pine chips, camphor and magnesium. It is very possible that beneath the patina of soot in this room there is a galaxy of latent fingerprints that have already been processed for us.

I call fingerprints section chief Neils Vander at home and explain the situation, and he says he will meet us at the motel in two hours. Marino is caught up in other preoccupations, his attention fixated on some spot above the bed, where he is shining the light. “Holy shit,” he mutters. “Doc, would you look at this?” He illuminates two sooty eyebolts screwed into the drywall ceiling about three feet apart. “Hey!” he calls through the doorway to Kiffin.

She peers inside the room and looks where he shines the light.

“You got any idea why these bolts are in the ceiling?” he asks her.

She gets a strange expression on her face, her voice going up a note, the way it does when she is being evasive, I think. “Never seen them before. Now I wonder how that happened?” she declares.

“Last time you were in this room was when?” Marino asks her.

“A couple days before he checked in. When I cleaned it after the last person checked out, the last person before him, I mean.”

“The bolts weren’t here then?”

“I didn’t notice, if they were.”

“Mrs. Kiffin, you just hang outside there in case we got more questions.”

Marino and I put on gloves. He splays his fingers, rubber stretching and snapping. The window next to the back door overlooks a swimming pool that is filled with dirty water. Across from the bed is a small Zenith television on a stand, a note taped to it reminding guests to turn the TV off before they go out. The room is rather much what Stanfield described, but he did not mention the Gideon Bible open on the dresser, or that to the right of the bed near the floor there is an electrical outlet with two unplugged cords on the carpet next to it, one to the lamp on the bedside table, the other to the clock radio. The clock radio is old. It isn’t digital. When it was unplugged, the hands stopped at 3:12 P.M. Marino tells Kiffin to step inside the room again. “What time did you say he checked in?” he asks.

“Oh, ’round three.” She is just inside the doorway, staring blankly at the clock. “Looks like he came in and unplugged the clock and the lamp, now doesn’t it? That’s kind of strange, unless maybe he was plugging something else in and needed the outlet. Some of these business types have those laptop computers.”

“Did you notice if he had one?” Marino glances at her.

“I didn’t notice he had anything except what looked like a car key and his wallet.”

“You didn’t say nothing about a wallet. You saw a wallet?”

“Pulled it out to pay me. Black leather, as I recall. Expensive looking, like everything else he had. Might have been alligator or something,” she adds to her story.

“How much cash he pay you and in what kind of bills?”

“A hundred-dollar bill and four twenties. He told me to keep the change. The total was one hundred and sixty dollars and seventy cents.”

“Oh yeah. The sixteen-oh-seven special,” Marino says in a monotone. He doesn’t like Kiffin. He certainly doesn’t trust her worth a damn, but he keeps it to himself, playing her like a hand of cards. If I didn’t know him so well, he might fool even me.

“You got some kind of stepladder around here?” Marino says next.

She hesitates. “Well, I guess so.” She is gone again, the door left standing wide open.

Marino gets down to take a closer look at the outlet and unplugged cords. “You think they plugged the heat gun in here?” He ponders this out loud.

“It’s possible. If we’re talking about a heat gun,” I remind him.

“I’ve used them to thaw my pipes and to get ice off my front steps. Works like a charm.” He is looking under the bed with the flashlight. “Never had a case where one was used on a person. Jesus. He must’ve been gagged pretty good for no one to hear anything. Wonder why they unplugged both things, the lamp and the clock?”

“Maybe so it didn’t throw the circuit breaker?”

“In a joint like this, yeah, maybe. A heat gun’s probably about the same voltage as a blow-dryer. One-twenty, one-twenty-five. And a blow-dryer would probably knock out the lights in a dump like this.”

I move over to the dresser and look at the Bible. It is open to the sixth and seventh chapters of Ecclesiastes, and the exposed pages are sooty, the area of dresser under the Bible spared, indicating this was the position the Bible was in when the fire started. The question is whether the Bible was open like this before the victim checked in, or does it even belong with the room, for that matter? My eyes wander down lines and stop at the first verse of the seventh chapter. A good name is better than precious ointment; and the day of death than the day of one’s birth. I read it to Marino. I tell him that this section of Ecclesiastes is about vanity.

“Kind of fits with the queer thing, don’t it?” he comments as aluminum scrapes outside and Kiffin returns with a rush of wintry air. Marino takes a paint-spattered, bent ladder from her and opens the legs. He climbs up and shines the flashlight on the bolts. “Damn, I think I need new glasses. I can’t see nothing,” he says as I hold the ladder steady.

“Want me to look?” I offer.

“Help yourself.” He climbs back down.

I take a small magnifying lens from my satchel and up I go. He hands me the light and I examine the eyebolts. I can’t see any fibers. If there are any, we are not going to have any luck collecting them here. The problem is how to preserve one type of evidence without ruining another, and there are three possible types of evidence that might be associated with the eyebolts: fingerprints, fibers and tool marks. If we dust off soot to look for latents, we might lose fibers that could match the ligature that might have been threaded through the eyebolts, which we also can’t unscrew without risking the introduction of new tool marks, assuming we use a tool such as pliers. The biggest threat is inadvertently eradicating any possible prints. In fact, the conditions and lighting are so bad that we shouldn’t be examining anything here, really. I get an idea. “If you can hand me a couple baggies,” I tell Marino. “And tape.”

He hands me two small, transparent plastic bags. I slip one over each eyebolt and carefully wrap tape around the top of the bag, careful not to touch any part of the bolt or the ceiling. I climb back down while Marino opens his tool box. “Hate to do this to you,” he says to Kiffin, who hovers outside the door, hands deep in her pockets, trying to keep warm. “But I’m gonna have to cut out part of the ceiling.”

“Like that’s gonna make much difference at this point,” she says in a voice of resignation, or is it indifference I detect? “May as well,” she adds.

I am still wondering why the fire only smoldered. This has really got me stuck. I ask Kiffin what type of linens and mattress cover were on the bed.

“Well, they were green,” she seems sure of herself on this point. “The bedspread was dark green, sort of like the color the doors are painted. Not that we know what happened to the linens. The sheets were white.”

“Do you have any idea what they were made of?” I ask.

“I’m pretty sure the bedspreads are polyester.”

Polyester is so combustible that I try to remember never to wear synthetic materials when I fly. If we have a crash landing and there is a fire, the last thing I want against my flesh is polyester. I may as well douse myself with gasoline. If a polyester bedspread had been on the bed when the fire was set, more than likely the entire room would have gone up in flames, and quickly. “Where did you get the mattresses?” I ask her.

She hesitates. She doesn’t want to tell me. “Well,” she finally gets around to what I believe is the truth, “new ones are awfully expensive. I get secondhand ones when I can.”

“From where?”

“Well, from that prison they closed down in Richmond a few years back,” she tells me.

“Spring Street?”

“That’s right. Now, I didn’t get anything that I wouldn’t sleep on myself.” She defends her choice in fine bedding. “Got the newest ones from them.”

This might explain why the mattress only smoldered and never really caught fire. In hospitals and prisons, mattresses are treated heavily with flame retardants. This also suggests that whoever set the fire wouldn’t have had any reason to know he was trying to burn a mattress specially treated with flame retardants. And of course, common sense would have it that this person also did not hang around long enough to know that the fire went out on its own. “Mrs. Kiffin,” I say, “is there a Bible in every room?”

“The one thing folks don’t steal.” She avoids my question, taking on a suspicious tone of voice again.

“Do you know why this one in here is open to Ecclesiastes?”

“Now I don’t go around opening them. I just leave them on the dresser. I didn’t open it.” She hesitates, then announces, “He must have been murdered or everybody wouldn’t be going to all this trouble.”

“We have to look into every possibility,” Marino remarks as he climbs back up the ladder, a small hacksaw in hand that is helpful at scenes like this because the teeth are hardened and aren’t angled. They can cut elements in situ, or in place, such as trim molding, baseboard, pipes or, in this instance, joists.

“Business has been hard,” Mrs. Kiffin says. “I’m on my own because my husband’s on the road all the time.”

“What does your husband do?” I inquire.

“A truck driver for Overland Transfer.”

Marino begins popping out drywall tiles from the ceiling around the ones the eyebolts are screwed through.

“I don’t imagine he’s home much,” I say.

Her lower lip trembles almost imperceptibly and her eyes brighten with pain. “I don’t need a murder. Oh Lord, it’s going to hurt me bad.”

“Doc, you mind holding the light for me?” Marino doesn’t respond to her sudden need for sympathy.

“Murder hurts many people.” I train the flashlight on the ceiling, my good arm steadying the ladder again. “That’s a sad, unfair fact, Mrs. Kiffin.”

Marino starts sawing, wood dust drifting down.

“I’ve never had anybody die here,” she whines some more. “Not much worse can happen to a place.”

“Hey,” Marino quips to her above the noise of sawing, “you’ll probably get business from the publicity.”

She gives him a black look. “Those types can just stay the hell away.”

FROM THE PHOTOGRAPHS Stanfield showed me, I recognize the area of wall where the body was propped up and I get the general idea where the clothing was found. I imagine the victim nude on the bed, his arms strung up by rope threaded through the eyebolts. He might be kneeling or even sitting—only partially hoisted up. But the crucifixion position and gag would impair his breathing. He is panting, fighting for breath, his heart palpitating furiously in panic and pain as he watches someone plug in the heat gun, as he hears air blow out when the trigger is pulled. I have never related to the human desire to torture. I know the dynamics, that it is all about control, the ultimate abuse of power. But I can’t comprehend deriving satisfaction, vindication and certainly not sexual pleasure out of causing any living creature pain.

My central nervous system spikes and surges, my pulse pounds. I am sweating beneath my coat even though it is cold enough inside the room to see our breath. “Mrs. Kiffin,” I say as Marino strokes the saw, “five days—a business special? This time of year?” I pause as confusion dances across her face. She is not inside my mind. She does not see what I see. She can’t begin to imagine the horror I am reconstructing as I stand inside this cheap motel with its secondhand prison mattresses. “Why would he check in for five days the week of Christmas?” I want to know. “Did he say anything at all that might have given you a hint as to why he was here, what he was doing, where he was from? Aside from your observation that he didn’t sound local?”

“I don’t ask.” She watches Marino work. “Maybe I should. Some people talk a lot and tell you more than you want to know. Some don’t want you in their business.”

“What feeling did you get from him?” I keep prodding her.

“Well, Mr. Peanut didn’t like him.”

“Who the hell is Mr. Peanut?” Marino reaches down with a ceiling tile that is attached by an eyebolt to a four-inch section of joist.

“Our dog. You probably noticed her when you came in. I know it’s kind of a funny name for a female that’s had as many puppies as that one, but Zack named her. Mr. Peanut just barked her head off right when that man showed up at the door. Wouldn’t come near him, the fur just standing up on her back.”

“Or maybe your dog was barking and upset because someone else was around? Someone you didn’t see?” I suggest.

“Could be.”

A second ceiling tile drops, and the ladder shakes as Marino descends. He goes back into his toolbox for a roll of freezer paper and evidence tape and begins wrapping the ceiling tiles in neat packages as I walk into the bathroom and shine the light around. Everything is institutional white, the top of the counter scarred with yellowish burns, probably from guests parking lit cigarettes while they shave or put on makeup or fix their hair. I see something else Stanfield missed. A single strand of dental floss dangles inside the toilet. It is draped over the edge of the bowl and trapped under the seat. With a gloved hand, I pick it up. It is about a foot long, several inches of it wet from toilet water, and the midsection of it pale red, as if someone flossed his teeth and his gums bled. Because this latest find isn’t perfectly dry, I don’t seal it in plastic. I place it in a square of freezer paper which I fold into a jeweler’s envelope. We probably have DNA. The question is, whose?

Marino and I return to his truck at one-thirty, and Mr. Peanut flies out of the house when Kiffin yanks open the front door to go back inside the house. The dog chases us as we pull out, barking. I watch in the side mirror as Kiffin yells at her dog. “You get here right now!” She angrily claps her hands. “Come here now!”

“Some asshole take time out from torture to floss his teeth?” Marino starts in. “Like what the hell is that about? Or more likely, it’s been hanging out in the toilet since last Christmas.”

Mr. Peanut is now right by my door, the truck bumping over the unpaved drive that leads through woods to Route 5.

“Come here now!” Kiffin bellows as she comes down the steps, hands smack-smack-smack.

“Goddamn dog,” Marino complains.

“Stop!” I am afraid we are going to run over the poor animal.

Marino stamps the brakes and the truck lurches to a halt. Mr. Peanut jumps up barking, her head bobbing in and out of my window. “What in the world?” I am baffled. The dog was scarcely interested in us when we first showed up a few hours ago.

“Get back here!” Kiffin is coming after her dog. Behind her, a child fills the doorway, not the little boy we saw earlier, but someone as tall as Kiffin.

I get out of the truck and Mr. Peanut starts wagging her tail. She nuzzles my hand. The poor, wretched creature is dirty and smells bad. I get her by the collar and tug her in the direction of her family, but she doesn’t want to leave the truck. “Come on,” I talk to her. “Let’s get you home before you get run over.”

Kiffin strides up, just livid. She pops the dog hard on top of the head. Mr. Peanut bleats like an injured lamb, tail tucked, cowering. “You learn to mind, you hear me?” Kiffin furiously wags her finger at her dog. “Get in the house!”

Mr. Peanut sneaks behind me.

“Get!”

The dog sits down in the dirt behind me, pressing its trembling body against my legs. The person I saw in the doorway has vanished, but Zack has emerged on the porch. He is dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt that are way too big. “Come ’ere, Peanut,” he sings out, snapping his fingers. He sounds as frightened as the dog.

“Zack! Don’t you make me tell you again to get your butt inside the house!” Zack’s mother shouts at him.

Cruelty. Leave, and the dog will be beaten. Maybe the child will. Bev Kiffin is an out-of-control, frustrated woman. Life has made her feel powerless, and beneath her skin she seethes with hurt and anger, the unfairness of it all. Or maybe she is just plain bad, and maybe poor Mr. Peanut is running after Marino’s truck because the dog wants us to take her with us, to save her. That fantasy enters my mind. “Mrs. Kiffin,” I say in the calm voice of authority—that cool, cool voice I reserve for times when I intend to threaten the living shit out of somebody. “Don’t you touch Mr. Peanut again unless you do it gently. I have this special thing about people who hurt animals.”

Her face darkens and anger glints. I fix my stare dead center on her pupils.

“There are laws against cruelty to animals, Mrs. Kiffin,” I say. “And beating Mr. Peanut is not a good example to set in front of your children.” I hint that I spotted a second child she has failed to mention to us thus far.

She steps back from me, turns and walks off toward the house. Mr. Peanut sits, looking up at me. “You go home,” I tell her as my heart breaks. “Go on, sweetie. You need to go home.”

Zack comes down the steps and runs up to us. He takes the dog by the collar, squats and scratches between her ears, talking to her. “Be good, don’t go making mama mad, Mr. Peanut. Please,” he says, looking up at me. “She just don’t like it ’cause you’re taking her baby buggy.”

This jolts me, but I don’t let it show. I get down to Zack’s level and pet Mr. Peanut, trying to block out that her musky stench triggers memories of Chandonne again. Nausea twists my stomach and makes my mouth water. “The baby buggy’s hers?” I ask Zack.

“When she has puppies, I take them on rides in it,” Zack tells me.

“Why was it over there by the picnic table, Zack?” I ask. “I thought maybe some campers might have left it there.”

He shakes his head, petting Mr. Peanut. “Uh uh. It’s Mr. Peanut’s buggy, isn’t it, Mr. Peanut? I gotta go in.” He gets up, glancing back furtively at the open front door.

“I tell you what.” I get up, too. “We just need to look at Mr. Peanut’s buggy, but when we’re done I promise to bring it back.”

“Okay.” He tugs the dog after him, half running, half yanking. I stare after them as they go inside the house and shut the door. I stand in the middle of the dirt drive in the shadow of scrub pines, hands in my pockets, watching, because I have no doubt Bev Kiffin is watching me. On the street it is called signifying, making your presence known. My business isn’t finished here. I’ll be back.

CHAPTER 23

WE HEAD EAST on Route 5 and I am mindful of the time. Even if I could conjure up Lucy’s helicopter, I would never make it back to Anna’s house by two. I pull out my wallet and find the card Berger wrote her phone numbers on. There is no answer at her hotel, and I leave a message for her to pick me up at six P.M. Marino is silent as I slip the cell phone back inside my satchel. He stares straight ahead, his truck rumbling loudly along the winding, narrow road. He is processing what I just told him about the baby carriage. Bev Kiffin, of course, lied to us.

“The whole thing out there, wow,” he finally says, shaking his head. “Talk about a creepy feeling. Like there were all these eyes watching everything we were doing. Like that place has a whole life of its own nobody knows nothing about.”

“She knows,” I reply. “She knows something. That much is obvious, Marino. She made a point of telling us the baby carriage was left by the people who abandoned the campsite. She volunteered that without pause. Wanted us to think it. Why?”

“Those people don’t exist, whoever was supposedly staying out in that tent. If the hairs turn out to be Chandonne’s, then I’m gonna have to entertain the idea she let him stay out there, and that’s why she got all hinky about it.”

The vision of Chandonne showing up at her motel office and asking for a place to stay for the night shorts out my imagination. I can’t picture it. Le Loup-Garou, as he calls himself, would not take such a chance. His modus operandi, as we know it, was not to show up at anyone’s door unless he intended to murder and maul that person. As we know it. As we know it, I keep thinking. The truth is, we know less than we did two weeks ago. “We have to start all over,” I tell Marino. “We’ve defined someone without information, and now what? We made the mistake of profiling him and then believing our projection. Well, there are dimensions to him we’ve completely missed, and even though he’s locked up, he isn’t.”

Marino gets out his cigarettes.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” I go on. “In our arrogance, we decided what he’s like. Based it on scientific evidence and came up with what, in truth, is an assumption. A caricature. He’s not a werewolf. He’s a human being, and no matter how evil he is, he has many facets, and now we’re finding them. Hell, it was obvious on the videotape. Why are we so damn slow on the uptake? I don’t want Vander going to that motel alone.”

“Good point.” Marino reaches for the phone. “I’ll go to the motel with him and you can take my truck back to Richmond.”

“There was someone in the doorway,” I say. “Did you see him? He was big.”

“Huh,” he says. “I didn’t see anyone. Just the little kid, what’s his name? Zack. And the dog.”

“I saw someone else,” I insist.

“I’ll check it out. You got Vander’s number?”

I give it to him and he calls. Vander is already on his way and his wife gives Marino a cell phone number. I stare out the window at wooded residential developments with large Colonial homes set back far from the streets. Elegant Christmas decorations shine through trees.

“Yeah, there’s some strange shit out there,” Marino is telling Vander by cell phone. “So yours truly here’s gonna be your bodyguard.” He ends the call and we are quiet for a moment. Last night seems to fill the rumbling space between us in the truck.

“How long have you known?” I finally ask Marino one more time, not at all satisfied with what he told me in Anna’s driveway when I walked him out to his truck after midnight. “When exactly did Righter tell you he was instigating a special grand jury investigation and what was his reason?”

“You hadn’t even finished her damn autopsy yet.” Marino lights a cigarette. “Bray was still on your table, to be exact. Righter gets me on the phone and says he don’t want you doing her post, and I tell him, ‘So what you want me to do? Walk in the morgue and order her to drop her scalpel and put her hands up in the air?’ The dumb shit.” Marino blows out smoke as my dismay folds into a scary shape inside my brain. “That’s why he didn’t ask your permission to come snoop around your house, either,” Marino adds.

The snooping part, at least, I had already figured out.

“He wanted to see if the cops came across anything.” He pauses to tap an ash. “Like a chipping hammer. Especially one with maybe Bray’s blood on it.”

“The one he tried to attack me with may very well have her blood on it,” I reply reasonably, calmly as anxiety inches through me.

“Problem is, the hammer with her blood on it was found in your house,” Marino reminds me of a fact.

“Of course it was. He brought it to my house so he could use it on me.”

“And yeah, it does have her blood on it,” Marino keeps talking. “They already did the DNA. Never seen the labs move so fast as they are these days, and you can guess why. The governor’s got his eye on everything going on—in case his chief medical examiner turns out to be some whacko murderer.” He sucks on the cigarette and glances over at me. “And another thing, Doc. Don’t know if Berger might have mentioned this to you. But the chipping hammer you say you bought at the hardware store? It ain’t been found.”

“What?” I am incredulous, then furious.

“So the only one at your house is the one with Bray’s blood on it. One hammer. Found at your house. And it’s got Bray’s blood.” He makes his point, not without some reluctance.

“You know why I bought that hammer,” I reply as if my argument is with him. “I wanted to see if it matched up with the pattern of her injuries. And it was definitely in my house. If it wasn’t there when you guys went through everything, then either you overlooked it or someone took it.”

“You remember where you had it last?”

“I used it in the kitchen on chicken to see what the injuries looked like, and also what kind of pattern the coiled handle would leave if I put something on it and pressed the handle against paper.”

“Yeah, we found pounded-up chicken in the garbage. And a pillowcase with barbecue sauce on it, like maybe from your rolling the handle around.” He doesn’t think such an experiment is odd. He knows I engage in a lot of unusual research when I am trying to figure out what happened to somebody. “But no chipping hammer. We didn’t find that. Not with or without barbecue sauce,” Marino goes on. “So I’m wondering if asshole Talley swiped it. Maybe you ought to get Lucy and Teun to turn their secret squirrel organization on him and see what they find out, huh? The Last Precinct’s first big investigation. I’d like to run a credit check on the bastard and see where he gets all his money from, for starters.”

I keep glancing at my watch, timing our drive. The subdivision where Mitch Barbosa lived is ten minutes from The Fort James Motel. Taupe clapboard townhouses are new and there is no vegetation, just raw earth sprinkled with dead young grass and patched with snow. I recognize unmarked police vehicles in the lot when we pull in, three Ford Crown Victorias and a Chevrolet Lumina parked in a row. It doesn’t escape my attention or Marino’s that two of these vehicles have Washington, D.C., plates.

“Oh shit,” Marino says. “I smell the feds. Oh boy,” he says to me as we park, “this ain’t good.”

I notice a curious detail as Marino and I follow the brick walkway to the townhouse where Barbosa lived with his alleged girlfriend. Through an upstairs window I see a fishing rod. It leans against the glass, and I don’t know why it strikes me as out of place except that this isn’t the time of year for fishing, just as it isn’t the time of year for camping. Again, I think of the mysterious if not mythical people who fled the campground, leaving behind many of their possessions. I return to Bev Kiffin’s lie and feel I am moving deeper into a dangerous airspace where there are forces I can’t see or understand moving at incredible speeds. Marino and I wait at the front door of townhouse D, and he rings the bell again.

Detective Stanfield answers and greets us distractedly, his eyes darting everywhere. Tension between him and Marino is a wall between them. “Sorry I didn’t make it by the motel,” he announces curtly as he steps aside to let us in. “Something’s come up. You’ll see that in a minute,” he promises. He is in gray corduroys and a heavy wool sweater, and he won’t meet my eyes, either. I am not sure if this is because he knows how I feel about his leaking information to his brother-in-law, Representative Dinwiddie, or if there is some other reason. It flashes across my thoughts that he might know I am being investigated for murder. I try not to think about that reality. It serves no good purpose to worry right now. “Everybody’s upstairs,” he says, and we follow him up.

“Who’s everybody?” Marino asks.

Our feet thud quietly on carpet. Stanfield keeps moving. He doesn’t turn around or pause when he replies, “ATF and the FBI.”

I notice framed photographs arranged on the wall to the left of the staircase and take a moment to peruse them, recognizing Mitch Barbosa grinning with tipsy-looking people in a bar and hanging out the window of the cab of a transfer truck. In one photograph, he is sunbathing in a bikini on a tropical beach, maybe Hawaii. He holds up a drink, toasting the person behind the camera. Several other poses are with a pretty woman, perhaps the girlfriend he lives with, I wonder. Halfway up is a landing and the window the fishing pole leans against.

I stop, a strange sensation lightly whispering across my flesh as I examine, without touching, a Shakespeare fiberglass rod and Shimano reel. A hook and split-shot weights are attached to the fishing line, and on the carpet next to the rod’s handle is a small blue plastic tackle box. Nearby, as if set down when someone entered the townhouse, are two empty Rolling Rock beer bottles, a new pack of Tiparillo cigars and some change. Marino turns around to see what I am doing. I join him at the top of the stairs and we emerge into a brightly lit living area that is attractively decorated in spare modern furniture and Indian rugs.

“When’s the last time you went fishing?” I ask Marino.

“Not freshwater,” he replies. “Not around here these days.”

“Exactly.” I am cut off by an awareness that I know one of the three people standing near the picture window in the living room. My heart jumps when the familiar dark head turns to me and suddenly I am facing Jay Talley. He doesn’t smile, his glance sharp as if his eyes are tipped like arrows. Marino makes a barely audible noise that is like a groan from a small, primitive animal. It is his way of letting me know that Jay is the last person he wants to see. Another man in a suit and tie is young and looks Hispanic, and when he sets down his coffee cup, his jacket falls open and reveals a shoulder holster holding a large caliber pistol.

The third person is a woman. She doesn’t demonstrate the devastated, confused demeanor of a person whose lover has just been killed. She is upset, yes. But her emotions are well contained beneath the surface, and I recognize the flare in her eyes and angry set of her jaw. I have seen the look in Lucy, in Marino and others who are more than bereft when something bad happens to a person they care about. Cops. Cops are offended and in an eye for an eye mode when something happens to one of their own. Mitch Barbosa’s girlfriend, I suspect right away, is law enforcement, probably undercover. In a matter of minutes, the scenario has dramatically shifted.

“This is Bunk Pruett, FBI,” Stanfield makes introductions. “Jay Talley, ATF.” Jay shakes my hand as if we have never met. “And Jilison McIntyre.” Her handshake is cool but firm. “Ms. McIntyre’s ATF.”

We find chairs and arrange them so all of us can look at each other and talk. The air is hard. It is flinty with anger. I recognize the mood. I have seen it so many times when a cop is killed. Now that Stanfield has set the stage, he slips behind a curtain of sullen silence. Bunk Pruett takes charge, typical FBI. “Dr. Scarpetta, Captain Marino,” Pruett begins. “I want to state the obvious right off. This is highly, highly sensitive. To be honest, I hate saying anything about what’s going on, but you got to know what you’re dealing with.” His jaw muscles bunch. “Mitch Barbosa is—was—undercover FBI, working a big investigation here in this area, which now of course we have to dismantle, at least to a certain degree.”

“Drugs and guns,” Jay says, glancing from Marino to me.

CHAPTER 24

IS INTERPOL INVOLVED? I don’t understand why Jay Talley is here. Barely two weeks ago, he was working in France.

“Well, you should know,” Jay says with a trace of sarcasm, or maybe I imagine it. “The unidentified case you just contacted Interpol about, the guy who died in the motel down the road? We have an idea who he might be. So yes, Interpol’s involved. Now we are. You bet.”

“I wasn’t aware we’d gotten a response from Interpol.” Marino barely tries to be civil to Jay. “So you’re telling me the guy from the motel’s some sort of international fugitive, maybe?”

“Yes,” Jay replies. “Rosso Matos, twenty-eight-year-old native of Colombia, as in South America. Last seen in Los Angeles. Also known as the Cat because he’s such a quiet guy when he goes in and out of places, killing. That’s his specialty. Taking people out, a hit man. Matos has a reputation for liking very expensive clothes, cars—and young men. I guess I need to talk about him in the past tense.” Jay pauses. No one responds beyond looking at him. “What none of us understands is what he was doing here in Virginia,” Jay adds.

“What exactly is the operation here?” Marino asks Jilison McIntyre.

“Started four months ago with a guy speeding along Route Five just a couple miles from here. A James City cop pulls him.” She glances at Stanfield. “Runs his tag and finds out he’s a convicted felon. Plus the officer happens to notice the handle of a long gun protruding from under a blanket in the back seat, turns out to be a MAK-90 with the serial number ground off. Our labs in Rockville managed to restore the SN and traced the weapon to a shipment from China—a regular shipment to Richmond. As you know, a MAK-90’s a popular knock-off of the AK-47 assault rifle, going rate of a thousand, two thousand bucks on the street. Gang members love the MAK, made in China, regularly shipped to local ports in Richmond, Norfolk, legitly in crates accurately marked. Other MAKs are being smuggled in from Asia along with heroin, in all kinds of crates marked everything from electronics to Oriental rugs.”

In an all-business voice that only occasionally reveals the strain she feels, McIntyre describes a smuggling ring that, in addition to area ports, involves the James City County trucking company where Barbosa was undercover as a driver and she was undercover as his girlfriend. He got her a job in the company’s office, where bills of lading and invoices were falsified to disguise a very lucrative operation that also involves cigarettes en route from Virginia to New York and other destinations in the Northeast. Some weapons are being sold through a dirty gun dealer in this area, but a lot of them end up in backroom sales at gun shows, and we all know how many gun shows Virginia has, McIntyre says.

“What’s the name of the trucking company?” Marino asks.

“Overland.”

Marino’s eyes dart to me. He runs his fingers through his thinning hair. “Christ,” he says to everyone. “That’s who Bev Kiffin’s husband works for. Jesus Christ.”

“The lady who owns and runs The Fort James Motel,” Stanfield explains to the others.

“Overland’s a big company and not everybody is involved in illegal activity,” Pruett is quick to be objective. “That’s what makes this so tough. The company and most people in it are legit. So you could pull their trucks all day and never find anything hot inside a single one of them. Then on another day, a shipload of paper products, televisions, whatever, heads out and stashed inside boxes are assault rifles and drugs.”

“You think someone put the dime on Mitch?” Marino asks Pruett. “And the bad guys decided to whack him?”

“If so, then why is Matos dead, too?” It is Jay who speaks. “And it appears Matos died first, right?” He looks at me. “He’s found dead in these really weird circumstances, in a motel right down the road. Then the next day, Mitch’s body is dumped in Richmond. Plus, Matos is an eight-hundred-pound gorilla. I don’t see what his interest would be here—even if someone out there dimed Mitch, you don’t send in a hit man like Matos. He’s pretty much reserved for big prey in powerful crime organizations, guys hard to get to because they are surrounded by their own heavily armed thugs.”

“Who does Matos work for?” Marino asks. “Do we know that?”

“Whoever will pay,” Pruett replies.

“He’s all over the map,” Jay adds. “South America, Europe, this country. He’s not associated with any one network or cartel, but is a lone operator. You want someone taken out, you hire Matos.”

“Then someone hired him to come here,” I conclude.

“We have to assume that,” Jay replies. “I don’t think he was in the area to check out Jamestown or the Christmas decorations in Williamsburg.”

“We also know he didn’t kill Mitch Barbosa,” Marino adds. “Matos was already dead and on the Doc’s table before Mitch went out jogging.”

There are nods around the room. Stanfield is picking at a fingernail. He looks lost in space, extremely uncomfortable. He keeps wiping sweat off his brow and drying his fingers on his pants. Marino asks Jilison McIntyre to tell us exactly what happened.

“Mitch likes to run midday, before lunch,” she begins. “He went out close to noon and didn’t come back. This was yesterday. I went out in the car looking for him around two o’clock and when there was still no sign, I called the police, and of course, our guys. ATF and FBI. Agents came in from the field and started looking, too. Nothing. We know he was spotted in the area of the law school.”

“Marshall-Wythe?” I inquire, taking notes.

“Right, at William and Mary. Mitch usually ran the same route, from here along Route Five, then over on Francis Street and to South Henry, then back. Usually an hour or so.”

“Do you remember what he was wearing and what he might have had with him?” I ask her.

“Red warm-up suit and a vest. He had on a down vest over his warm-up. Uh, gray, North Face. And his butt pack. He never went anywhere without his butt pack.”

“He had a gun in it?” Marino assumes.

She nods, swallowing, face stoical. “Gun, money, portable phone. House keys.”

“He wasn’t wearing the down jacket when his body was found,” Marino informs her. “No butt pack. Describe the key.”

“Keys,” she corrects him. “He has the key for here, for the townhouse, and his car key on a steel ring.”

“What does the key for your townhouse look like?” I ask, and I feel Jay staring at me.

“Just a brass key. A normal-looking key.”

“He had a stainless steel key in the pocket of his running shorts,” I say. “It has two-three-three written on it in permanent Magic Marker.”

Agent McIntyre frowns. She knows nothing about it. “Well now, that’s really strange. I have no idea what that key might be to,” she replies.

“So we gotta figure he was taken somewhere,” Marino says. “He was tied up, gagged, tortured, then driven to Richmond and dumped in the street in one of our lovely projects, Mosby Court.”

“Hot drug-trafficking area?” Pruett asks him.

“Oh yeah. The projects are big into economic development. Guns and drugs. You bet.” Marino knows his turf. “But the other nice thing about places like Mosby Court is people don’t see nothing. You want to dump a body, don’t matter if fifty people were standing right there. They get temporary blindness, amnesia.”

“Someone familiar with Richmond, then,” Stanfield finally offers an opinion.

McIntyre’s eyes are wide. She has a stricken expression on her face. “I didn’t know about torture,” she says to me. Her professional resolve shivers like a tree about to fall.

I describe Barbosa’s burns and go into detail about the burns Matos had, as well. I talk about the evidence of ligatures and gags, and then Marino talks about the eyebolts in the motel room ceiling. All present get the picture. Everyone can envision what was done to these two men. We have to suspect the same person or persons are involved in their deaths. But this doesn’t begin to tell us who or why. We don’t know where Barbosa was taken, but I have an idea.

“When you go back there with Vander,” I say to Marino, “maybe you ought to check out the other rooms, see if another one has eyebolts in the ceiling.”

“Will do. Got to go back there anyway.” He glances at his watch.

“Today?” Jay asks him.

“Yup.”

“You got any reason to think Mitch was drugged like the first guy?” Pruett asks me.

“I didn’t find any needle marks,” I reply. “But we’ll see what comes up on his tox results.”

“Jesus,” McIntyre mutters.

“And both of them wet their pants?” Stanfield says. “Doesn’t that happen when people die? They lose control of their bladders and wet their pants? Just a natural thing, in other words?”

“I can’t say losing urine is rare. But the first man, Matos, took his clothes off. He was nude. It appears he wet his pants and then disrobed.”

“So that was before he got burned,” Stanfield says.

“I would assume so. He wasn’t burned through his clothing,” I reply. “It’s very possible both victims lost control of their bladders due to fear, panic. You get scared badly enough, you wet your pants.”

“Jesus,” McIntyre mutters again.

“And you see some asshole screwing eyebolts in the ceiling and plugging in a heat gun, that’s enough to scare the piss right out of you,” Marino abundantly illustrates. “You know damn well what’s about to happen to you.”

“Jesus!” McIntyre blurts out. “What the fuck is this about?” Her eyes blaze.

Silence.

“Why the fuck would someone do something like that to Mitch? And it’s not like he wasn’t careful, not like he would just get in someone’s car or even get close to some stranger trying to stop him on the road.”

Stanfield says, “Makes me think of Vietnam, the way they did things to prisoners of war, tortured them to make them talk.”

Making someone talk can certainly be one reason for torture, I respond to what Stanfield has just said. “But it’s also a power rush. Some people are into torture because they get off on it.”

“You think that’s the case here?” Pruett says to me.

“I have no way of knowing.” Then I ask McIntyre, “I noticed a fishing pole when I was coming up the walk.”

Her reaction is a flicker of confusion. Then she realizes what I am talking about. “Oh, right. Mitch likes to fish.”

“Around here?”

“A creek over near College Landing Park.”

I look at Marino. That particular creek is at the edge of the wooded camping area at The Fort James Motel.

“Mitch ever mention to you the motel over there by that creek?” Marino asks her.

“I just know he liked to fish over there.”

“He know the lady who runs the joint? Bev Kiffin? And her husband? Maybe you both know him since he works for Overland?” Marino says to McIntyre.

“Well, I do know that Mitch used to talk to her boys. She has two young boys and sometimes they’d be out there fishing when Mitch was. He said he felt for them because their dad was never around. But I don’t know anybody named Kiffin at the trucking company, and I do their books.”

“Can you check that out?” Jay says.

“Maybe his last name’s different from hers.”

“Yeah.”

She nods.

“You remember the last time Mitch went fishing out there?” Marino asks her.

“Right before all the snow,” she replies. “It was pretty nice weather up until then.”

“I noticed some change, a couple beer bottles and some cigars on the landing,” I say. “Right by the fishing pole.”

“You sure he hasn’t been fishing out there since it snowed?” Marino picks up my thought.

The expression in her eyes makes it evident that she isn’t sure. I wonder just how much she really knows about her undercover boyfriend.

“Any illegal shit going on at the motel that you and Mitch are aware of?” Marino asks her.

McIntyre starts shaking her head. “He never mentioned anything about that. Nothing like that. His only connection to the place was fishing and being nice to the two boys, on occasion, if he saw them.”

“Just if they happened up when he was fishing?” Marino keeps pushing. “Any reason to think Mitch might have ever wandered over to the house to say hi to them?”

She hesitates.

“Mitch a generous guy?”

“Oh yes,” she says. “Very much so. He might have wandered over. I don’t know. He really likes kids. Liked them.” She tears up again and at the same time simmers.

“How did he identify himself to people around here? He say he was a truck driver? What did he say about you? You supposed to be a career woman? Now, you two weren’t really boyfriend and girlfriend. That was just part of the front, right?” Marino is on to something. He is leaning forward, his arms braced on his knees, staring intensely at Jilison McIntyre. When he gets like this, he fires questions so rapidly, people often don’t have time to answer. Then they get confused and say something they regret. She does that this very moment.

“Hey, I’m not a fucking suspect,” she snaps at him. “And our relationship, I don’t know what you’re getting at. It was professional. But you can’t help being close to someone when you live in the same damn townhouse and act like you’re involved, make people think you are.”

“But you weren’t involved,” Marino says. “Or at least he wasn’t with you. You guys were doing a job, right? Meaning, if he wanted to pay attention to a lonely woman with two nice little boys, he could do that.” Marino leans back in his chair. The room is so silent, it seems to hum. “Problem is, Mitch shouldn’t have done that. Dangerous, fucking stupid in light of his situation. He one of those types who had a hard time keeping his pants on?”

She doesn’t answer him. Tears jump out.

“You know what, folks?” Marino scans the room. “It just might be that Mitch got tangled up in something that doesn’t have a damn thing to do with your undercover operation here. Wrong place, wrong time. Caught something he sure as hell wasn’t fishing for.”

“You got any idea where Mitch was at three o’clock Wednesday afternoon, when Matos checked into the motel and the fire started?” Stanfield is putting the pieces together. “Was he here or out somewhere?”

“No, he wasn’t here,” she barely says, wiping her eyes with a tissue. “Gone. I don’t know where.”

Marino blows out in disgust. He doesn’t need to say it. Undercover partners are supposed to keep track of each other, and if Agent McIntyre didn’t always know where Special Agent Barbosa was, then he was up to something that maybe wasn’t germane to their investigation.

“I know you don’t even want to think it, Jilison,” Marino goes on in a milder tone, “but Mitch was tortured and murdered, okay? I mean, the guy was fucking scared to death. Literally. Whatever someone was doing to him, it was so awful, he had a fucking heart attack. He wet his fucking pants. He was taken somewhere and strung up, gagged and then has a weirdo key put in his pocket, planted, what for? Why? He into anything we ought to know about, Jilison? He fishing for more than bass out there in that creek by the campground?”

Tears are rolling down McIntryre’s face. She wipes them away roughly with the tissue and sniffles loudly. “He liked drinking and women,” she barely says. “Okay?”

“He ever go out at night, barhopping and that sort of thing?” Pruett asks her.

She nods. “It was part of his cover. You saw . . .” Her eyes jump to me. “You saw him. His dyed hair, the earring, all the rest. Mitch played the role of a sort of, well, wild party guy and he did like the women. He never pretended to be, uh, faithful to me, to his so-called girlfriend. It was part of his cover. But it was also him. Yeah. I worried about it, okay? But that was Mitch. He was a good agent. I don’t think he did anything dishonest, if that’s what you’re asking. But he didn’t tell me everything, either. If he got onto something going on at the campground, for example, he might have started poking around. He might have.”

“Without letting you know,” Marino confirms.

She nods again. “And I was out doing my thing, too. It’s not like I was here every minute waiting for him. I was working in the office at Overland. Part-time, anyway. So we didn’t always know what the other was up to every hour of every day.”

“I’ll tell you this much,” Marino decides. “Mitch stumbled onto something. And I’m just wondering if he wasn’t out at the motel around the time Matos showed up, and maybe whatever Matos was into, Mitch had the misfortune of being spotted in the area. Maybe it’s just that simple. Somebody thinks he saw something, knew something, and next thing, he gets picked up and gets the treatment.”

No one argues. Marino’s theory, actually, is the only one so far that makes any sense.

“Which brings us back to what Matos was doing here to begin with,” Pruett comments.

I look at Stanfield. He has wandered out of the conversation. His face is wan. He is a nervous wreck. His eyes drift to me and quickly move away. He wets his lips and coughs several times.

“Detective Stanfield,” I feel compelled to say to him in front of everyone. “For God’s sake, don’t tell any of this to your brother-in-law.” Anger sparks in his eyes. I have humiliated him and don’t care. “Please,” I add.

“You want to know the truth?” he angrily retorts. “I don’t want nothing to do with any of this.” He slowly draws himself to his feet and looks around the room, blinking, his eyes glazing over. “I don’t know what this is all about, but I don’t want no part—I mean, no part of it. You feds are in it already, up to your eyeballs, so you can just have it. I quit.” He nods. “You heard me right, I quit.”

Detective Stanfield, to our amazement, collapses. He falls so hard the room shakes. I spring up. Thank God, he is breathing. His pulse is running wild, but he is not in the grips of a cardiac arrest or anything life-threatening. He simply has fainted. I check his head to make sure he hasn’t injured himself. He is all right. He comes to. Marino and I help him to his feet and get him on the couch. I make him lie down and prop several pillows under his neck. Most of all, he is embarrassed, acutely so.

“Detective Stanfield, are you diabetic?” I ask. “Do you have a heart condition?”

“If you just got a Coke or something, that would be good,” he says, weakly.

I get up and head into the kitchen. “Let me see what I can do,” I say as if I live here. Inside the refrigerator, I get out orange juice. I find peanut butter in a cabinet and scoop out a big spoonful. It is while I am looking for paper towels that I notice a prescription bottle by the toaster oven. Mitch Barbosa’s name is on the label. He was taking the antidepressant Prozac. When I return to the living room, I say something about this to McIntyre and she tells us that Barbosa went on Prozac several months ago because he was suffering anxiety and depression, which he blamed on the undercover assignment, on stress, she adds.

“That’s interesting,” is all Marino has to say about it.

“You said you’re going back to the motel when you leave here?” Jay asks Marino.

“Yeah, Vander’s going to see if we might have any luck with prints.”

“Prints?” Stanfield murmurs from his sickbed.

“Jesus, Stanfield,” Marino blurts out in exasperation. “They teach you anything in detective school? Or did you get sent ahead several grades because of your goddamn brother-in-law?”

“He is a goddamn brother-in-law, you want to know the truth.” He says this so pitifully and with such candor that everybody laughs. Stanfield perks up a little bit. He sits higher against the pillows. “And you’re right.” He meets my eyes. “I shouldn’t have told him one peep about this case. And I won’t tell him nothing else, not a word, because it’s all politicking to that one. It wasn’t me who dragged in this whole Jamestown thing, just so you know.”

Pruett frowns. “What Jamestown thing?”

“Oh, you know, the dig out there and the big celebration the state’s planning. Well, thing is, if the truth be known, Dinwiddie got no more Indian blood in him than I do. All this horse crap about him being a descendent of Chief Powhatan. Pshaw!” Stanfield’s eyes dance with resentment that I doubt he rarely touches. He probably hates his brother-in-law.

“Mitch has Indian blood,” McIntyre says somberly. “He’s half Native American.”

“Well, for Christ’s sake, let’s hope the newspapers don’t find that out,” Marino mutters to Stanfield, not buying for one second that Stanfield is going to keep his mouth shut. “We got a gay guy and now an Indian. Oh boy, oh boy.” Marino shakes his head. “We got to keep this out of politics, out of circulation and I mean it.” He stares right at Stanfield, then at Jay. “Because guess what? We can’t talk about what we think is really going on, now can we? About the big undercover operation. About Mitch being undercover FBI. And that maybe in some fruitloop way, Chandonne is all wrapped around whatever the shit’s going on out here. So if people get all caught up in this hate crime shit, how do we turn that around when we can’t tell the truth?”

“I don’t agree,” Jay says to him. “I’m not ready to say what these murders are about. I’m not prepared to accept, for example, that Matos and now Barbosa aren’t related to gun smuggling. I do think without a doubt their murders are connected.”

No one disagrees. The modi operandi are too similar for the deaths not to be related, and in fact, committed by the same person or persons.

“I’m also not prepared to totally ignore the idea that they’re hate crimes,” Jay goes on. “A gay male. A Native American.” He shrugs. “Torture’s pretty damn hateful. Any injuries to their genitalia?” He turns to me.

“No.” I hold his gaze. It is odd to think we were intimate, to look at his full lips and graceful hands and to remember their touch. When we walked the streets of Paris, people turned to stare at him.

“Hmmm,” he says. “I find that interesting and maybe important. I’m not a forensic psychiatrist, of course, but it does seem in hate crimes the perpetrators rarely injure the victims’ genitals.”

Marino gives him an incredible look, his mouth parting in blatant disdain.

“Because you get some redneck homophobic sort, and the last thing he’s going to go near is the guy’s genitals,” Jay adds.

“Well, if you really want to go around this mulberry bush,” Marino acidly says to him, “then let’s just connect it to Chandonne. He never went near his victims’ genitals either. Shit, he didn’t even take their fucking pants off, just beat and bit the shit out of their faces and breasts. Only lower body thing he did at all was to take off their shoes and socks and bite their feet. And why? The guy’s afraid of female genitalia because his own’s as deformed as the rest of him.” Marino surveys the faces around him. “One good thing about the bastard being locked up is we got to find out what the rest of him looks like. Right? And guess what? He ain’t got a dick. Or let’s just say that what he’s got I wouldn’t call a dick.”

Stanfield is sitting straight up on the couch now, his eyes wide in amazement.

“I’ll go with you to the motel,” Jay says to Marino.

Marino gets up and looks out the window. “Wonder where the hell Vander is,” he says.

He gets Vander on the cell phone and we head out minutes later to meet in the parking lot. Jay walks with me. I feel the energy of his desire to talk to me, to somehow come to a consensus. In this way, he is like the stereotype of a woman. He wants to talk, to settle matters, to have closure or to rekindle our connection so he can then play hard to get again. I, on the other hand, want none of it.

“Kay, can I have a minute?” he says in the parking lot.

I stop and look at him as I button my coat. I notice Marino glancing our way as he gets the trash bags and baby carriage out of the back of his truck and loads them into Vander’s car.

“I know this is awkward, but is there some way we can make it easier? For one thing, we have to work together,” Jay says.

“Maybe you should have thought about that before you told Jaime Berger every detail, Jay,” I reply.

“That wasn’t against you.” His eyes are intense.

“Right.”

“She asked me questions, understandably. She’s just doing her job.”

I don’t believe him. That is my fundamental problem with Jay Talley. I don’t trust him and wish I never had. “Well, that’s curious,” I comment. “Because it appears people started asking questions about me before Diane Bray was even murdered. Right about the time I was with you in France inquiries began, as a matter of fact.”

His expression darkens. Anger peers out before he can hide it. “You’re paranoid, Kay,” he says.

“You’re right,” I reply. “You’re absolutely right, Jay.”

CHAPTER 25

I HAVE NEVER driven Marino’s Dodge Ram Quad Cab pickup truck, and were circumstances not so strained I would probably find the scenario comical. I am not a big person, barely five foot five, slender, and there is nothing funky or extreme about me. I do wear jeans, but not today. I suppose I dress like a proper chief or lawyer, usually in a tailored skirt suit or flannel trousers and a blazer, unless I am working a crime scene. I wear my blond hair short and neatly styled, am light on makeup and, other than my signet ring and watch, jewelry is an afterthought. I don’t have a single tattoo. I don’t look like the sort who would be roaring along in a monster macho truck that is dark blue with pinstriping, chrome, mud flaps, scanner and big, swooping antennas that go with the CB and two-way radios.

I take 64 West back to Richmond because it is quicker, and I pay close attention to my driving because it is a lot to handle a vehicle this size with only one arm. I have never spent a Christmas Eve like this and I am increasingly depressed over the notion. Usually, by now I have stocked the refrigerator and freezer, and have cooked sauces and soups and decorated the house. I feel utterly homeless and alien as I drive Marino’s truck along the interstate, and it occurs to me that I don’t know where I will sleep tonight. I guess at Anna’s, but I dread the necessary chill between us. I didn’t even see her this morning, and a helpless feeling of loneliness settles over me and seems to push me down in my seat. I page Lucy. “I’ve got to move back into my house tomorrow,” I tell her on the phone.

“Maybe you should stay in the hotel with Teun and me,” she suggests.

“How about you and Teun stay with me?” It is so hard for me to express a need, and I need them. I do. For a lot of reasons.

“When do you want us there?”

“We’ll have Christmas together in the morning.”

“Early.” Lucy has never stayed in bed past six on Christmas morning.

“I’ll be up, and then we’ll go to the house,” I tell her.

December 24. Days have gotten as short as they can, and it will be a while before light savors the hours and burns off my heavy, anxious moods. It is dark by the time I reach downtown Richmond, and when I pull up to Anna’s house at five minutes past six, I find Berger waiting for me in her Mercedes SUV, headlights penetrating the night. Anna’s car is gone. She is not home. I don’t know why this unsettles me so completely unless it is that I am suspicious she somehow knows Berger is meeting me and chose not to be here. Considering such a possibility reminds me that Anna has talked to people and may one day be forced to reveal what I have told her during my most vulnerable hours in her home. Berger climbs out as I open the truck door, and if she is taken aback by my transportation, she makes no indication of it.

“Do you need anything from inside the house before we go?” she asks.

“Give me just a minute,” I tell her. “Was Dr. Zenner here when you arrived?”

I feel her stiffen a little. “I got here just a few minutes before you did.”

Evasion, I think as I climb the front steps. I unlock the door and turn off the burglar alarm. The foyer is dark, the great chandelier and Christmas tree lights off. I write Anna a note and thank her for her friendship and hospitality. I need to return to my own home tomorrow and know she will understand why I must. Mostly, I want her to believe I am not upset with her, that I realize she is as victimized by circumstances as I am. I say circumstances because I am no longer sure who is holding a gun to Anna’s head and ordering her to divulge confidences about me. Rocky Caggiano may be next in line, unless I am indicted. If that should happen, I will be no factor in Chandonne’s trial, not hardly. I leave the note on Anna’s immaculately made Biedermeier bed. Then I get in Berger’s car and begin to tell her about my day in James City County, about the abandoned campsite and the long, pale hairs. She listens intently, driving, knowing where she is going as if she has lived in Richmond all of her life.

“Can we prove the hairs are Chandonne’s?” she finally asks. “Assuming there are no roots, as usual. And there weren’t roots with the ones found at the crime scenes, right? Your crime scenes. Luong and Bray.”

“No roots,” I say, rankled by the reference to my crime scenes. They aren’t my crime scenes, I silently protest. “He shed those hairs, so there are no roots,” I tell Berger. “But we can get mitochondrial DNA from the shafts. So yes, we can definitely know if the hairs from the campground are his.”

“Please explain,” she says. “I’m not an expert on mitochondrial DNA. Or an expert on hair for that matter, especially the kind of hair he has.”

The subject of DNA is a difficult one. Explaining human life on a molecular level tells most people far more than they can understand or care to know. Cops and prosecutors love what DNA can do. They hate to talk about it scientifically. Few of them understand it. The old joke is, most people can’t even spell DNA. I explain that nuclear DNA is what we get when cells with nuclei are present, such as with blood, tissue, seminal fluid and hair roots. Nuclear DNA is inherited equally from both parents, so if we have someone’s nuclear DNA we have, in a sense, all of him, and can compare his DNA profile to any other biological sample this same person has left at, say, another crime scene.

“Can we just compare the hairs from the campground to the hairs he left at the murder scenes?” Berger asks.

“Not successfully,” I reply. “Examining microscopic characteristics in this instance won’t tell us much because the hairs are unpigmented. The most we will be able to say is their morphologies are similar or consistent with each other.”

“Not conclusive to a jury.” She thinks out loud.

“Not in the least.”

“If we don’t do a microscopic comparison anyway, the defense will bring that up,” Berger considers. “He’ll say, Why didn’t you?”

“Well, we can microscopically compare the hairs, if you want.”

“The ones from Susan Pless’s body and the ones from your cases.”

“If you want,” I repeat.

“Explain hair shafts. How does DNA work with those?”

I tell her that mitochondrial DNA is found in the walls of cells and not in their nuclei, meaning mitochondrial DNA is the anthropological DNA of hair, fingernail, tooth and bone. Mitochondrial DNA is the molecules that make up our mortar and stone, I say. The limited usefulness lies in that mitochondrial DNA is inherited only through the female lineage. I use the analogy of an egg. Think of mitochondrial DNA as the egg white, while nuclear DNA is the yolk. You can’t compare one to the other. But if you have DNA from blood, you have the whole egg and can compare mitochondrial to mitochondrial—egg white to egg white. We have blood because we have Chandonne. He had to give up a blood sample while in the hospital. We have his complete DNA profile and can compare the mitochondrial DNA of unknown hairs to the mitochondrial DNA from his blood sample.

Berger listens without interruption. She has taken in what I am saying and seems to understand. As usual, she takes no notes. She asks, “Did he leave hair at your house?”

“I’m not sure what the police found.”

“As much as he seems to shed, I would think he left hair at your house or certainly out in the snow in your yard when he was thrashing about.”

“You would think so,” I agree with her.

“I’ve been reading about werewolves.” Berger leaps to the next topic. “Apparently, there have been people who really thought they were werewolves or tried all sorts of bizarre things to turn themselves into werewolves. Witchcraft, black magic. Satan worship. Biting. Drinking blood. Do you think it’s possible Chandonne really believes he is a loup-garou? A werewolf? And maybe even wants to be one?”

“Thus not guilty by reason of insanity,” I reply, and I have assumed all along this would be his defense.

“There was a Hungarian countess in the early sixteen hundreds, Elizabeth Bathory-Nadasdy, also known as the Blood Countess,” Berger goes on. “She supposedly tortured and murdered some six hundred young women. Would bathe in their blood, believing it would keep her young and preserve her beauty. Familiar with the case?”

“Vaguely.”

“As the story goes, this countess kept young women in her dungeon, fattened them up, would bleed them and bathe in their blood and then force other imprisoned women to lick all the blood off her body. Supposedly because towels were harsh on her skin. Rubbing blood in her skin, all over her body,” she ponders. “Accounts of this have left out the obvious. I’d say there was a sexual component,” she adds dryly. “Lust murders. Even if the perpetrator truly believed in the magical powers of blood, it’s about power and sex. That’s what it’s about whether you’re a beautiful countess or some genetic anomaly who grew up on the Île Saint-Louis.”

We turn on Canterbury Road, entering the wooded, wealthy neighborhood of Windsor Farms, where Diane Bray lived on the outer edge, her property separated by a wall from the noisy downtown expressway.

“I would give my right arm to know what’s in the Chandonne library,” Berger is saying. “Or better put, what sorts of things Chandonne’s been reading over the years—aside from the histories and other erudite materials he says his father gave him, yada, yada, yada. For example, does he know about the Blood Countess? Was he rubbing blood all over his body in hopes it might magically heal him of his affliction?”

“We believe he was bathing in the Seine and then here in the James River,” I reply. “Possibly for that reason. To be magically healed.”

“Sort of a biblical thing.”

“Maybe.”

“He might read the Bible, too,” she offers. “Was he influenced by the French serial killer Gilles Garnier, who killed little boys and ate them and bayed at the moon? There were a lot of so-called werewolves in France during the Middle Ages. Some thirty thousand people charged with it, can you imagine?” Berger has been doing a lot of research. This is evident. “And there’s the other weird idea,” she goes on. “In werewolf folklore it was believed if you were bitten by a werewolf, you would turn into one. Possible Chandonne was trying to turn his victims into werewolves? Maybe so he could find a bride of Frankenstein, a mate just like him?”

These unusual considerations begin to form a composite that is far more matter-of-fact and pedestrian than it might seem. Berger is simply anticipating what the defense is going to do in her case, and an obvious ploy is to distract the jury from the heinous nature of the crimes by preoccupying them with Chandonne’s physical deformity and alleged mental illness and downright bizarreness. If the argument can be successfully made that he believes he is a paranormal creature, a werewolf, a monster, then it is highly unlikely the jury will find him guilty and sentence him to life in prison. It occurs to me that some people might even feel sorry for him.

“The silver-bullet defense.” Berger alludes to the superstition that only a silver bullet can kill a werewolf. “We have a mountain of evidence, but then so did the prosecution in the O.J. case. The silver bullet for the defense will be that Chandonne is deranged and pitiful.”

DIANE BRAY’S HOUSE is a white Cape Cod with a gambrel roof, and although the police havesecured and cleared the scene, the property has not returned to life. Not even Berger can enter without permission of the owner, or in this case, the person acting as custodian. We sit in the driveway and wait for Eric Bray, the brother, to appear with a key.

“You may have seen him at the memorial service.” Berger reminds me that Eric Bray was the man carrying the urn containing his sister’s cremains. “Tell me how you think Chandonne got an experienced policewoman to open the door.” Berger’s attention flows far away from monsters in medieval France to the very real slaughterhouse before our eyes.

“That’s a little wide of my boundaries, Ms. Berger. Maybe it’s better if you restrict your questions to the bodies and what my findings are.”

“There are no boundaries right now, only questions.”

“Is this because you assume I may never be in court, at least not in New York, because I’m tainted?” I go ahead and open that door. “In fact, they don’t get much more tainted than I am right this minute.”

I pause to see if she knows. When she says nothing, I confront her. “Has Righter given you a hint that I may not prove very helpful to you? That I’m being investigated by a grand jury because he has this cockeyed notion that I had something to do with Bray’s death?”

“I’ve been given more than a hint,” she quietly replies as she stares out at Bray’s dark house. “Marino and I have talked about it, too.”

“So much for secret proceedings,” I sardonically say.

“Well, the rule is, nothing that goes on inside the grand jury room can be discussed. Nothing’s gone on yet. All that’s happening is Righter is using a special grand jury as a tool for gaining access to everything he can. About you. Your phone bills. Your bank statements. What people have to say. You know how it works. I’m sure you’ve testified in your share of grand jury hearings.”

She says all this as if it is routine. My indignation rises and spills over in words. “You know, I do have feelings,” I say. “Maybe murder indictments are everyday matters to you, but they aren’t to me. My integrity is the one thing I’ve got that I can’t afford to lose. It’s everything to me, and of all people to accuse of such a crime. Of all people! To even consider that I would do the very thing I fight against every waking minute of my life? Never. I don’t abuse power. Never. I don’t deliberately hurt people. Never. And I don’t take this bullshit in stride, Ms. Berger. Nothing worse could happen to me. Nothing.”

“Do you want my recommendation?” She looks at me.

“I’m always open for suggestions.”

“First, the media’s going to find out. You know that. I’d beat them to the draw and have a press conference. Right away. The good news is, you haven’t been fired. You haven’t lost the support of the people who have power over your professional life. A fucking miracle. Politicians are usually quick to run for cover, but the governor has a very high opinion of you. He doesn’t believe you killed Diane Bray. If he makes a statement to that effect, then you should be all right, providing the special grand jury doesn’t come back with a true bill, an indictment.”

“Have you discussed any of this with Governor Mitchell?” I ask her.

“We’ve had contact in the past. We’re acquainted. We worked a case together when he was AG.”

“Yes, I know that.” It also isn’t what I asked.

Silence. She stares out at Bray’s house. There are no lights on inside, and I point out that it was Chandonne’s MO to unscrew the lightbulb over the porch or pull out the wires, and when his victim opened the door, he was hidden by darkness.

“I would like your opinion,” she then says. “I’m confident you have one. You’re a very observant, seasoned investigator.” She says this firmly and with an edge. “You also know what Chandonne did to you—you are intimately familiar with his MO in a way no one else is.”

Her reference to Chandonne’s attack on me is jarring. Even though Berger is simply doing her job, I am offended by her blunt objectivity. I am also put off by her evasiveness. I resent that she decides what we will discuss and when and for how long. I can’t help it. I am human. I want her to show at least a hint of compassion toward me and what I have endured. “Someone called the morgue this morning and identified himself as Benton Wesley.” I drop that one on her. “You heard from Rocky Marino Caggiano yet? What’s he up to?” Anger and fear sharpen my voice.

“We won’t hear from him for a while,” she says as if she knows. “Not his style. But it sure wouldn’t surprise me if he’s up to his old tricks. Harassment. Hurting. Terrorizing. Going for the sensitive spots as a warning, if nothing else. My guess is you’ll have no direct contact with him or even catch a whiff of him until closer to the trial. If you ever see him at all. He’s like that, the son of a bitch. Behind the scenes all the way.”

Neither of us speaks for a moment. She is waiting for me to lower the gate. “My opinion or speculation, all right,” I finally say. “That’s what you want? Fine.”

“That’s what I want. You’d make a pretty good second seat.” A reference to a second D.A. who would be her co-counsel, her partner during a trial. Either she has just paid me a compliment or she is being ironical.

“Diane Bray had a friend who came over quite often.” I take my first step out of bounds. I begin deducing. “Detective Anderson. She was obsessed with Bray. Bray seriously teased her, so it appears. I think it’s possible Chandonne watched Bray and gathered intelligence. He observed Anderson come and go. On the night of the murder, he waited until Anderson left Bray’s house”—I stare out at it—“and immediately went up to it, unscrewed the porch light, then knocked on the door. Bray assumed it was Anderson returning to resume their argument or make up or whatever.”

“Because they’d been fighting. They fought a lot,” Berger carries along the narrative.

“By all appearances, it was a tempestuous relationship,” I keep heading deeper into restricted airspace. I am not supposed to enter this part of an investigation, but I keep going. “Anderson had stormed off and come back in the past,” I add.

“You sat in on the interview with Anderson after the body was found.” Berger knows this. Someone has told her. Marino, probably.

“Yes, I did.”

“And the story of what happened that night while Anderson was eating pizza and drinking beer at Bray’s house?”

“They got into an argument—this is according to Anderson. So Anderson left angry and soon after there is a knock on the door. The same pattern of knocking that Anderson always did. He imitated the way she knocked just as he imitated the police when he came to my house.”

“Show me.” Berger looks at me.

I knock on the console between the front seats. Three times, hard.

“This is how Anderson always knocked on the door? She didn’t use the doorbell?” Berger asks.

“You’ve been around cops enough to know that they hardly ever ring doorbells. They’re used to neighborhoods where doorbells don’t work, if they exist.”

“Interesting that Anderson didn’t come back,” she observes. “What if she had? Do you think Chandonne somehow knew she wasn’t going to come back that night?”

“I’ve wondered that, too.”

“Maybe just something he sensed about her demeanor when she left? Or maybe he was so out of control he couldn’t stop,” Berger ponders. “Or maybe his lust was stronger than his fear that he might be interrupted.”

“He may have observed one other important thing,” I say. “Anderson didn’t have a key to Bray’s house. Bray always let her in.”

“Yes, but the door wasn’t locked when Anderson came back the next morning and found the body, right?”

“Doesn’t mean it wasn’t locked when he was inside attacking Bray. He hung out a closed sign and locked the convenience store while he was killing Kim Luong.”

“But we don’t know for a fact that he locked the door behind him when he entered Bray’s house,” Berger reiterates.

“I certainly don’t know it for a fact.”

“And he might not have locked up.” Berger is into it. “He might have shoved his way in and the chase begins. The door is unlocked the entire time he is mutilating her body in the bedroom.”

“That would suggest he was out of control and taking big risks,” I point out.

“Hmmm. I don’t want to go down the road of out of control.” Berger seems to talk to herself.

“Out of control isn’t at all the same thing as insane,” I remind her. “All people who murder, except out of self-defense, are out of control.”

“Ah. Touché.” She nods. “So Bray opens the door, and the light is out and there he is in the dark.”

“This is also what he did to Dr. Stvan in Paris,” I tell Berger. “Women were being murdered over there, same MO, and in several cases Chandonne left notes at the crime scenes.”

“That’s where the name Loup-Garou comes from,” Berger interjects.

“He also wrote that name on a box inside the cargo container where the body was found—the body of his brother, Thomas. But yes,” I say, “he apparently began leaving notes, referring to himself as a werewolf when he began murdering over there, in Paris. One night, he showed up at Dr. Stvan’s door, not realizing that her husband was home sick. He works at night as a chef, but on this particular occasion, he was home unexpectedly, thank God. Dr. Stvan opens the door and when Chandonne hears her husband call out from another room, he flees.”

“She get a good look at him?”

“I don’t think so.” I conjure up what Dr. Stvan told me. “It was dark. It was her impression that he was dressed neatly in a long, dark coat, a scarf, his hands in his pockets. He spoke well, was gentlemanly, using the ruse that his car had broken down and he needed a phone. Then he realized she wasn’t alone and ran like hell.”

“Anything else she remembered about him?”

“His smell. He had a musky smell, like a wet dog.”

Berger makes a strange sound at that comment. I am becoming familiar with her subtle mannerisms, and when a detail is especially weird or disgusting, she sucks the inside of her cheek and emits a quiet rasping squeak like a bird. “So he goes after the chief medical examiner there, and then goes after the one here. You,” she adds for emphasis. “Why?” She has turned halfway around in her seat and is resting an elbow on the steering wheel, facing me.

“Why?” I repeat, as if it is a question I can’t possibly answer—as if it is a question she shouldn’t ask me. “Maybe someone should tell me that.” Again, I feel the heat of anger rise.

“Premeditation,” she replies. “Insane people don’t plan their crimes with this sort of deliberation. Picking the chief medical examiner in Paris and then the one here. Both women. Both autopsied his victims and therefore in a perverse way are intimate with him. Perhaps more intimate with him than a lover, because you have, in a sense, watched. You see where he has touched and bitten. You put your hands on the same body he did. In a way, you have watched him make love with these women, for this is how Jean-Baptiste Chandonne makes love to a woman.”

“A revolting thought.” I find her psychological interpretation personally offensive.

“A pattern. A plan. Not the least bit random. So it’s important we understand his patterns, Kay. And do so without personal revulsion or reaction.” She draws out a pause. “You must look at him dispassionately. You can’t indulge in hate.”

“It’s hard not to hate someone like him,” I reply honestly.

“And when we truly resent and hate someone, it’s also hard to give them our time and attention, to be interested in them as if they are worth figuring out. We have to be interested in Chandonne. Intensely interested. I need you to be more interested in him than you have in anyone else in your life.”

I don’t disagree with what Berger is saying. I know she is pointing out a significant truth. But I desperately resist being interested in Chandonne. “I’ve always been victim-driven,” I tell Berger. “I’ve never spent my time trying to get into the soul and mind of the assholes who do it.”

“And you’ve never been involved in a case like this, either,” she counters. “You’ve never been a suspect in a murder, either. I can help you with your mess. And I need you to help me with mine. Help me get into Chandonne’s mind, into his heart. I need you not to hate him.”

I am silent. I don’t want to give Chandonne any more of myself than he has already taken. I feel tears of frustration and fury and blink them back. “How can you help me?” I ask Berger. “You have no jurisdiction here. Diane Bray is not your case. You can drag her into your Molineux motion in Susan Pless’s murder, but I’m left hanging out to dry when it comes to a Richmond special grand jury. Especially if certain people are trying to make it appear that I killed her, killed Bray. That I’m deranged.” I take a deep breath. My heart races.

“The key to your clearing your name is my same key,” she replies. “Susan Pless. How could you possibly have had anything to do with that death? How could you have tampered with that evidence?”

She waits for my answer, as if I have one. The thought numbs me. Of course, I had nothing to do with Susan Pless’s murder.

“My question is this,” Berger goes on. “If the DNA from Susan’s case matches your cases here and possibly the DNA in the Paris cases, doesn’t that mean it has to be the same person who killed all these people?”

“I guess jurors don’t have to believe it beyond a reasonable doubt. All they need is probable cause,” I reply, playing devil’s advocate in my own dilemma. “The chipping hammer with Bray’s blood on it—found in my house. And a receipt showing that I bought a chipping hammer. And the chipping hammer I actually bought has vanished. All sort of sticks out like a smoking gun, Ms. Berger, don’t you think?”

She touches my shoulder. “Answer me this,” she says. “Did you do it?”

“No,” I reply. “No, I didn’t do it.”

“Good. Because I can’t afford for you to have done it,” she says. “I need you. They need you.” She stares out at the cold, empty house beyond our windshield, indicating Chandonne’s other victims, the ones who didn’t survive. They need me. “Okay.” She returns us to why we are waiting in this driveway. She returns us to Diane Bray. “So he comes through her front door. There’s no sign of a struggle and he doesn’t attack her until they are all the way to the other end of the house, in her bedroom. It doesn’t appear she attempted to escape or defend herself in any way. She never went for her gun? She’s a policewoman. Where’s her gun?”

“I know when he forced his way into my house,” I reply, “he tried to throw his coat over my head.” I am trying to do what she wants. I act as if I am talking about someone else.

“Then maybe he nets Bray with a coat or something else he threw over her head, and forced her back to the bedroom?”

“Maybe. The police never found Bray’s gun. Not that I know of,” I reply.

“Huh. Wonder what he did with that?” Berger muses.

Headlights shine in the rearview mirror and I turn around. A station wagon slows at the driveway.

“There was also money missing from her house,” I add. “Twenty-five hundred dollars, drug money Anderson had just brought over earlier that evening. According to her, to Anderson.” The station wagon pulls up behind us. “From the sale of prescription pills, if Anderson’s telling the truth.”

“Do you think she was telling the truth?” Berger asks.

“The whole truth? I don’t know,” I reply. “So maybe Chandonne took the money and he may have taken her gun, too. Unless Anderson took the money when she came back to the house the next morning and found the body. But after seeing what was in the master bedroom, it’s frankly hard for me to imagine she did anything but run like the wind.”

“Based on the photographs you’ve shown me, I would tend to agree,” Berger replies.

We get out. I can’t see Eric Bray well enough to recognize him, but my vague impression is of a well-dressed, attractive man who is close in age to his slain sister, maybe forty or so. He hands Berger a key attached to a manila tag. “The alarm code’s written on it,” he says. “I’m just going to wait out here.”

“I’m really sorry to put you to all this trouble.” Berger gathers a camera and an accordion file from the backseat. “Especially on Christmas Eve.”

“I know you people have to do your job,” he says in a dull, flat tone.

“Have you been inside?”

He hesitates and stares off at the house. “Can’t do it.” His voice rises with emotion and tears cut him off. He shakes his head and climbs back inside his car. “I don’t know how any of us . . . Well,” he clears his throat, talking to us through the open car door, the interior light on, the bell dinging. “How we’re ever going to go in and deal with her things.” He focuses on me, and Berger introduces us. I have no doubt he already knows very well who I am.

“There are professional cleaning services in the area,” I delicately tell him. “I suggest you contact one and have them go in before you or any other family member does. Service Master, for example.” I have been through this many times with families whose loved ones have died violently inside the residence. No one should have to go in and deal with their loved one’s blood and brains everywhere.

“They can just go in without us?” he asks me. “The cleaning people can?”

“Leave a key in a lock box at the door. And yes, they’ll go in and take care of things without you present,” I reply. “They’re bonded and insured.”

“I want to do that. We want to go on and sell this place,” he tells Berger. “If you’re not needing it anymore.”

“I’ll let you know,” she replies. “But you, of course, have the right to do whatever you want with the property, Mr. Bray.”

“Well, I don’t know who will buy it after what happened,” he mutters.

Neither Berger nor I comment. He is probably right. Most people do not want a house where someone has been murdered. “I already talked to one realtor,” he goes on in a dull voice that belies his anger. “They said they couldn’t take it on. They’re sorry and all that, but they didn’t want to represent the property. I don’t know what to do.” He stares out at the dark, lifeless house. “You know, we weren’t real close to Diane, no one in the family was. She wasn’t what I would call really into her family or friends. Mostly just into herself, and I know I probably shouldn’t say that. But it’s the damn honest truth.”

“Did you see her very often?” Berger asks him.

He shakes his head, no. “I guess I knew her best because we’re only two years apart. We all knew she had more money than we could understand. She stopped by my house on Thanksgiving, pulled up in this brand new red Jaguar.” He smiles bitterly and shakes his head again. “That’s when I knew for sure she was into something I probably didn’t want to know a damn thing about. I’m not surprised, really.” He takes a deep, quiet breath. “Not surprised really that it’s ended up like this.”

“Were you aware of her involvement in drugs?” Berger shifts her file to her other arm.

I am getting cold standing out here, and the dark house pulls at us like a black hole.

“The police have said some things. Diane never talked about what she did and we didn’t ask, frankly. As far as we know, she didn’t even have a will. So now we’ve got that mess, too,” Eric Bray tells us. “And what to do with her things.” He looks up at us from the driver’s seat and the dark can’t hide his misery. “I really don’t know what to do.”

So much eddies around a violent death. These are hardships that no one sees in the movies or reads about in the newspapers: the people left behind and the wrenching concerns they bear. I give Eric Bray my business card and tell him to call my office if he has any further questions. I go through my usual routine of letting him know the Institute has a booklet, an excellent resource called What to Do When the Police Leave written by Bill Jenkins, whose young son was murdered during the mindless robbery of a fast-food restaurant a couple years back. “The book will answer a lot of your questions,” I add. “I’m sorry. A violent death leaves many victims in its wake. That’s the unfortunate reality.”

“Yes, ma’am, that’s for damn sure,” he says. “And yes, I’d like to read anything you got. I don’t know what to expect, what to do about any of this,” he repeats himself. “I’m out here if you have any questions. I’ll be right here inside the car.”

He shuts his door. My chest is tight. I am touched by his pain, yet I can’t feel sorrow for his slain sister. If anything, the portrait he paints of her makes me like her even less. She wasn’t even decent to her own flesh and blood. Berger says nothing as we climb the front steps and I sense her never-ending scrutiny. She is interested in my every reaction. She can tell that I still resent Diane Bray and what she tried to do to my life. I make no effort to hide it. Why bother at this point?

Berger is looking up at the porch light, which is faintly illuminated by the headlights of Eric Bray’s car. It is a simple glass fixture, small and globe-shaped, supposed to be held into the fixture by screws. Police found the glass globe in the grass near a boxwood where Chandonne apparently tossed it. Then it was simply a matter of unscrewing the bulb, which “would have been hot,” I tell Berger. “So my guess is he covered it with something to protect his fingers. Maybe he used his coat.”

“No fingerprints on it,” she says. “Not Chandonne’s prints, according to Marino.” This is news to me. “But that doesn’t surprise me, assuming he covered the bulb so he didn’t burn his fingers,” she adds.

“What about the globe?”

“No prints. Not his.” Berger inserts the key in the lock. “But he might have his hands covered when he unscrewed that, too. Just wonder how he reached the light. It’s pretty high up.” She opens the door and the alarm system begins beeping. “Think he climbed up on something?” She goes to the key pad inside and enters the code.

“Maybe he climbed up on the railing,” I suggest, suddenly the expert on Jean-Baptiste Chandonne’s behavior and not liking the role.

“What about at your house?”

“He could have done that,” I reply. “Climbed up on the railing and steadied himself against the wall or the porch roof.”

“No prints on your light fixture or the bulb, in case you don’t know,” she tells me. “Not his, at any rate.”

Clocks tick-tock in the living room, and I remember how surprised I was when I walked into Diane Bray’s house for the first time, after she was dead, and discovered her collection of perfectly synchronized clocks and her grand but cold English antiques.

“Money.” Berger stands in the living room and looks around at the scroll-end sofa, the revolving bookcase, the ebonized sideboard. “Oh yes, indeed. Money, money, money. Cops don’t live like this.”

“Drugs,” I comment.

“No fucking kidding.” Berger’s eyes move everywhere. “User and dealer. Only she got others to be her mules. Including Anderson. Including your former morgue supervisor who was stealing prescription drugs that you assumed were being disposed of down the morgue sink. Chuck what’s-his-name.” She touches gold damask draperies and looks up at the valances. “Cobwebs,” she observes. “Dust that didn’t just appear during these last few days. There are other stories about her.”

“There must be,” I reply. “Selling prescription drugs on the street can’t account for all this and a new Jaguar.”

“Brings me back to a question I keep asking everyone who will stand still long enough for me to talk to them.” Berger moves on toward the kitchen. “Why did Diane Bray move to Richmond?”

I have no answer.

“Not for the job, no matter what she said. Not for that. No way.” Berger opens the refrigerator door. There is very little inside: Grape-Nuts cereal, tangerines, mustard, Miracle Whip. The two percent milk passed its expiration date yesterday. “Rather interesting,” Berger says. “I don’t think this lady was ever home.” She opens a cupboard and scans cans of Campbell’s soup and a box of saltine crackers. There are three jars of gourmet olives. “Martinis? I wonder. She drink a lot?”

“Not the night she died,” I remind her.

“That’s right. Point-oh-three alcohol level.” Berger opens another cupboard and another until she finds where Bray kept her liquor. “One bottle of vodka. One of Scotch. Two Argentine cabernets. Not the bar of someone who drank a lot. Probably was too vain about her figure to ruin it with booze. Pills at least aren’t fattening. When you came to the scene, was that the first time you’d ever been to her house—to this house?” Berger asks.

“Yes.”

“But your house is only a few blocks away.”

“I’d seen this house in passing. From the street. But no, I’d never been inside. We weren’t friends.”

“But she wanted to be friends.”

“I’m told she wanted to have lunch or whatever. To get to know me,” I reply.

“Marino.”

“That’s what Marino told me,” I confirm, getting used to her questions by now.

“Do you think she was sexually interested in you?” Berger asks this very casually as she opens a cabinet door. Inside are glasses and dishes. “There are plenty of intimations that she played both sides of the net.”

“I’ve been asked that before. I don’t know.”

“Would it have bothered you if she was?”

“It would have made me uncomfortable. Probably,” I admit.

“She eat out a lot?”

“It’s my understanding she did.”

I am noting that Berger asks questions I suspect she already has answered. She wants to hear what I have to say and weigh my perceptions against those of others. Some of what she explores carries the echo of what Anna asked me during our fireside confessionals. I wonder if it is remotely possible that Berger has talked to Anna, too.

“Reminds me of a store that’s a front for some illegal business,” Berger says as she checks out what’s beneath the sink: a few cleansers and several dried sponges. “Don’t worry,” she seems to read my mind. “I’m not going to let anyone ask you these sorts of things in court, about your sex life or whatever. Nothing about her personal life, either. I realize that’s not supposed to be your area of expertise.”

“Not supposed to be?” It seems an odd comment.

“Problem is, some of what you know isn’t hearsay, but knowledge you got directly from her. She did tell you”—Berger opens a drawer—“that she often ate out alone, sat at the bar at Buckhead’s.”

“That’s what she told me.”

“The night you met her there in the parking lot and confronted her.”

“The night I tried to prove that she was in collusion with my morgue assistant, Chuck.”

“And she was.”

“Unfortunately, she certainly was,” I reply.

“And you confronted her.”

“I did.”

“Well, good ol’ Chuck’s in lockup where he belongs.” Berger walks out of the kitchen. “And if it’s not hearsay,” she returns to that topic, “then Rocky Caggiano is going to ask you and I can’t object. Or I can, but it will get me nowhere. You need to realize that. And how it makes you look.”

“Right now, I’m more worried about how everything makes me look to a special grand jury,” I pointedly answer her.

She stops in the hallway. At the end of it, the master bedroom is behind a door that is carelessly ajar, adding to the ambiance of neglect and indifference that chills this place. Berger meets my eyes. “I don’t know you personally,” she says. “No one seated on that special grand jury is going to know you personally. It’s your word against a murdered policewoman’s that it was she who harassed you and not the other way around, and that you had nothing to do with her murder—even though you seem to think the world is better off without her.”

“Did you get that from Anna or Righter?” I bitterly ask her.

She starts down the hallway. “Pretty soon, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, you’re gonna get a thick skin,” she says. “I’m making that my mission.”

CHAPTER 26

BLOOD IS LIFE. It behaves like a living creature.

When the circulatory system is breached, the blood vessel contracts in a panic, making itself smaller in an attempt to diminish the blood flowing through it and out of the tear or cut. Platelets immediately rally to plug the hole. There are thirteen clotting factors and together they instigate their alchemy to stop blood loss. I have always thought that blood is bright red for a reason, too. It is the color of alarm, of emergency, of danger and distress. If blood were a clear fluid like sweat, we might not notice when we are injured or when someone else is. Bright red boasts of blood’s importance, and it is the siren that sounds when the greatest of all violations has occurred: when another person has maimed or taken a life.

Diane Bray’s blood cries out in drips and droplets, splashes and smears. It tattles on who did what and how and in some instances, why. The severity of a beating affects the velocity and volume of blood flying through the air. Cast-off blood from the backswing of a weapon tells the number of blows, which in this case were at least fifty-six. That is as precisely as we can calculate, because some blood spatters overlay other spatters and sorting out how many might be on top of each other is like trying to figure out how many times a hammer struck a nail to drive it into a tree. The number of blows mapped in this room are consistent with what Bray’s body told me. But again, so many fractures overlaid others and so much bone was utterly crushed that I, too, lost count. Hate. Incredible lust and rage.

There has been no attempt to clean up what happened in the master bedroom, and what Berger and I find contrasts profoundly with the stillness and sterility of the rest of the house. First, there is what looks like a massive bright pink web spun by crime scene technicians who have used a method called stringing to find the trajectories of blood droplets that are simply everywhere. The objective is to determine distance, velocity and angle, to conjure up through a mathematical model the exact position of Bray’s body when each blow was struck. The results look like a strange modern art design, a weird fuchsia geometry that leads the eye to walls, ceiling, floor, antique furniture and the four ornate mirrors where Bray once admired her spectacular, sensual beauty. Coagulated puddles of blood on the floor are now hard and thick like dried molasses, and the king-size bed where Bray’s body was so crudely displayed looks as if someone dashed cans of black paint across the bare mattress.

I feel Berger’s reaction as she stares. She is silent as she absorbs what is ghastly, truly incomprehensible. She becomes charged with a peculiar energy that only people, especially women, who battle violence for a living can really understand. “Where are the bed linens?” Berger opens the accordion file. “Were they turned in to the labs?”

“We never found them,” I reply, and I am reminded of the motel room at the campground. Those bed linens are missing, too. Chandonne claims bed linens disappeared from his apartment in Paris, I recall his saying.

“Removed before or after she was killed?” Berger slips photographs out of an envelope.

“Before. That’s apparent from the bloody transfers on the bare mattress.” I step inside the room, moving around strings that point accusingly at Chandonne’s crime like long slender fingers. I show Berger unusual parallel smears on the mattress, the bloody stripes transferred by the coil handle of the chipping hammer when Chandonne set it down on the mattress between or after blows. Berger doesn’t see the pattern at first. She stares, slightly frowning as I decipher a chaos of dark stains that are handprints and smears where I believe Chandonne’s knees may have been as he was straddling the body and acting out his horrific sexual fantasies. “These patterns wouldn’t have been transferred to the mattress if there were linens on the bed at the time of the attack,” I explain.

Berger studies a photograph of Bray on her back, sprawled across the middle of the mattress, black corduroy pants and belt on, but no shoes and socks, naked from the waist up, a smashed gold watch on her left wrist. A gold ring on her battered right hand is driven into the bone of her finger.

“So either there were no linens on the bed at the time, or he removed them for some reason,” I add.

“I’m trying to envision that.” Berger scans the mattress. “He’s in the house. He’s forcing her down the hallway, back to this area, to the bedroom. There’s no sign of a struggle—no evidence he injured her until they get in here and then boom! All hell breaks loose. My question is this: He gets her back here and then says, ‘Hey, wait a second while I strip the bed’? He takes time to do that?”

“By the time he got her on the bed, I seriously doubt she was talking or able to run. If you look here and here and here and here.” I refer to segments of string taped to blood droplets that begin at the bedroom’s entrance. “Cast-off blood from the backswing of the weapon—in this case, the chipping hammer.”

Berger follows the bright pink string design and tries to correlate what it indicates with what she is seeing in photographs she goes through. “Tell me the truth,” she says. “Do you really put a lot of credence in stringing? I know cops who think it’s bullshit and a huge waste of time.”

“Not if the person knows what he’s doing and is faithful to the science.”

“And the science is?”

I explain to her that blood is ninety-one percent water. It adheres to the physics of liquid, and it is affected by motion and gravity. A typical drop of blood will fall 25.1 feet per second. Stain diameter increases as the dropping distance increases. Blood dripping into blood produces a corona of spatters around the original pool. Splashed blood produces long, narrow spatters around a central stain, and as blood dries, it goes from bright red to reddish-brown to brown to black. I know experts who have spent their entire careers affixing medicine droppers of blood to ring stands, using plumb lines, squeezing or dripping or pouring or projecting blood onto a variety of target surfaces from a variety of angles and heights, and walking through puddles and stamping and slapping, and experimenting. Then, of course, there is the math, the straight-line geometry and trigonometry for figuring out point of origin.

The blood in Diane Bray’s bedroom, at a glance, is a videotape of what happened, but it is in a format that is unreadable unless we use science, experience and deductive reasoning to sort it out. Berger also wants me to use my intuition. Again, she wants me to edge beyond my clinical boundaries. I follow dozens of strands of string that connect spatters on the wall and the door frame and converge to a point in mid-air. Since you can’t tape string to thin air, the crime scene technicians moved an antique coat rack in from the foyer and taped the string some five feet from the base of it to determine the point of origin. I show Berger where Bray probably was standing when Chandonne struck the first blow.

“She was several feet inside the door,” I say. “See this void area here?” I point out a space on the wall where there is no blood, just spatters in an aura all around it. “Her body or his blocked blood from hitting that part of the wall. She was upright. Or he was. And if he was upright, we can assume she was because you don’t stand straight up and beat someone who is on the floor.” I stand straight up and show her. “Not unless you have arms six feet long. Also, the point of origin is more than five feet off the floor, implying this is where the blows were connecting with their target. Her body. Most likely, her head.” I move several feet closer to the bed. “Now she’s down.”

I point out smears and drips on the floor. I explain that stains produced from a ninety-degree angle are round. If, for example, you were on your hands and knees and blood was dripping straight down to the floor from your face, those drips would be round. Numerous drips on the floor are round. Some are smeared. They cover an approximate two-foot area. Bray was, for a brief time, on her hands and knees, perhaps trying to crawl as he kept on swinging.

“Did he kick or stomp?” Berger asks.

“Nothing I found would tell me that.” It is a good question. Stomping and kicking would add other shadings to the emotions of the crime.

“Hands are more personal than feet,” Berger remarks. “That’s been my experience in lust murders. Rarely do I see kicking, stomping.”

I walk around, pointing out more cast-off blood and satellite spatters before moving to a hardened puddle of blood several feet from the bed. “She bled out here,” I tell her. “This may be where he tore off her blouse and bra.”

Berger shuffles through photographs and finds the one of Bray’s green satin blouse and black underwire bra on the floor several feet from the bed.

“This close to the bed and we begin finding brain tissue.” I keep deciphering the gory hieroglyphics.

“He places her body on the bed,” Berger interpolates. “Versus forcing her on it. Question is, is she still conscious when he gets her on the bed?”

“I really don’t think so.” I point out tiny bits of blackened tissue adhering to the headboard, the walls, a bedside lamp, the ceiling over the bed. “Brain tissue. She doesn’t know what’s going on anymore. That’s just an opinion,” I offer.

“Still alive?”

“She’s still bleeding out.” I indicate dense black areas of the mattress. “That’s not an opinion. That’s a fact. She still has a blood pressure, but it’s very unlikely she’s conscious.”

“Thank God.” Berger has gotten out her camera and begins taking photographs. I can tell she is skilled and has been properly trained. She walks out of the room and starts shooting as she comes back in, recreating what I have just walked her through and capturing it on film. “I’ll get Escudero back here and videotape it,” she lets me know.

“The cops videoed it.”

“I know,” she replies as the flash goes off again and again. She doesn’t care. Berger is a perfectionist. She wants it done her way. “I’d love to have you on tape explaining all this, but can’t do it.”

She can’t, not unless she wants opposing counsel to have access to the same tape. Based on the resounding absence of note-taking, I am certain that she doesn’t want Rocky Caggiano to have access to a single word—written or spoken—that goes beyond what is on my standard reports. Her caution is extreme. I am shaded by suspicions that I have a hard time taking seriously. It really hasn’t penetrated that anyone might seriously think I murdered the woman whose blood is all around us and under our feet.

BERGER AND I finish with the bedroom. Next we explore other areas of the house that I paid little if any attention to when I was working the scene. I did go through the medicine cabinet in the master bedroom. I always do that. What people keep to alleviate bodily discomforts tells quite a story. I know who has migraines or mental illness or is obsessive about health. I know that Bray’s chemicals of choice, for example, were Valium and Ativan. I found hundreds of pills that she had put in Nuprin and Tylenol PM bottles. She had a small amount of BuSpar, too. Bray liked sedatives. She craved soothing. Berger and I explore a guest bedroom down the hall. It is a room I have never stepped inside, and unsurprisingly, it is unlived-in. It isn’t even furnished, but instead is cluttered with boxes that Bray apparently never unpacked.

“Are you getting the sensation that she wasn’t planning on staying here long?” Berger is beginning to talk to me as if I am part of her prosecution team, her second seat in the trial. “Because I sure am. And you don’t take on a major position in a police department without assuming you’re going to stick it out for at least a few years. Even if the job is nothing but a stepping stone.”

I look around inside the bathroom and note there is no toilet paper, no tissues, not even soap. But what I find inside the medicine cabinet surprises me. “Ex-Lax,” I announce. “At least a dozen boxes.”

Berger appears in the doorway. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she says. “Maybe our vain friend had an eating disorder.”

It is not uncommon with people who suffer from bulimia to use laxatives to purge themselves after bingeing. I lift the toilet seat and find evidence of vomit that has splashed up on the inside of the rim and the bowl. It is a reddish color. Bray supposedly ate pizza before she died, and I recall that she had very little stomach contents: traces of ground meat and vegetables.

“If someone threw up after eating and then died maybe a half hour or hour later, would you expect his stomach to be totally empty?” Berger follows what I am piecing together.

“There would still be traces of food clinging to the stomach lining.” I lower the toilet seat. “A stomach isn’t totally empty or clean unless the person has drunk huge amounts of water and purged. Like a lavage or a repeated infusion of water to wash out a poison, let’s say.” Another section of footage plays before my eyes. This room was Bray’s dirty, shameful secret. It is closed off from the regular flow of the house and no one but Bray ever came back here, so there was no fear of discovery, and I know enough about eating disorders and addictions to be very aware of the person’s desperate need to hide his shameful ritual from others. Bray was determined that no one would ever catch even the slightest hint that she was bingeing and purging, and perhaps her problem explains why she kept so little food in the house. Perhaps the medications helped control the anxiety that is inevitably part of any compulsion.

“Maybe this is one of the reasons she was so quick to run Anderson off after eating,” Berger conjectures. “Bray wanted to get rid of the food and wanted privacy.”

“That would be at least one reason,” I reply. “People with this affliction are so overwhelmed by the impulse it tends to override anything else that might be going on. So yes, she might have wanted to be alone to take care of her problem. And she might have been back here in this bathroom when Chandonne showed up.”

“Thus adding to her vulnerability.” Berger takes photographs of the Ex-Lax inside the medicine cabinet.

“Yes. She would have been alarmed and paranoid if she was in the middle of her ritual. And her first thought would have been about what she was doing—not about any imminent danger.”

“Distracted.” Berger bends over and photographs the toilet bowl.

“Extremely distracted.”

“So she hurries to finish what she’s doing, vomiting, ” Berger reconstructs. “She rushes out of here and shuts the door and goes to the front door. She’s assuming it’s Anderson who’s out there knocking three times. Very possibly, Bray’s rattled and annoyed and might even start saying something angry as she opens the door and . . .” Berger steps back out in the hallway, her mouth grimly set. “She’s dead.”

She lets this scenario hang pregnantly as we seek out the laundry room. She knows I can relate to the distraction and mind-searing horror of opening the front door and having Chandonne suddenly rush in from the darkness like a creature out of hell. Berger opens hall closet doors, then finds a door that leads to the basement. The laundry area is down here, and I feel strangely unsettled and unnerved as we walk about in the harsh glare of naked overhead lightbulbs that are turned on by tugging strings. I have never been in this part of the house, either. I have never seen the bright red Jaguar I have heard so much about. It is absurdly out of place in this dark, cluttered, dismal space. The car is gorgeously bold and an on-the-nose symbol of the power Bray craved and flaunted. I am reminded of what Anderson angrily said about her being Bray’s “gofer.” I seriously doubt Bray ever drove to the carwash herself.

The basement garage looks the way I imagine it did when Bray bought the house: a dusty, dark, concrete space frozen in time. There is no sign of improvements. Tools hanging on a pegboard and a push lawn mower are old and rusting. Spare tires lean against a wall. The washer and dryer are not new and although I feel certain the police checked them, I see no sign of it. Both machines are full. Whenever Bray did laundry last, she didn’t bother to empty either the washer or dryer, and lingerie, jeans and towels are hopelessly wrinkled and smell sour. Socks, more towels and work-out clothes in the washer were never put through the cycle. I pull out a Speedo running shirt. “Did she belong to a gym?” I ask.

“Good question. Vain and obsessive as she was, I suspect she did something to keep in shape.” Berger digs through clothes in the washer and pulls out a pair of panties that are spotted with blood in the crotch. “Talk about airing someone’s dirty laundry,” she ruefully comments. “Even I feel like a voyeur sometimes. So maybe she had her period recently. Not that it necessarily has anything to do with the price of tea in China.”

“It might have,” I reply. “Depends on how it affected her moods. PMS could certainly make her eating disorder worse, and mood swings couldn’t have helped her volatile relationship with Anderson.”

“Pretty amazing to think about the common, mundane things that can lead to catastrophe.” Berger drops the panties back into the machine. “I had a case one time. This man has to pee and decides to pull off Bleecker Street and relieve himself in an alleyway. He can’t see what he’s doing until another car goes by and illuminates the alleyway just enough for the poor old guy to realize he’s peeing on a bloody dead body. The guy peeing has a heart attack. A little later, a cop investigates this car illegally parked, goes in the alleyway and finds a dead Hispanic with multiple stab wounds. Next to him is a dead older white male with his dick hanging out of his unzipped pants.” Berger goes to a sink and rinses her hands, shakes them dry. “Took a little while to figure that one out,” she says.

CHAPTER 27

WE FINISH WITH Bray’s house at half past nine, and although I am tired, it would be impossible for me to even think about sleeping. I am energized in a strung-out way. My mind is lit up like a huge city at night and I almost feel feverish. I would never want to admit to anyone how much I actually enjoy working with Berger. She misses nothing. She keeps even more to herself. She has me intrigued. I have tasted the forbidden fruit of straying from my bureaucratic boundaries and I like it. I am flexing muscles I rarely get to use because she is not limiting my areas of expertise, and she is not territorial or insecure. Maybe I also want her to respect me, too. She has encountered me at my lowest point, when I am accused. She returns the house key to Eric Bray, who has no questions for us. He doesn’t even seem curious but just wants to be on his way.

“How are you feeling?” Berger asks me as we drive off. “Holding up?”

“Holding up,” I affirm.

She turns on an overhead light and squints at a Post-it on the dash. She dials a number on her car phone, leaving it on speaker. Her own recorded announcement comes on and she hits a code to see how many messages she has. Eight. And she picks up the handset so I can’t hear them. This seems odd. Is there some reason she wanted me to know how many messages she has? I am alone with my thoughts for the next few minutes as she drives through my neighborhood, the phone against her ear. She goes through messages quickly and I suspect we share the same impatient habit. If someone is long-winded, I tend to delete the message before it is finished. Berger, I bet, does the same thing. We follow Sulgrave Road through the heart of Windsor Farms, passing the Virginia House and Agecroft Hall—ancient Tudor mansions that were dismantled and crated in England and shipped over here by wealthy Richmonders back in an era when this part of the city was one huge estate.

We approach the guard booth for Lockgreen, my neighborhood. Rita steps out of the booth and I know instantly by her bland expression that she has seen this Mercedes SUV and its driver before. “Hi,” Berger says to her. “I have Dr. Scarpetta.”

Rita bends over and her face shines in the open window. She is happy to see me. “Welcome back,” she says with a hint of relief. “You’re home for good, I hope? It doesn’t seem right, you not being here. Seems real quiet these days.”

“Coming home in the morning.” I experience ambivalence, even fear, as I hear myself say the words. “Merry Christmas, Rita. It looks like all of us are working tonight.”

“Gotta do what you gotta do.”

Guilt pinches my heart as we drive off. This will be the first Christmas when I haven’t remembered the guards in some way. Usually, I bake bread for them or send food to whoever’s sad lot it is to be sitting in that small booth when he should be home with family. I have gotten quiet. Berger senses I am troubled. “It’s very important that you tell me your feelings,” she quietly says. “I know it’s completely against your nature and violates every rule you have laid down in your life.” We follow the street toward the river. “I understand all too well.”

“Murder makes everybody selfish,” I tell her.

“No kidding.”

“It causes unbearable anger and pain,” I continue. “You think only of yourself. I’ve done much statistical analysis with our computer database, and one day I’m trying to pull up the case of a woman who was raped and murdered. I hit on three cases with the same last name and discover the rest of her family: a brother who died of a drug overdose some years after the murder, then the father who committed suicide several years after that, the mother who got killed in a car accident. We’ve begun an ambitious study at the Institute, doing an analysis of what happens to the people left behind. They get divorced. They become substance abusers. Are treated for mental illness. Lose their jobs. Move.”

“Violence certainly poisons the lake,” Berger rather banally replies.

“I’m tired of being selfish. That’s what I’m feeling,” I say. “Christmas Eve, and what have I done for anybody? Not even for Rita. Here she’s working past midnight, has several jobs because she has children. Well, I hate this. He’s hurt so many people. He continues to hurt people. We’ve had two off-the-wall murders that I believe are related. Torture. International connections. Guns, drugs. Bed covers missing.” I look over at Berger. “When the hell is it going to stop?”

She turns into my driveway, making no pretense that she doesn’t know exactly which one it is. “The reality is, not soon enough,” she answers me.

Like Bray’s house, mine is completely dark. Someone has turned off all the lights, including the floodlights that are politely hidden in trees or in eaves and pointed down at the ground so they don’t light up my property like a baseball park and completely offend my neighbors. I don’t feel welcome. I dread walking inside and facing what Chandonne, what the police, have done to my private world. I sit for a moment and stare out my window as my heart sinks lower. Anger. Pain. I am deeply offended.

“What are you feeling?” Berger asks as she stares out at my house.

“What am I feeling?” I bitterly repeat. “So much for Più si prende e peggio si mangia.” I get out and angrily shut the car door.

Loosely translated, the Italian proverb means the more you pay, the worse you eat. Italian country life is supposed to be simple and sweet. It is supposed to be uncomplicated. The best food is made of fresh ingredients and people don’t rush away from the table or care about matters that really aren’t important. To my neighbors, my sturdy house is a fortress with every security system known to the human race. To me, what I built is a casa colonica, a quaint farmhouse of varying shades of creamy gray stone with brown shutters that warm me with reassuring, gentle thoughts of the people I come from. I only wish I had roofed my house with coppi, or curved terra-cotta tiles, instead of slate, but I didn’t want a red dragon’s back on top of rustic stone. If I couldn’t reasonably find materials that were old, at least I chose ones that blend with the earth.

The essence of who I am is ruined. The simple beauty and safety of my life is sullied. I tremble inside. My vision blurs with tears as I climb the front steps and stand beneath the overhead lamp that Chandonne unscrewed. The night air bites and clouds have absorbed the moon. It feels like it might snow again. I blink and take in several breaths of cold air in an effort to calm myself and shove down overwhelming emotion. Berger, at least, has the good grace to give me a moment of peace. She has dropped back as I insert my key into the deadbolt lock. I step inside the dark, cool foyer and enter the alarm code as an awareness raises the hair on the back of my neck. I flip on lights and blink at the steel Medeco key in my hand and my pulse picks up. This is crazy. It can’t be. No way. Berger is quietly coming through the door behind me. She looks around at the stucco walls and vaulted ceilings. Paintings are crooked. Rich Persian rugs are rumpled and disturbed and filthy. Nothing has been restored to its original order. It seems contemptuous that no one bothered to clean up dusting powder and tracked-in mud, but this isn’t why I have a look on my face that pins Berger’s complete attention.

“What is it?” she says, her hands poised to open her fur coat.

“I need to make a quick phone call,” I tell her.

I DON’T TELL Berger what I am thinking. I dont’t let on what I fear. I don’t divulge that when I stepped back outside the house to use my cell phone in private, I called Marino and asked him to come here right now.

“Everything all right?” Berger asks when I return and shut the front door.

I don’t answer her. Of course, everything isn’t all right. “Where do you want me to start?” I remind her we have work to do.

She wants me to reconstruct exactly what happened the night Chandonne tried to murder me, and we wander into the great room. I begin with the white cotton sectional sofa in front of the fireplace. I was sitting there last Friday night, going through bills, the television turned down low. Periodically, a newsbreak would come on, warning the public about the serial killer who calls himself Le Loup-Garou. Information had been released about his supposed genetic disorder, his extreme deformity, and as I remember that evening it almost seems absurd to imagine a very serious anchor on a local channel talking about a man who is maybe six feet tall, has weird teeth and a body covered with long baby-fine hair. People were advised not to open the door if they weren’t sure who was there.

“At about eleven,” I tell Berger, “I switched over to NBC, I think, to watch the late news and moments later my burglar alarm went off. The zone for the garage had been violated, according to the display on the keypad, and when the service called, I told them they’d better dispatch the police because I had no idea why the thing had gone off.”

“So your garage has an alarm system,” Berger repeats. “Why the garage? Why do you think he tried to break into it?”

“To deliberately set off the alarm so the police would come,” I repeat my belief. “They show up. They leave. Then he shows up. He impersonates the police and I open my door. No matter what anybody says or what I heard on the videotape when you interviewed him, he spoke English, perfect English. He had no accent at all.”

“Didn’t sound like the man in the videotape,” she agrees.

“No. Certainly not.”

“So you didn’t recognize his voice in that tape.”

“I didn’t,” I reply.

“You don’t think he was really trying to get inside your garage, then. That this was just for the purpose of setting off the alarm,” Berger probes, as usual writing nothing down.

“I doubt it. I think he was trying to do exactly what I said.”

“And how do you suppose he knew your garage had an alarm system?” Berger inquires. “Rather unusual. Most homes don’t have an alarm system in the garage.”

“I don’t know if he knew or how he knew.”

“He could have tried a back door instead, for example, and been assured that the alarm would go off, assuming you had it on. And I fully believe he knew you would have it on. We can assume he knows you are a very security-minded woman, especially in light of the murders going on around here.”

“I have no clue what would go through his mind,” I say rather tersely.

Berger paces. She stops in front of the stone fireplace. It gapes empty and dark and makes my house seem unlived-in and neglected like Bray’s. Berger points a finger at me, “You do know what he thinks,” she confronts me. “Just as he was gathering intelligence on you and getting a feel for how you think and what your patterns are, you were doing the same thing to him. You read about him in the wounds of the bodies. You were communicating with him through his victims, through the crime scenes, through everything you learned in France.”

CHAPTER 28

MY TRADITIONAL ITALIAN white sofa is stained pink from formalin. There are footprints on a cushion, probably left by me when I jumped over the sofa to escape Chandonne. I will never sit on that sofa again and can’t wait to have it hauled away. I perch on the edge of a nearby matching chair.

“I must know him to dismantle him in court,” Berger goes on, her eyes reflecting her inner fire. “I can only know him through you. You must make that introduction, Kay. Take me to him. Show him to me.” She sits on the hearth and dramatically lifts her hands. “Who is Jean-Baptiste Chandonne? Why your garage? Why? What is special about your garage? What?”

I think for a moment. “I can’t begin to say what might be special about it to him.”

“All right. Then what’s special about it to you?”

“It’s where I keep my scene clothes.” I begin trying to figure out what might be special about my garage. “And an industrial-size washer and dryer. I never wear scene clothes inside my house, so that’s rather much my changing room, out there in the garage.”

Something shines in Berger’s eyes, a recognition, a connection. She gets up. “Show me,” she says.

I turn on lights in the kitchen as we pass on through to the mud room, where a door leads into the garage.

“Your home locker room,” Berger comments.

I flip on lights and my heart constricts as I realize the garage is empty. My Mercedes is gone.

“Where the hell’s my car?” I ask. I scan walls of cabinets, and the specially ventilated cedar locker, and neatly stored yard and gardening supplies, the expected tools, and an alcove for the washer, dryer and a big steel sink. “No one has said anything about taking my car anywhere.” I look accusingly at Berger and am rocked by instant distrust. But either she is quite an actor, or she has no clue. I walk out into the middle of the garage and look around, as if I might find something that will tell me what has happened to my car. I tell Berger my black Mercedes sedan was here last Saturday, the day I moved to Anna’s. I haven’t seen the car since. I haven’t been here since. “But you have,” I add. “Was my car here when you were here last? How many times have you been here?” I go ahead and ask her that.

She is walking around, too. She squats before the garage door and examines scrapes on the rubber strip where we believe Chandonne used some type of tool to pry the door up. “Could you open the door, please?” Berger is grim.

I press a button on the wall and the door loudly rolls up. The temperature inside the garage instantly drops.

“No, your car wasn’t here when I was.” Berger straightens up. “I’ve never seen it. In light of circumstances, I suspect you do know where it is,” she adds.

The night fills the large empty space and I walk over to where Berger is standing. “Probably impounded,” I say. “Jesus Christ.”

She nods. “We’ll get to the bottom of it.” She turns to me and there is something in her eyes I’ve never before seen. Doubt. Berger is uneasy. Maybe it is wishful thinking on my part, but I sense she feels bad for me.

“So now what?” I mutter, looking around my garage as if I have never seen it before. “What am I supposed to drive?”

“Your alarm went off around eleven o’clock Friday night,” Berger is all business again. She is firm and no-nonsense again. She returns to our mission of retracing Chandonne’s steps. “The cops arrive. You take them in here and find the door open about eight inches.” Obviously, she has seen the incident report of the attempted breaking and entering. “It was snowing and you found footprints on the other side of the door.” She steps outside and I follow. “The footprints were covered with a dusting of snow, but you could tell they led around the side of the house, up to the street.”

We stand on my driveway in the raw air, both of us without coats. I stare up at the murky sky and a few flakes of snow coldly touch my face. It has started again. Winter has become a hemophiliac. It can’t seem to stop precipitating. Lights from my neighbor’s house shine through magnolias and bare trees, and I wonder how much peace of mind the people of Lockgreen have left. Chandonne has tainted life for them, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if some people move.

“Can you remember where the footprints were?” Berger asks.

I show her. I follow my driveway around the side of the house and cut through the yard, straight out to the street.

“Which way did he go?” Berger looks up and down the dark, empty street.

“Don’t know,” I reply. “The snow was churned up and it was snowing again. We couldn’t tell which way he went. But I didn’t stay out here looking, either. I guess you’ll have to ask the police.” I think about Marino. I wish he would hurry up and get here, and I am reminded of why I called him. Fear and bewilderment crackle up my spine. I look around at my neighbors’ houses. I have learned to read where I live and can tell, by windows lit up, by cars in the driveway and newspaper deliveries, when people are home, which really isn’t often. So much of the population here is retired and wintering in Florida and spending hot summer months on the water somewhere. It occurs to me that I have never really had friends in my neighborhood, only people who wave when we pass each other in our cars.

Berger walks back toward the garage, hugging herself to keep warm, the moisture in her breath freezing and puffing out white. I remember Lucy as a child coming to visit from Miami. Her only exposure to the cold was Richmond, and she would roll up notebook paper and stand out on the patio, pretending to smoke, tapping imaginary ashes, not knowing I was watching through a window. “Let’s back up,” Berger is saying as she walks. “To Monday, December sixth. The day the body was found in the container at the Richmond Port. The body that we believe was Thomas Chandonne, allegedly murdered by his brother, Jean-Baptiste. Tell me exactly what happened that Monday.”

“I was notified about the body,” I begin.

“By whom?”

“Marino. Then minutes later, my deputy chief, Jack Fielding, called. I said I would respond to the scene,” I begin.

“But you didn’t have to,” she interrupts. “You’re the chief. We have a stinky, nasty decomposing body on an unseasonably warm morning. You could have let, uh, Fielding or whoever respond.”

“I could have.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“It was clearly going to be a complicated case. The ship was out of Belgium and we had to entertain the possibility that the body originated in Belgium, thus adding international difficulties. I tend to take the hard cases, the ones that will get a lot of publicity.”

“Because you like the publicity?”

“Because I don’t like it.”

We are inside my garage now and both of us are thoroughly chilled. I shut the door.

“And maybe you wanted to take this case because you’d had an upsetting morning?” Berger walks over to the large cedar locker. “You mind?” I tell her to help herself as I marvel again at the details she seems to know about me.

Black Monday. That morning, Senator Frank Lord, chairman of the judiciary committee and an old, dear friend, came to see me. In his possession was a letter Benton had written to me. I knew nothing about this letter. It would never occur to me that while Benton was on vacation at Lake Michigan some years ago, he had written me a letter and instructed Senator Lord to give it to me should he—Benton—die. I remember recognizing the penmanship when Senator Lord delivered the letter to me. I will never forget the shock. I was devastated. Grief finally caught up with me and seized my soul, and this was precisely what Benton had intended. He was the brilliant profiler to the end. He knew exactly how I would react should something happen to him, and he was forcing me out of my workaholic denial.

“How do you know about the letter?” I numbly ask Berger.

She is looking inside the locker at jumpsuits, rubber boots, waders, heavy leather gloves, long underwear, socks, tennis shoes. “Please bear with me,” she says almost gently. “Just answer my questions for now. I’ll answer yours later.”

Later isn’t good enough. “Why does the letter matter?”

“I’m not sure. But let’s start with state of mind.”

She lets that sink in. My state of mind is the bull’s-eye of Caggiano’s target, should I end up in New York. More immediately, it is what everyone else seems to be questioning.

“Let’s assume if I know something, the opposing counsel does, too,” she adds.

I nod.

“You get this letter out of the blue. From Benton.” She pauses and emotion flickers across her face. “Let me just say . . .” She looks away from me. “That would have undone me, too, totally. I’m sorry for what you’ve been through.” She meets my eyes. Another ploy to make me trust her, bond with her? “Benton is reminding you a year after his death that you’ve probably not dealt with his loss. You’ve run like hell from the pain.”

“You can’t have seen the letter.” I am stunned and outraged. “It’s locked in a safe. How do you know what it says?”

“You showed it to other people,” she reasonably replies.

I realize with the little bit of objectivity I have left that if Berger hasn’t talked to everyone around me, including Lucy and Marino, she will. It is her duty. She would be foolish and negligent if she didn’t. “December the sixth,” she resumes. “He wrote the letter on December the sixth, nineteen-ninety-six, and instructed Senator Lord to deliver it to you on the December the sixth following Benton’s death. Why was that date special to Benton?”

I hesitate.

“Thick skin, Kay,” she reminds me. “Thick skin.”

“I don’t know the significance of December the sixth, exactly—except Benton mentioned in the letter that he knew Christmas is hard for me,” I reply. “He wanted me to get the letter close to Christmas.”

“Christmas is hard for you?”

“Isn’t it hard for everybody?”

Berger is silent. Then she asks, “When did your intimate relationship with him begin?”

“In the fall. Years ago.”

“Okay. In the fall, years ago. That’s when you began your sexual relationship with him.” She says this as if I am avoiding reality. “When he was still married. When your affair with him began.”

“That’s right.”

“Okay. This past December the sixth, you get the letter and later that morning responded to the scene at the Richmond port. Then you came back here. Tell me exactly what your routine is when you come straight home from a crime scene.”

“My scene clothes were double-bagged in the trunk of my car,” I explain. “A jumpsuit and tennis shoes.” I keep staring at the empty space where my car should be. “The jumpsuit went into the washing machine, the shoes into a sink of scalding water with disinfectant.” I show her the shoes. They are still parked on the shelf where I left them to dry more than two weeks ago.

“Then?” Berger walks over to the washing machine and dryer.

“Then I stripped,” I tell her. “I took off everything and put it in the washing machine, started it up and went inside the house.”

“Naked.”

“Yes. I went back to my bedroom, to the shower, without stopping. That’s how I disinfect if I come straight home from a scene,” I conclude.

Berger is fascinated. She has a theory going, and whatever it is, I am feeling increasingly uncomfortable and exposed. “I just wonder,” she muses. “Just wonder if he somehow knew.”

“Somehow knew? And I really would like to go inside, if it’s all right with you,” I say. “I’m freezing.”

“Somehow knew your routine,” she persists. “If he was interested in your garage because of your routine. It was more than setting off the alarm. Maybe he really was trying to get in. The garage is where you take off your death clothes—in this instance, clothes sullied by a death he caused. You were nude and vulnerable, even if ever so briefly.” She follows me back inside and I shut the mud room door behind us. “He might have a real sexual fantasy about that.”

“I can’t see how he could know a damn thing about my routine.” I resist her hypothesis. “He didn’t witness what I did that day.”

She raises an eyebrow as she looks at me. “Can you say that as fact? Any possibility he followed you home? We know he was at the port at some point, because that’s how he got to Richmond—aboard the Sirius, where he’d covered himself with a white uniform, shaved visible areas of his body, and stayed in the galley most of the time, working as the cook and keeping to himself. Isn’t that the theory? I certainly don’t buy what he said when I interviewed him—that he stole a passport and wallet and flew coach.”

“It’s a theory that he arrived at the same time his brother’s body showed up,” I reply.

“So Jean-Baptiste, caring guy that he is, probably hung around in the ship and watched all you people scurrying around when the body was found. Greatest show on earth. These assholes love to watch us work their crimes.”

“How could he have followed me?” I get back to that outrageous thought. “How? He had a car?”

“Maybe he did,” she says. “I’m getting around to entertaining the possibility that Chandonne wasn’t the lone, wretched creature who just happened upon your city because it was convenient or even random. I’m no longer sure what his connections are, and I’m beginning to wonder if perhaps he might have been part of a grander scheme that has to do with the family business. Perhaps even with Bray herself, since she clearly was involved in an underworld of crime. And now we have other murders, one of the victims clearly involved in organized crime. An assassin. And an undercover FBI agent working a gun-smuggling case. And the hairs at the campground that might be Chandonne’s. This is all adding up to something more than a man who killed his brother, took his place on a ship bound for Richmond—all to get out of Paris because his nasty little habit of murdering and mutilating women was becoming increasingly inconvenient to his powerful criminal family. Then he starts killing here because he can’t control himself? Well.” Berger leans against the kitchen counter. “There are just too many coincidences. And how did he get to the campground if he didn’t have a car? Assuming those hairs turn out to be his,” she repeats.

I sit down at the table. There are no windows inside my garage, but there are small windows in the garage door. I consider the possibility that Chandonne did follow me home and peeped through the garage door at me while I was cleaning up and undressing. Maybe he had help finding the abandoned house on the river, too. Maybe Berger is right. Maybe he isn’t alone and never has been. It is almost midnight, almost Christmas, and Marino still isn’t here and Berger’s demeanor tells me she could keep going until dawn.

“Alarm goes off,” she resumes. “Cops come and go. You return to the great room.” She motions me to follow her there. “You’re sitting where?”

“On the sofa.”

“Right. TV on, going through bills, and around midnight what?”

“There’s a knock on the front door,” I reply.

“Describe the knock.”

“A rapping with something hard.” I try to remember every detail. “Like a flashlight or tactical baton. The way police knock. I get up and ask who’s there. Or I think I ask. I’m not sure, but a male voice identifies himself as police. He says a prowler has been spotted on my property and asks if everything’s okay.”

“And that makes sense because we know a prowler was there about an hour earlier, when someone tried to force open your garage door.”

“Exactly.” I nod. “I turn off the alarm and open the door, and he is there,” I add as if I am talking about nothing more threatening than trick-or-treaters.

“Show me,” Berger says.

. . .

I WALK THROUGH the great room, past the dining room and to the entrance hall. I open the door, and just the act of recreating a scenario that almost cost me my life causes a visceral reaction. I feel sick. My hands begin to tremble. My front porch light is still out because the police removed the bulb and fixture and submitted them to the labs to be processed for fingerprints. No one has replaced them. Exposed wires dangle from the porch ceiling. Berger is waiting patiently for me to continue. “He rushes inside,” I say. “And back-kicks the door shut behind him.” I shut the door. “He has this black coat and he tries to put it over my head.”

“Coat on or off when he came in?”

“On. He was grabbing it off as he came through the door.” I am standing still. “And he tried to touch me.”

“Tried to touch you?” Berger frowns. “With the chipping hammer?”

“With his hand. He reached out his hand and touched my cheek, or tried to touch it.”

“You stood there while he did that? Just stood there?”

“It all happened so fast,” I say. “So fast,” I repeat. “I’m not sure. I just know he tried to do that and was snatching off his coat and trying to throw it over my head. And I ran.”

“What about the chipping hammer?”

“He had it out. I’m not sure. Or he got it out. But I know he had it out when he was chasing me into the great room.”

“Not out at first? He didn’t have the chipping hammer out at first? You’re sure?” She presses me on this point.

I try to remember, to envision it. “No, not at first,” I decide. “He tried to touch me first with his hand. Then net me. Then he pulled out the chipping hammer.”

“Can you show me what you did next?” she asks.

“Run?”

“Yes, run.”

“Not like that,” I say. “I’d have to have the same adrenaline rush, the same panic, to run like that.”

“Kay, walk me through it, please.”

I move out of the entrance hall, past the dining room and back into the great room. Straight ahead is the yellow Jarrah coffee table I discovered at that wonderful shop in Katonah, New York. What was the name? Antipodes? The rich blond wood glows like honey and I try not to notice the dusting powder all over it, or that somebody left a 7-Eleven coffee cup on it. “The jar of formalin was here, on this corner of the table,” I tell Berger.

“And it was there because . . . ?”

“Because of the tattoo in it. The tattoo I’d removed from the back of the body that we believe is Thomas Chandonne.”

“The defense is going to want to know why you brought human skin to your house, Kay.”

“Of course. Everyone’s been asking me that.” I feel a rush of annoyance. “The tattoo is important and created many, many questions because we just couldn’t figure out what it was. Not only was the body badly decomposed, thus making it very difficult to even see the tattoo, but then it turned out that it was a cover-up tattoo. One tattoo covering up another, and it was crucial, especially, that we determine what the original tattoo was.”

“Two gold dots that were covered up with an owl,” Berger says. “Every member of the Chandonne cartel has two gold dots tattooed on him.”

“That’s what Interpol told me, yes,” I say, and by now I have accepted that she and Jay Talley have spent a lot of quality time together.

“Brother Thomas was screwing his family, had his own side business, was diverting ships, falsifying bills of lading, running his own guns and drugs. And the theory is the family caught on. He changed his tattoo into an owl and began using aliases because he knew the family would kill him if they found him,” I recite what I have been told, what Jay told me in Lyon.

“Interesting.” She touches a finger to her lips, looking around. “And it appears the family did kill him. The other son did. The jar of formalin. Why did you bring it home? Tell me again.”

“It wasn’t really deliberate. I went to a tattoo parlor in Petersburg to have the tattoo from the body looked at by someone who’s an expert, a tattoo artist. I came straight home from there and left the tattoo in my office here. It was just a chance situation that the night he came here . . .”

“Jean-Baptiste Chandonne.”

“Yes. The night he came here I had carried the jar in here, in the great room, and was looking at it while I was doing other things. I set it down. He pushes his way into my house and I run. By now he has the chipping hammer out and has it raised to strike me. It was just a panicked reflex that I see the jar and grab it. I jump over the back of the sofa and unscrew the lid and throw the formalin in his face.”

“A reflex because you know very well how caustic formalin is.”

“You can’t smell it every day and not know. It’s accepted in my profession that exposure to formalin is a chronic danger, and all of us fear being splashed,” I explain, realizing how my story may sound to a special grand jury. Contrived. Unbelievable. Grotesquely bizarre.

“Have you ever gotten it in your eyes?” Berger asks me. “Ever splashed yourself with formalin?”

“No, thank God.”

“So you dashed it in his face. Then what?”

“I ran out of the house. On my way, I grabbed my Glock pistol off the dining room table, where I’d left it earlier. I go outside, slip on the icy steps and fracture my arm.” I hold up my cast.

“And what’s he doing?”

“He came out after me.”

“Instantly?”

“It seems like it.”

Berger moves around to the back of the sofa and stands at the area of antique French oak flooring where formalin has eaten off the finish. She follows the lighter areas of hardwood. The formalin apparently splashed almost to the entrance of the kitchen. This is something I didn’t realize until this moment. I only remember his shrieks, his howls of pain as he grabbed at his eyes. Berger stands in the doorway, staring in at my kitchen. I go to her, wondering what has caught her interest.

“I have to stray off subject and say I don’t think I’ve ever seen a kitchen quite like this,” she comments.

The kitchen is the heart of my house. Copper pots and pans shine like gold from racks around the huge Thirode stove that is central to the room and includes two grills, a hot water bath, a griddle, two hot plates, gas tops, a charbroiler and an oversized burner for the huge pots of soup I love to make. Appliances are stainless steel, including the Sub-Zero refrigerator and freezer. Racks of spices line the walls and there is a butcher block the size of a twin bed. The oak floor is bare, and there is an upright wine cooler in a corner and a small table by the window that offers a distant view of a rocky bend in the James River.

“Industrial,” Berger mutters as she walks around a kitchen that, yes, I must admit, fills me with pride. “Someone who comes in here to work but loves the finer things in life. I’ve heard you’re an amazing cook.”

“I love to cook,” I tell her. “It gets my mind off everything else.”

“Where do you get your money?” she boldly asks.

“I’m smart with it,” I reply coolly, never one to discuss money. “I’ve been lucky with investments over the years, very lucky.”

“You’re a smart businesswoman,” Berger says.

“Try to be. And then when Benton died, he left his Hilton Head condo to me.” I pause. “I sold it, couldn’t stay there anymore.” I pause again. “Got six-hundred-and-something thousand for it.”

“I see. And what’s this?” She points out the Milano Italian sandwich maker.

I explain.

“Well, when this is all over, you’ll have to cook for me sometime,” she says rather presumptuously. “And rumor has it that you cook Italian. Your specialty.”

“Yes. Mostly Italian.” There is no rumor involved. Berger knows more about me than I do. “Do you suppose he might have come in here and tried to wash his face in the sink?” she then asks.

“I don’t have any idea. All I can tell you is I ran out and fell, and when I looked up he was staggering out the door after me. He came down the steps, still screaming, and dropped to the ground and started rubbing snow in his face.”

“Trying to wash the formalin out of his eyes. It’s rather oily, isn’t it? Hard to wash out?”

“It wouldn’t be easy,” I reply. “You would want copious amounts of warm water.”

“And you didn’t offer that to him? Made no effort to help him?”

I look at Berger. “Come on,” I say. “What the hell would you have done?” Anger spikes. “I’m supposed to play doctor after the son of a bitch has just tried to beat my brains out?”

“It will be asked,” Berger matter-of-factly answers me. “But no. I wouldn’t have helped him, either, and that’s off the record. So he’s in your front yard.”

“I left out that I hit the panic alarm when I was running out of the house,” I remember.

“You grabbed the formalin. You grabbed your gun. You hit the panic alarm. You had pretty damn good presence of mind, didn’t you?” she comments. “Anyway, you and Chandonne are in your front yard. Lucy pulls up and you have to talk her out of shooting him point-blank in the head. ATF and all the troops show up. End of story.”

“I wish it were the end of the story,” I say.

“The chipping hammer,” Berger gets back to that. “Now you figured out what the weapon was because you went to a hardware store and just looked around until you found something that might have made a pattern like the one on Bray’s body?”

“I had more to go on than you might think,” I reply. “I knew Bray was struck with something that had two different surfaces. One rather pointed, the other more square. Actual punched-out areas of her skull clearly showed the shape of what struck her, and then the pattern on the mattress that I knew was made when he set down something bloody. Which most likely was the weapon. A hammer or pickax-type weapon of some sort, but unusual. You look around. You ask people.”

“And then of course when he came to your house, he had this chipping hammer inside his coat or whatever and tried to use it on you.” She says this dispassionately, objectively.

“Yes.”

“So there were two chipping hammers at your house. The one you bought in the hardware store after Bray had already been murdered. And a second hammer, the one he brought with him.”

“Yes.” I am stunned by what she has just indicated. “Good God,” I mutter. “That’s right. I bought the hammer after she was murdered, not before.” I am so confused by what has passed, by the days, by all of it. “What am I thinking? The date on the receipt . . .” My voice fades. I remember paying cash in the hardware store. Five dollars, something like that. I don’t have a receipt, I am fairly sure, and I feel the blood drain from my face. Berger has known all along what I have forgotten: that I didn’t buy the hammer before Bray was beaten to death, but the day after. But I can’t prove it. Unless the clerk who waited on me in the hardware store can produce the cash register tape and swear I am the one who bought the chipping hammer, there is no proof.

“And now one of them is gone. The chipping hammer you bought is gone,” Berger is saying as my mind reels. I tell her I am not privy to what the police found.

“But you were there when they were searching your house. Were you not in your house while the police were?” she asks me.

“I showed them whatever they wanted to see. I answered their questions. I was there on Saturday and left early that evening, but I can’t say I saw everything they did or what they took, nor were they finished when I left. Frankly, I don’t even know how long they were in my house or how many times.” I am touched by anger as I explain all this, and Berger senses it. “Christ, I didn’t have a chipping hammer when Bray was murdered. I’ve been confused because I bought it the day her body was found, not the day she died. She was murdered the night before, her body found the next day.” I am rambling now.

“What exactly is a chipping hammer used for?” Berger next asks. “And by the way, hate to tell you, but no matter when you say you bought the chipping hammer, Kay, there remains the minor problem that the one—the only one—found at your house happened to have Bray’s blood on it.”

“They’re used for masonry. There’s a lot of slatework in this area. And stonework.”

“So probably used by roofers? And the theory is that Chandonne found a chipping hammer at the house he had broken into. The place under construction where he was staying?” Berger is relentless.

“I believe that’s the theory,” I reply.

“Your house is made of stone and has a slate roof,” she says. “Did you closely supervise when it was being built? Because you seem the sort who would. A perfectionist.”

“You’re foolish not to supervise if you’re building.”

“I’m just wondering if you might have ever seen a chipping hammer while your house was being built. Maybe at the construction site or in a workman’s tool belt?”

“Not that I recall. But I can’t be sure.”

“And you never owned one prior to your shopping expedition at Pleasants Hardware on the night of December seventeenth—two weeks ago exactly and almost twenty-four hours after Bray was murdered?”

“Not before that night. No, I never owned one before then, not that I am aware of,” I tell her.

“What time was it when you bought the chipping hammer?” Berger asks as I hear the deep thunder of Marino’s truck parking in front of my house.

“Sometime around seven. I don’t know exactly. Maybe between six-thirty and seven, that Friday night, the night of December seventeenth,” I reply. I am not thinking clearly now. Berger is wearing me down and I can’t imagine how any lie could stand up to her long. The problem is knowing what is a lie, and what isn’t, and I am not convinced she believes me.

“And you went home right after the hardware store?” she goes on. “Tell me what you did the rest of the night.”

The doorbell rings. I glance at the Aiphone on the wall in the great room and see Marino’s face looming on the video screen. Berger has just asked the question. She has just tested the alchemy that I am sure Righter will use to turn my life to shit. She wants to know my alibi. She wants to know where I was at the exact time Bray was murdered on Thursday night, December sixteenth. “I’d just come in from Paris that morning,” I reply. “Ran errands, got home around six P.M. Later that night, around ten, I drove to MCV to check on Jo—Lucy’s former girlfriend, the one who got in the shooting with her in Miami. I wanted to see if I could help out in that situation because the parents were interfering.” My doorbell rings again. “And I wanted to know where Lucy was, and Jo told me Lucy was at a bar in Greenwich Village.” I start walking toward the door. Berger is staring at me. “In New York. Lucy was in New York. I came home and called her. She was drunk.” Marino rings the bell again and pounds on the door. “So to answer your question, Ms. Berger, I have no alibi for where I was between six and maybe ten-thirty Thursday night because I was either in my home or in my car—alone, absolutely alone. No one saw me. No one talked to me. I have no witnesses to the fact that where I wasn’t between seven-thirty and ten-thirty was at Diane Bray’s house beating her to death with a goddamn chipping hammer.”

I open the door. I can feel Berger’s eyes burning into my back. Marino looks as if he is about to fly apart. I can’t tell if he is furious or scared to death. Maybe both. “What the hell?” he asks, his eyes going from me to her. “What the shit’s going on?”

“I’m sorry for making you stand out in the cold,” I tell Marino. “Please come in.”

CHAPTER 29

MARINO TOOK SO long getting here because he had stopped by the property room at headquarters. I had asked him to pick up the stainless-steel key I found in the pocket of Mitch Barboso’s running shorts. Marino tells Berger and me that he rooted around for quite some time inside that small room behind wire mesh where Spacesaver shelves are crowded with bar-coded bags, some of which hold items the police took from my house last Saturday.

I have been in the property room before. I can picture it. Portable phones ring from inside those bags. Pagers go off as unwitting people keep trying to call associates who are either locked up or dead. There are also locked refrigerators for the storage of Physical Evidence Recovery Kits and any other evidence that might be perishable—such as the raw chicken I pounded with the chipping hammer.

“Now, why did you pound raw chicken with a chipping hammer?” Berger wants further clarification on this part of my rather odd story.

“To see if the injuries correlated to the ones on Bray’s body,” I reply.

“Well, the chicken’s still inside the evidence refrigerator,” Marino says. “Gotta say, you sure beat the hell out of it.”

“Describe in detail exactly what you did to the chicken,” Berger prods me, as if I am on the witness stand.

I face her and Marino inside my entrance hallway and explain that I placed raw chicken breasts on a cutting board and beat them with every side and edge of the chipping hammer to note the pattern of injuries. The wounds from both the blunt-bladed tip and the pointed tip were identical in configuration and measurement to those on Bray’s body, particularly to the punched-out areas in her cartilage and skull, which are excellent for retaining the shape—or tool mark—of whatever penetrated them. Then I spread out a white pillowcase, I explain. I rolled the coiled handle of the chipping hammer in barbecue sauce. What kind of barbecue sauce? Berger wants to know, of course.

I recall it was Smokey Pig barbecue sauce that I had thinned to the consistency of blood, and then I pressed the sauce-coated handle against the cloth to see what that transfer pattern looked like. I got the same striations that were left in blood on Bray’s mattress. The pillowcase with its barbecue sauce imprints, Marino says, were turned in to the DNA lab. I remark that this is a waste of time. We don’t test for tomatoes. I am not trying to be funny but am sufficiently frustrated to emit a spark of sarcasm. The only result the DNA lab will get from the pillowcase, I promise, is not human. Marino is pacing the floor.

I am screwed, he says, because the chipping hammer I bought and did all these tests with is gone. He couldn’t find it. He looked everywhere for it. It isn’t listed in the evidence computer. It clearly was never turned in to the evidence room, nor was it picked up by forensic technicians and receipted to the labs. It is gone. Gone. And I have no receipt. By now I am sure of this.

“I told you from my car phone that I had bought it,” I remind him.

“Yeah,” he says. He remembers my calling him from my car after I left Pleasants Hardware store, sometime between six-thirty and seven. I told him I believed a chipping hammer was what had been used on Bray. I said I had bought one. But, he points out, that doesn’t mean I didn’t buy such a tool after Bray’s murder to fabricate an alibi. “You know, to make it look like you didn’t own one or even know what she was killed with until after the fact.”

“Whose goddamn side are you on?” I say to him. “You believe this Righter bullshit? Jesus. I can’t take any more of this.”

“This isn’t about sides, Doc,” Marino grimly replies as Berger looks on.

We are back to there being only one hammer: the one with Bray’s blood on it found inside my house. Specifically, in my great room on the Persian rug, exactly seventeen and a half inches to the right of the Jarrah Wood coffee table. Chandonne’s hammer, not my hammer, I keep saying as I imagine cheap brown paper bags with a voucher number and bar code that represent Scarpetta—me, behind wire mesh on Spacesaver shelves.

I lean against the wall inside my entry hallway and feel lightheaded. It is as if I am having an out-of-body experience, looking down on myself after something terrible and final has happened. My undoing. My destruction. I am dead like other people whose brown paper bags end up in that evidence room. I am not dead, but maybe it is worse to be the accused. I hate even to suggest the next stage of my undoing. It is overkill. “Marino,” I say, “try the key in my door.”

He hesitates, frowning. Then he slips the clear plastic evidence bag out of the inner pocket of his old leather jacket with its balding fleece lining. Cold wind punches into the house as he opens the front door and slides the steel key—easily slides it—into the lock, and clicks the lock, and the dead bolt slides open and shut.

“The number written on it,” I quietly tell Marino and Berger. “Two-thirty-three. That’s my burglar alarm code.”

“What?” Berger, for once, is almost speechless.

The three of us go into my great room. This time I perch on the cold hearth, like Cinderella. Berger and Marino avoid sitting on the ruined couch, but situate themselves near me, looking at me, waiting for any possible explanation. There is but one, and I think it is rather obvious. “Police and God knows who else have been in and out of my house since Saturday,” I begin. “A drawer in the kitchen. In it are keys to everything. My house, my car, my office, file cabinets, whatever. So it’s not like someone didn’t have easy access to a spare key to my house, and you guys had my burglar alarm code, right?” I look at Marino. “I mean, you weren’t leaving my house unarmed after you left it. And the alarm was on when we came in a little while ago.”

“We need a list of everybody who’s been inside this house,” Berger grimly decides.

“I can tell you everybody I know about,” Marino answers. “But I haven’t been here every time somebody else has. So I can’t say I know who everybody is.”

I sigh and lean my back against the fireplace. I start naming cops I saw with my own eyes, including Jay Talley. Including Marino. “And Righter’s been in here,” I add.

“As have I,” Berger replies. “But I certainly didn’t let myself in. I had no idea what your code is.”

“Who let you in?” I ask.

Her answer is to look at Marino. It bothers me that Marino never told me he was Berger’s tour guide. It is irrational for me to feel stung. After all, who better than Marino? Who do I trust more than him? Marino is visibly agitated. He gets up and strolls through the doorway leading into my kitchen. I hear him open the drawer where I keep the keys, then he opens the refrigerator.

“Well, I was with you when you found that key in Mitch Barbosa’s pocket,” Berger starts to think out loud. “You couldn’t have put it there, couldn’t have planted it.” She is working this out. “Because you weren’t at the scene. And you didn’t touch the body unwitnessed. I mean, Marino and I were right there when you unzipped the pouch.” She blows out in frustration. “And Marino?”

“He wouldn’t,” I cut her off with a weary wave of my hand. “No way. Sure, he had access, but no way. And based on his account of the crime scene, he never saw Barbosa’s body. It was already being loaded into the ambulance when he pulled up on Mosby Court.”

“So either one of the cops at the scene did it . . .”

“Or more likely,” I finish her thought, “the key was placed in Barbosa’s pocket when he was killed. At the crime scene. Not where he was dumped.”

Marino walks in drinking a bottle of Spaten beer that Lucy must have bought. I don’t remember buying it. Nothing about my house seems to belong to me anymore, and Anna’s story comes to mind. I am beginning to understand the way she must have felt when Nazis occupied her family home. I realize, suddenly, that people can be pushed beyond anger, beyond tears, beyond protest, beyond even grief. Finally, you just sink into a dark mire of acceptance. What is, is. And what was, is past. “I can’t live here anymore,” I tell Berger and Marino.

“You got that right,” Marino fires back in the aggressive, angry tone he seems to wear like his own skin these days.

“Look,” I say to him, “don’t bark at me anymore, Marino. We’re all angry, frustrated, worn out. I don’t understand what’s happening, but it’s clear someone connected to us is also involved in the murder of these two recent victims, these men who were tortured, and I guess whoever planted my key on Barbosa’s body wants to either implicate me in those crimes, as well, or more likely, is sending me a warning.”

“I think it’s a warning,” Marino says.

And where’s Rocky these days? I almost ask him.

“Your dear son Rocky,” Berger says it for me.

Marino takes a slug of beer and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He doesn’t respond. Berger glances at her watch and looks up at us. “Well,” she says, “Merry Christmas, I guess.”

CHAPTER 30

ANNA’S HOUSE IS dark and still when I come in at nearly three A.M. She has thoughtfully left on a light in the hallway and one in the kitchen near a crystal tumbler and the bottle of Glenmorangie, just in case I need a sedative. At this hour, I decline. A part of me wishes Anna were awake. I am halfway tempted to rattle around in hopes she will wander in and sit down with me. I have become oddly addicted to our sessions even if I am now supposed to wish they had never taken place. I make my way to the guest wing and start thinking about transference and wonder if I am experiencing this with Anna. Or maybe I just feel lonely and gloomy because it is Christmas and I am wide awake and frazzled in someone else’s house after investigating violent death all day, including one I am accused of committing.

Anna has left a note on my bed. I pick up the elegant creamy envelope and can tell by its weight and thickness that whatever she has written is lengthy. I leave my clothes in a pile on the bathroom floor and imagine the ugliness that must linger in their very fabrics because of where I have been and what I have done the past twenty hours. I do not realize until I am out of the shower that the clothes carry with them the dirty fire smell of the motel room. Now I ball them up in a towel so I can forget about them until they can go to the dry cleaner. I wear one of Anna’s thick robes to bed and am edgy as I pick up the letter again. I open it and unfold six stiff pages of watermarked engraved stationery. I begin to read, willing myself not to go too fast. Anna is deliberate and wants me to take in every word, because she does not waste words.

Dearest Kay,

As a child of the war, I learned that truth is not always what is right or good or best. If the SS came to your door and asked if you had Jews inside, you did not tell the truth if you were hiding Jews. When members of the Totenkopf SS occupied my family home in Austria, I could not tell the truth about how much I hated them. When the SS commander of Mauthausen came into my bed so many nights and asked me if I enjoyed what he did to me, I did not tell the truth.

He would tell vile jokes and hiss in my ear, imitating the sound of the Jews being gassed, and I laughed because I was afraid. He would get very drunk sometimes when he came back from the camp, and once he bragged he had killed a 12-year-old village boy in nearby Langenstein during an SS hunting raid. Later I learned this was not so, that the Leitstelle—Chief of Staatspolizei in Linz—was the one who shot the boy, but I believed what I was told at the time and my fear was indescribable. I, too, was a civilian child. No one was safe. (In 1945 that same commander died in Gusen and his body was displayed to the public for days. I saw it and spat. That was the truth about how I felt—a truth I could not tell earlier!)

Truth is relative, then. It is about timing. It is about what is safe. Truth is the luxury of the privileged, of people who have plenty of food and are not forced to hide because they are Jews. Truth can destroy, and therefore it is not always wise or even healthy to be truthful. A strange thing for a psychiatrist to admit, yes? I give you this lesson for a reason, Kay. After you read my letter, you must destroy it and never admit it existed. I know you well. Such a small covert act will be hard for you. If you are asked, you must say nothing about what I am telling you here.

My life in this country would be ruined if it was known that my family gave food and shelter to the SS, no matter that our hearts were not in it. It was to survive. I also think you would be greatly harmed if people should know that your best friend is a Nazi sympathizer, as I am certain I would be called. And oh, what a terrible thing to be called, especially when one hates them as I do. I am a Jew. My father was a prescient man and very aware of what Hitler intended to do. In the late thirties, my father used his banking and political connections and wealth to secure entire new identities for us. He changed our name to Zenner and moved us from Poland to Austria when I was too young to be aware of much.

So you might say that I have lived a lie since I can remember. Perhaps this helps you understand why I do not want to be interrogated in a legal proceeding and why I will avoid this if I can. So Kay, the real reason for this long letter is not to tell my story. At last I talk to you about Benton.

I am quite certain you do not know that for a while he was my patient. About three years ago, he came to see me in my office. He was depressed and had many work-related difficulties that he could not speak of to anyone, including you. He said that throughout his career with the FBI he had seen the worst of the worst—the most aberrant acts imaginable, and although he had been haunted by them and suffered in many ways because of this exposure to what he called “evil,” he had never felt truly afraid. Most of those bad people were not interested in him, he said. They meant him no personal harm, and in fact enjoyed the attention he paid to them when he interviewed them in prison. As for the many cases he helped police solve, again, he was in no personal danger. Serial rapists and killers were not interested in him.

But then strange things began to happen to him some months before he came to see me. I wish I could remember better, Kay, but there were odd events. Phone calls. Hang-ups that could not be traced because they were made by satellite (I guess he meant cell phones). He got crank mail that made very terrible references to you. There were threats made toward you, again untraceable. It was clear to Benton that whoever was writing the letters knew something about both of you personally.

Of course, he was very suspicious of Carrie Grethen. He kept saying, “We haven’t heard the last from that woman.” But at the time, he did not see how she could be making the calls and sending the mail because she was still locked up in New York—in Kirby.

I will sum up six months of conversations with Benton by saying he had a very strong premonition that his death was imminent. He suffered subsequent depression, anxiety, paranoia and began to struggle with alcohol. He said he hid bouts of heavy drinking from you and that his problems were causing a deterioration in his relationship with you. As I listened to some of what you told me during our talks, Kay, I can see that his behavior at home did change. Now perhaps you understand some of the reasons why.

I wanted to put Benton on a mild antidepressant but he would not let me. He worried constantly about what would happen to you and Lucy if something happened to him. He wept about it openly in my office. It was I who suggested he write the letter that Senator Lord delivered to you several weeks ago. I said to Benton, “Imagine you are dead and have one last chance to say something to Kay.” So he did. He said to you the words you read in his letter.

During our sessions, I suggested to him repeatedly that perhaps he knew more about who was harassing him and perhaps denial was preventing him from facing the truth. He hesitated. I remember so well I had a feeling he possessed information he could not or would not say. Now I am beginning to think I might know. I have reached the conclusion that what began happening to Benton several years ago and what is now happening to you are connected to Marino’s Mafia son. Rocky is involved with very powerful criminal people and he hates his father. He would hate everyone who matters to his father. Can it be a coincidence that Benton got threatening letters and was murdered, and then this terrible killer, Chandonne, ends up in Richmond and now Marino’s terrible son is Chandonne’s lawyer? Is this tortuous road not winding, at last, to some dreadful conclusion that is meant to bring down everyone good in Marino’s life?

In my office, Benton often referred to a Tlip file. In it he kept all the strange, menacing letters and other records of communications and incidents that he had begun to receive. For months, I thought he was saying Tip file, as in police tips. But one day I made mention of his Tip file and he corrected me and said the file was actually his T-L-P file which he pronounced tlip. I next asked what TLP stood for, and he said The Last Precinct. I asked him what he meant by that and his eyes filled with tears. His exact words to me were this: “The Last Precinct is where I will end up, Anna. It is where I’ll end up.”

You cannot imagine my feeling when Lucy mentioned that this is also the name for the investigative consulting company that she has now gone to work for in New York. When I was so upset last night, it was not simply over the subpoena delivered to my house. What happened was the following: I got the subpoena. I called Lucy because I thought she should know what was happening to you. She said her “new boss” (Teun McGovern) was in town and mentioned The Last Precinct. I was shocked. I still am shocked and do not understand what all this means. Does Lucy perhaps know about Benton’s file?

Again, can this be coincidence, Kay? Did she just happen to think up the same name that Benton called his secret file? Can all these connections be coincidences? Now there is something called The Last Precinct and it is located in New York and Lucy is moving to New York, the trial of Chandonne has moved to New York because he killed in New York two years ago while Carrie Grethen was still incarcerated in New York, and Carrie’s former murderous partner Temple Gault was killed (by you) in New York, and Marino began his police career in New York. And Rocky lives in New York.

Let me close by telling you I feel so badly over any hand I might have in making your current situation worse, although you can be sure I intend to say nothing that can be twisted. Never. I am too old for this. Tomorrow, on Christmas Day, I will leave for my house in Hilton Head, where I will stay until it is all right to return to Richmond. I do this for several reasons. I do not intend to make it easy for Buford or anyone else to get to me. Most important, you need some place to stay. Do not go back to your house, Kay.

Your devoted friend,

Anna

I read and reread. I feel sick as I imagine Anna growing up in the poisonous air of Mauthausen and knowing what went on there. I feel the deepest sorrow that all her life she has listened to references to Jews and bad jokes about Jews and learned more of the atrocities committed against Jews, all the while knowing she is a Jew. No matter how she rationalizes it, what her father did was cowardly and wrong. I suspect he also knew Anna was being raped by the SS commander he wined and dined, and Anna’s father did nothing about that, either. Not one thing.

I realize it is now almost five o’clock in the morning. My eyelids are heavy, my nerves buzzing. There is no point in trying to sleep. I get up and go into the kitchen to make coffee. For a while I sit before the dark window looking out toward a river I can’t see and contemplate everything Anna has revealed to me. So much about Benton’s last years now makes sense. I think of days when he claimed to have a tension headache, and I thought he looked hung over and now I suspect he probably was. He was increasingly depressed and distant and frustrated. In a way, I understand his not telling me about the letters, the phone calls, the Tlip file, as he referred to it. But I don’t agree with him. He should have told me.

I have no recollection of having come across such a file when I was going through his belongings after his death. But then, there is so much I don’t remember about that time. It was as if I were living under the earth, moving ever so heavily and slowly, and unable to see where I was going or where I had been. After Benton’s death, Anna helped me sort through his personal effects. She cleaned out his closets and went through his drawers while I was in and out of rooms like a crazed insect, helping one minute, ranting and weeping the next. I wonder if she came across that file. I know I must find it, if it still exists.

The first morning light is a hint of deep blue as I fix coffee for Anna and carry it back to her bedroom. I listen outside her door to see if I hear any sign of her being awake. All is still. I quietly open her door and carry her coffee in. I set it down on the oval table by her bed. Anna likes night-lights. Her suite is lit up like a runway, lights inserted in almost every receptacle. When I first became aware of this, I thought it odd. Now I begin to understand. Perhaps she associates utter darkness with being alone and terrified in her bedroom, waiting for a drunken, stinking Nazi to come in and overpower her young body. No wonder she has spent her life dealing with damaged people. She understands damaged people. She is as much a student of her past tragedies as she has said I am of mine.

“Anna?” I whisper. I see her stir. “Anna? It’s me. I’ve brought you coffee.”

She sits up with a start, squinting, her white hair in her face and sticking up in places.

Merry Christmas, I start to say. I tell her “happy holidays” instead.

“All these years I celebrate Christmas while I am secretly Jewish.” She reaches for her coffee. “I am not known for a sweet disposition early in the morning,” she says.

I squeeze her hand, and in the dark she seems suddenly so old and delicate. “I read your letter. I’m not sure what to say but I can’t destroy it, and we must talk about it,” I tell her.

For an instant she pauses. I think I catch relief in her silence. Then she gets stubborn again and waves me off, as if by a mere gesture she can dismiss her entire history and what she has told me about my own life. Night-lights cast exaggerated, deep shadows of Biedemeier furniture and antique lamps and oil paintings in her large, gorgeous bedroom. Thick silk draperies are drawn. “I probably should not have written any of that to you,” she says firmly.

“I wish you’d written it to me sooner, Anna.”

She sips her coffee and pulls the covers up to her shoulders.

“What happened to you as a child isn’t your fault,” I say to her. “The choices were made by your father, not you. He protected you in one way and didn’t protect you at all. Maybe there was no choice.”

She shakes her head. “You do not know. You cannot know.”

I am not about to argue with that.

“There are no monsters to compare with them. My family had no choice. My father drank a lot of schnapps. He was drunk most the time on schnapps and they would get drunk with him. To this day I cannot smell schnapps.” She clutches the coffee mug in both hands. “They all got drunk, it did not matter. When Reichsminister Speer and his entourage visited installations at Gusen and Ebensee, they came to our schloss, oh yes, our quaint little castle. My parents had this sumptuous banquet with musicians from Vienna and the finest champagne and food, and everyone was drunk. I remember I hid in my bedroom, so afraid of who would come next. I hid under the bed all night and several times there were footsteps in my room and once someone yanked the covers back and swore. I stayed on the floor under the bed all night dreaming of the music and of one young man who made such sweetness flow from his violin. He looked at me often and made me blush and as I hid under my bed later that night, I thought of him. No one who made such beauty could be unkind. All night I thought of him.”

“The violinist from Vienna?” I asked. “The one you later . . . ?”

“No, no.” Anna shakes her head in the shadows. “This was many years before Rudi. But I think it is when I fell in love with Rudi, in advance, having never met him. I saw the musicians in their black cutaways and was mesmerized by the magic they made, and I wanted them to steal me from the horror. I imagined myself soaring on their notes into a pure place. For a moment, I was returned to Austria before the quarry and the crematorium, when life was simple, the people decent and fun and had perfect gardens and such pride in their homes. On sunny spring days we would hang our goose-down duvets out windows to be scrubbed by the sweetest air I have ever breathed. And we would play in rolling fields of grass that seemed to lead right up to the sky while father would hunt in the woods for boar and mother would sew and bake.” She pauses, her face touched by sweet sadness. “That a string quartet could transform the most dreadful of nights. And then later, my magical thinking carries me into the arms of a man with a violin, an American. And I am here. I am here. I escaped. But I have never escaped, Kay.”

DAWN BEGINS TO light up the drapes and turn them the color of honey. I tell Anna I am glad she is here. I thank her for talking to Benton and for finally letting me know. In some ways the picture is more complete because of what I now understand. In some ways, it isn’t. I can’t sharply outline the progression of moods and changes that preceded Benton’s murder, but I do know that about the time he was seeing Anna, Carrie Grethen was looking for a new partner to replace Temple Gault. Carrie had worked in computers earlier in her life. She was brilliant and incredibly manipulative and talked her way into gaining access to a computer at the forensic psychiatric hospital, Kirby. This was how she cast her web back out into the world. She linked up with a new partner—another psychopathic killer named Newton Joyce. She did this through the Internet, and he helped her escape from Kirby.

“Perhaps she met certain other people through the Internet, too,” Anna suggests.

“Marino’s son. Rocky?” I say.

“I am thinking it.”

“Anna, do you have any idea what happened to Benton’s file? The Tlip file, as he called it?”

“I have never seen it.” She sits up straighter, deciding it is time to get out of bed, and the covers settle around her waist. Her bare arms look pitifully thin and wrinkled, as if someone has let the air out of them. Her bosom sags low and loose beneath dark silk. “When I helped you sort through his clothing and other personal belongings, I did not see a file. But I did not touch his office.”

I remember so little.

“No.” She pulls back the covers and lowers her feet to the floor. “I would not. That was not something I would go into. His professional files.” She is up now and slips on a robe. “I just assumed you would have gone through those.” She looks at me. “You have, yes? What about his office at Quantico? He had already retired, so I suppose he had cleaned that out already?”

“That was cleaned out, yes.” We walk down the hallway toward the kitchen. “Case files would have stayed there. Unlike some of his compatriots who retire from the FBI, Benton didn’t believe cases he worked belonged to him,” I add ruefully. “So I know he didn’t take any case files away from Quantico when he retired. What I don’t know is if he would have left the Tlip file with the Bureau. If so, I’ll never see it.”

“That was his file,” Anna points out. “Correspondence to him. When he spoke about it to me, he never referred to what was happening to him as Bureau business. He seemed to take the threats, the crank calls, as something personal, and I am not aware that he ever shared these things with other agents. He was so paranoid, mostly because some of the threats involved you. I was led to believe I am the only person he told. I know this. I said to him many times that I believed he should tell the FBI.” She shook her head. “He would not,” she says again.

I empty the coffee filter into the trash and feel a spike of old resentment. Benton kept so much from me. “A shame,” I reply. “Maybe if he’d told some of the other agents, none of this would have happened.”

“Would you like more coffee?”

I am reminded that I did not go to bed last night. “I guess I’d better,” I reply.

“Some Viennese coffee,” Anna decides, opening the refrigerator and picking through bags of coffee. “Since I am feeling nostalgic for Austria this morning.” She says this with a hint of sarcasm, as if she is silently berating herself for divulging details of her past. She pours beans into the grinder and the kitchen is filled briefly with noise.

“Benton got disillusioned with the Bureau in the end,” I think out loud. “I’m not sure he trusted people around him anymore. Competitiveness. He was the unit chief and knew everybody was going to fight over his job the minute he even mentioned he was ready to retire. Knowing him, he handled his problems in total isolation—the same way he worked his cases. If nothing else, Benton was a master of discretion.” I am running through every possibility. Where would Benton have kept the file? Where might it be? He had his own room in my house where he stored his belongings and plugged in his laptop. He had file drawers. But I have been through those and never saw anything even similar to what Anna has described.

Then I think of something else. When Benton was murdered in Philadelphia, he was checked into a hotel. Several bags of his personal effects were returned to me, including his briefcase, which I opened. I went through it just as the police had. I know I didn’t see anything like this Tlip file, but if it is true Benton was suspicious that Carrie Grethen might have had something to do with the crank calls and notes he was getting, might he not have carried the Tlip file with him when he was working new cases possibly connected to her? Wouldn’t he have brought the file to Philadelphia?

I go to the phone and call Marino. “Merry Christmas,” I say. “It’s me.”

“What?” he blurts out, half asleep. “Oh shit. What time is it?”

“A few minutes past seven.”

“Seven!” Groan. “Hell, Santa ain’t even come yet. What you calling me so early for?”

“Marino, this is important. When the police went through Benton’s personal effects in the hotel room in Philadelphia, did you go through them?”

A big yawn and he blows out loudly. “Damn, I gotta quit staying up so late. My lungs are killing me, got to quit smoking. Me and some of the guys and Wild Turkey hung out last night.” Another yawn. “Hold on. I’m coming to. Let me switch channels. One minute it’s Christmas, next you’re asking about Philadelphia?”

“That’s right. The stuff you guys found in Benton’s hotel room.”

“Yeah. Hell, yeah I went through it.”

“Did you take anything? Anything, for example, that might have been in his briefcase? A file, for example, that might have had letters in it?”

“He had a couple files in there. Why do you want to know?”

I am getting excited. My synapses are firing, clearing my head and pumping energy into my cells. “Where are these files now?” I ask him.

“Yeah, I remember some letters. Weirdo shit that I thought I should pay some attention to. Then Lucy blew Carrie and Joyce out of the air and turned them into fish chum, and that exceptionally cleared the case, I guess you could say. Shit. I still can’t believe she had a fucking AR-fifteen in the damn helicopter and . . .”

“Where are the files?” I ask him again and I can’t keep the urgency out of my voice. My heart is pounding. “I need to see a file that had the weird letters. Benton called it his Tlip file. T-L-P. As in The Last Precinct. Maybe where Lucy got the idea for the name.”

“The Last Precinct. You mean where Lucy’s going to work—McGovern’s place in New York? What the hell’s that got to do with some file in Benton’s briefcase?”

“Good question,” I tell him.

“Okay. It’s somewhere. I gotta find it, and I’ll be over.”

Anna has gone back to her bedroom, and I occupy myself with thinking about our holiday meal as I wait for Lucy and McGovern to get here. I start pulling food out of the refrigerator as I replay what Lucy told me about McGovern’s new company in New York. Lucy said the name The Last Precinct started out as a joke. Where you go when there is nowhere left. And in Anna’s letter, she said Benton told her The Last Precinct is where he would end up. Cryptic. Riddles. Benton believed his future was somehow connected to what he was putting in that file. The Last Precinct was death, I then consider. Where was Benton going to end up? He was going to end up dead. Is this what he meant? Where else might he have ended up?

Days ago, I promised Anna I would cook Christmas dinner if she did not mind an Italian in her kitchen who does not go near a turkey or what people stuff in turkeys during the holidays. Anna has made a valiant effort at shopping. She even has cold-pressed olive oil and fresh buffalo mozzarella. I fill a large pot with water and go back to Anna’s bedroom to tell her she can’t go to Hilton Head or anywhere else until she has eaten a little cucina Scarpetta and sampled a little wine. This is a family day, I tell her as she brushes her teeth. I don’t care about special grand juries or prosecutors or anything else until after dinner. Why doesn’t she make something Austrian? At this she almost spits out toothpaste. Never, she says. If both of us were in the kitchen at the same time, we would kill each other.

For a while, the mood seems to lift in Anna’s house. Lucy and McGovern appear around nine and gifts are piled under the tree. I start mixing eggs and flour and work it all together with my fingers on a wooden cutting board. When the dough is the right consistency, I wrap it in plastic and start looking for the hand-cranked pasta machine Anna claims to have somewhere as I jump from thought to thought, barely hearing what Lucy and McGovern are chatting about.

“It’s not that I can’t fly when it’s not VFR conditions.” Lucy is explaining something about her new helicopter, which apparently has been delivered to New York. “I have my instrument rating. But I’m not interested in having an instrument-rated single-engine helicopter because with only one engine, I want to see the ground at all times. So I don’t want to be flying above the clouds on crappy days.”

“Sounds dangerous,” McGovern comments.

“It’s not in the least. The engines never quit in these things, but it pays to always consider the worst-case scenario.”

I begin kneading the dough. It is my favorite part of making pasta, and I always refrain from using food processors because the warmth of the human touch gives a texture to fresh pasta that is unlike anything agitating steel blades can effect. I get into a rhythm, pushing down, folding over, giving half-turns, pressing hard with the heel of my good hand as I, too, think of worst-case scenarios. What might Benton have believed was the worst-case scenario for him? If he was thinking that his metaphorical Last Precinct was where he would end up, what would have been the worst-case scenario? This is when I decide he didn’t mean death when he said he would end up in The Last Precinct. No. Benton of all people knew there are far worse things than death.

“I’ve given her lessons off and on. Talk about a quick study. But people who use their hands have an advantage,” Lucy is saying to McGovern, talking about me.

It is where I will end up. Benton’s words shine my mind.

“Right. Because it takes coordination.”

“Got to be able to use both hands and both feet at the same time. And unlike fixed wing, a helicopter is intrinsically unstable.”

“That’s what I’m saying. They’re dangerous.”

It is where I’ll end up, Anna.

“They aren’t, Teun. You can lose an engine at a thousand feet and fly it right down to the ground. The air keeps the blades turning. Ever heard of autorotating? You land in a parking lot or someone’s yard. You can’t do that with a plane.”

What did you mean, Benton. Goddamn it, what did you mean? I knead and knead, always turning the ball of dough in the same direction, clockwise because I am leading with my right hand, avoiding my cast.

“Thought you said you never lose an engine. I want some eggnog. Is Marino making his famous eggnog this morning?” McGovern says.

“That’s his New Year’s Eve thing.”

“What? It’s against the law on Christmas? I don’t know how she does that.”

“Stubborn, that’s how.”

“No kidding. And we’re just standing here doing nothing.”

“She won’t let you help. No one touches her dough. Trust me. Aunt Kay, isn’t that making your elbow hurt?”

My eyes focus as I look up. I am kneading with my right hand and the fingertips of my left. I glance at the clock over the sink and realize I have lost track of time and have been kneading for almost ten minutes.

“God, what world were you just in?” Lucy’s light spirit turns to lead as she searches my face. “Don’t let all this eat you alive. It’s going to be all right.”

She thinks I am worrying about the special grand jury, when ironically, I am not thinking about that at all this morning.

“Teun and I are going to help you, are helping you. What do you think we’ve been doing these last few days? We’ve got a plan we want to talk to you about.”

“After eggnog,” McGovern says with a kind smile.

“Did Benton ever talk to you about The Last Precinct?” I am out with it, almost accusing in the fierce way I look at both of them, then realizing by their confused expressions they don’t know what I am alluding to at all.

“You mean what we’re doing now?” Lucy frowns. “The office in New York? He couldn’t have known about that unless you mentioned to him you were thinking about going into your own business.” This she says to McGovern.

I divide the dough into smaller parts and begin kneading again.

“I’ve always thought about going private,” McGovern replies. “But I never said anything about it to Benton. We were pretty consumed with the cases up there in Pennsylvania.”

“Understatement of the century,” Lucy adds blackly.

“Right.” McGovern sighs and shakes her head.

“If Benton didn’t have a clue about the private enterprise you planned to start,” I then say, “is it possible he’d heard you mention The Last Precinct—the concept, the thing you say you used to joke about? I’m trying to figure out why he would label a file with that name.”

“What file?” Lucy asks.

“Marino’s bringing it over.” I finish kneading one portion of dough and wrap it tightly in plastic. “It was in Benton’s briefcase in Philadelphia.” I explain to them what Anna told me in her letter and Lucy helps clarify at least one point. She feels certain she mentioned the philosophy of The Last Precinct to Benton. She seems to recall that she was in the car with him one day and was asking him about the private consulting he had begun doing in his retirement. He told her it was going all right but it was difficult handling the logistics of running his own business, that he missed having a secretary and someone else answering the phone, that sort of thing. Lucy wistfully replied that maybe all of us ought to get together and form our own company. That was when she used the term The Last Precinct—sort of “a league of our own,” she says she told him.

I spread clean, dry dish towels over the countertop. “Did he have any idea you might be serious about really doing that some day?” I ask.

“I told him if I ever got enough money, I was going to quit working for the fucking government,” Lucy replies.

“Well.” I fit thinning rollers in the pasta machine and set them at the largest opening. “Anybody who knows you would figure it was only a matter of time before you made money doing something. Benton always said you were too much a maverick to last in a bureaucracy forever. He wouldn’t be the least bit surprised over what’s happening to you now, Lucy.”

“In fact, it had already started happening to you from the start,” McGovern points out to my niece. “Which is why you didn’t last with the FBI.”

Lucy isn’t insulted. She has at least accepted that she made mistakes early on, the worst one being her affair with Carrie Grethen. She no longer blames the FBI for backing away from her until she finally quit. I flatten a piece of dough with my palm and crank it through the machine. “I’m wondering if Benton used your concept as the name of his mysterious file because he somehow knew The Last Precinct—meaning us—would investigate his case some day,” I offer. “That we are where he would end up, because whatever was begun with those harassing letters and all the rest of it wasn’t going to stop, even with his death.” I turn the dough back through the machine again and again until I have a perfect strip of pasta to lay flat over a towel. “He knew. Somehow he did.”

“Somehow he always knew everything.” Lucy’s face is touched by deep sadness.

Benton is in the kitchen. We feel him as I make Christmas pasta and we talk about the way his mind worked. He was very intuitive. He always thought far ahead of where he was. I can imagine him projecting himself into a future after his death and imagining how we might react to everything, including a file we might find in his briefcase. Benton would know for a fact that if something happened to him—and he clearly feared something would—then I most certainly would go through his briefcase, which I did. What he may not have anticipated was that Marino would go through the briefcase first and remove a file that I would not learn about until now.

By noon, Anna has her car packed for the beach and her kitchen countertops are covered with lasagna noodles. Tomato sauce simmers on the stove. Parmesan reggiano and aged asagio cheeses are grated in bowls and fresh mozzarella rests in a towel and surrenders some of its moisture. The house smells like garlic and wood smoke, and Christmas lights glow while smoke drifts out the chimney, and when Marino arrives with all his typical noise and gaucheness he finds more happiness than he has seen from any of us for a while. He is dressed in jeans and a denim shirt and laden with gifts and a bottle of Virginia Lightning moonshine. I catch the edge of a file folder peeking out from behind wrapped packages in a bag, and my heart skips.

“Ho! Ho! Ho!” he bellows. “Merry fucking Christmas!” It is his standard holiday line, but his heart isn’t into it. I have a feeling he didn’t spend the past few hours merely looking for the Tlip file. He has been through it. “I need a drink,” he announces to the house.

CHAPTER 31

IN THE KITCHEN, I set the oven and cook pasta. I mix grated cheeses with ricotta and begin layering it and meat sauce between noodles in a deep dish. Anna stuffs dates with cream cheese and fills a bowl with salted nuts while Marino, Lucy and McGovern pour beer and wine or mix whatever holiday potion they want, which in Marino’s case is a spicy Bloody Mary made with his moonshine.

He is in a weird mood and well on his way to getting drunk. The Tlip file is a black hole, still in the bag of presents, ironically under the Christmas tree. Marino knows what’s in that file, but I don’t ask him. Nobody does. Lucy begins getting out ingredients for chocolate-chip cookies and two pies—one peanut butter, the other key lime—as if we are feeding the entire city. McGovern uncorks a Chambertin Grand Cru red burgundy while Anna sets the table, and the file pulls silently and with great force. It is as if all of us have made an unspoken agreement to at least drink a toast and get dinner going before we start talking about murder.

“Anybody else want a Bloody?” Marino talks loudly and hangs out in the kitchen doing nothing helpful. “Hey, Doc, how ’bout I mix up a pitcher?” He yanks open the refrigerator and grabs a handful of Spicy Hot V8 juices and starts popping open the small cans. I wonder how much Marino had to drink before he got here and the safety comes off my anger. In the first place, I am insulted that he put the file under the tree, as if this is his idea of a tasteless, morbid joke. What is he implying? This is my Christmas present? Or is he so callous it didn’t even occur to him that when he rather unceremoniously stuck the bag under the tree the file was still in it? He bumps past me and starts pressing lemon halves into the electric juicer and tosses the rinds in the sink.

“Well, I guess nobody’s gonna help me so I’ll just help myself,” he mutters. “Hey!” he calls out as if we aren’t in the same room with him. “Anybody think to buy horseradish?”

Anna glances at me. A collective bad mood begins to settle in. The kitchen seems to get darker and chillier, and my anger itches. I am going to fire at Marino any minute, and I am trying so hard to hold back. It is Christmas, I keep telling myself. It is Christmas. Marino grabs a long wooden spoon and makes a big production of stirring his pitcher of Bloody Marys as he slops in an appalling amount of moonshine.

“Gag.” Lucy shakes her head. “At least use Grey Goose.”

“Ain’t a way in hell I’m drinking French vodka.” The spoon clacks as he stirs and then taps it on the lip of the pitcher. “French wine, French vodka. Hey. What happened to things Italian?” He exaggerates a New York–Italian accent. “What happened to the neigh-ba-hood?”

“Nothing Italian about that shit you’re mixing,” Lucy tells him as she gets a beer out of the refrigerator. “You drink all that, Aunt Kay will take you to work with her in the morning. Only you’ll be lying down in a bag.”

Marino chugs a glass of his dangerous concoction. “That reminds me,” he says to no one in particular. “I die, she ain’t cutting on me.” As if I am not standing right there. “That’s the deal.” He pours another glass, and by now, all of us have stopped what we are doing. We stare at him. “That’s been bothering me for ten fucking years now.” Another swallow. “Damn, this stuff will warm your toes. I don’t want her slamming me around on one of those damn steel tables and cutting me up like I’m a fish from the fucking market. Huh. I got a deal with the girls up front.” A reference to my clerks in the front office. “No passing my pictures around. Don’t think I don’t see what goes on up there. They compare dick sizes.” He chugs half a glass and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’ve heard ’em do it. Especially Clit-ta.” He makes a lewd play on Cleta’s name.

He starts for the pitcher again and I put out my hand to stop him as my anger rushes forth in an army of harsh words. “That’s enough. What the hell’s gotten into you? How dare you come here drunk and then get drunker. Go sleep it off, Marino. I’m sure Anna can find a spare bed. You’re not driving anywhere and none of us care to be subjected to you right now.”

He gives me a defiant, mocking stare as he lifts his glass again. “Least I’m being honest,” he retorts. “Rest of you can pretend all you want that it’s a good damn day because it’s fucking Christmas. Well, so fucking what? Lucy’s quit her job so she don’t get fired because she’s a smart-ass queer.”

“Don’t, Marino,” Lucy warns him.

“McGovern quit her job, and I dunno what her deal is.” Pokes a thumb at her, insinuating she may be of Lucy’s same persuasion. “Anna’s gotta move outta her own fucking house because you’re here and being investigated for murder, and now you’re quitting your job. No small fucking goddamn wonder, and we’ll just see if the governor keeps you around. A private consultant. Yeah.” He slurs his words and sways in the middle of the kitchen, his face blotchy red. “That’ll be the day. So guess who’s left? Me, myself and I.” He slams the glass down on the counter and walks out of the kitchen, bumping into a wall, knocking a painting crooked, stumbling into the living room.

“My God.” McGovern quietly lets out a big breath.

“Redneck bastard,” Lucy says.

“The file.” Anna stares after him. “That is what is wrong with him.”

MARINO IS IN a drunken coma on the living room couch. Nothing stirs him. He does not move, but his snoring alerts us that he is both alive and not aware of what is going on inside Anna’s house. The lasagna is cooked and staying warm in the oven, and a key lime pie chills inside the refrigerator. Anna has set out on the eight-hour drive to Hilton Head, despite my protests. I did all I could to encourage her to stay, but she felt she should go on. It is midafternoon. Lucy, McGovern and I have been sitting at the dining room table for hours, place settings moved out of the way, gifts still unopened under the tree, the Tlip file spread out before us.

Benton was meticulous. He sealed each item in clear plastic, and purple stains on some of the letters and envelopes indicate ninhydrin was used to process latent fingerprints. The postmarks are Manhattan, all with the same first three digits of a zip code, 100. It is not possible to know which branch posted the letters. All a three-digit prefix indicates is which city and that the mail wasn’t processed through a home or business postage meter machine or at some rural station. In those instances, the postmark would be five digits.

There is a table of contents in the front of the Tlip file and it lists a total of sixty-three items dating from the spring of 1996 (about six months before Benton wrote the letter he wanted delivered to me after his death) to the fall of 1998 (mere days before Carrie Grethen escaped from Kirby). The first item is labeled Exhibit 1, as if it is physical evidence for a jury to see. It is a letter posted in New York on May 15, 1996, unsigned and computer-printed in an ornate, hard-to-read WordPerfect font that Lucy identifies as “Ransom.”

Dear Benton,

I’m the president of the Ugly Fan Club and you’ve been picked to be an honorary member! Guess what? Members get to be ugly for free! Aren’t you excited? More later . . .

This was followed by five more letters, all within weeks of each other, all making the same references to an Ugly Fan Club and Benton’s becoming the newest member. The paper was plain, same Ransom font, no signature, same New York zip code, clearly the same author for all. And a very clever one until this person mailed the sixth letter and made a mistake, a rather obvious one to the investigative eye, which is why I am baffled that Benton didn’t seem to catch it. On the back of the plain white envelope are writing impressions that are noticeable when I tilt the envelope and catch light at different angles.

I get a pair of latex gloves out of my satchel and put them on as I wander into the kitchen to find a flashlight. Anna keeps one on the counter by the toaster. Back in the dining room, I slip the envelope out of its plastic cover, hold it up by the corners and shine the flashlight on the paper obliquely. I catch the shadow of the indented word Postmaster and it becomes instantly clear to me what the author of this letter did.

“Franklin D.,” I make out more words. “Is there a Franklin D. Roosevelt post office in New York? Because this definitely says N-Y, N-Y.”

“Yes. The one in my neighborhood,” McGovern says, her eyes getting wide. She comes over to my side of the table to get a closer look.

“I’ve had cases where people try to create alibis,” I say, shining the light from different angles. “An obvious, shopworn one is you were in a different, very distant location at the time of the murder and therefore couldn’t have done it. An easy way to do that is have mail posted from some remote location at or around the time the murder happens, thereby making it seem the killer couldn’t be you because you can’t be in two places at once.”

“Third Avenue,” McGovern says. “That’s where the FDR post office is.”

“We’ve got part of a street address; some of it’s obliterated by the flap. Nine-something. Three A-V. Yes, Third Avenue. What you do is address the letter, put on the appropriate postage, then enclose it in another envelope addressed to the postmaster of whatever post office you want your letter mailed from. The postmaster is obliged to mail your letter for you, postmarked in that city. So what this person did was tuck this letter inside another envelope, and when he addressed that outer envelope, the impressions of what he wrote were left on the envelope underneath.”

Lucy has come behind me, too, and is leaning close to see. “Susan Pless’s neighborhood,” she says.

Not only that, but the letter, which is by far the most vile, is dated December 5, 1997—the same day Susan Pless was murdered:

Hey Benton,

How are you, soon-to-be-ugly boy. Just wondering—Got any idea what it’s like to look in the mirror and want to commit suicide? No? Will soon. Wiiiilllll soooonnnn. Gonna carve you up like a Christmas turkey and same goes for the Chief Cunt you screw when you got time off from trying to figure out people like me & you. Can’t tell you how much I’m-a-gonna (to quote Southerners) like using my big blade to open her seams. Quid pro quo, right? When you gonna learn to mind your own business?

I imagine Benton receiving these sick, crude missives. I imagine him in his room at my house, sitting at the desk with laptop opened and plugged into a modem line, his briefcase nearby, coffee within reach. His notes indicate he determined the font was Ransom and then contemplated the significance. To obtain release by paying a price. To buy back. To deliver from sin, I read his scribbles. I might have been down the hallway in my study or in the kitchen at the very moment he was reading this letter and looking up “ransom” in the dictionary, and he never said a word. Lucy volunteers that Benton wouldn’t have wanted to burden me, and nothing helpful would have come from my knowing. I couldn’t have done anything about it, she adds.

“Cactus, lilies, tulips,” McGovern goes through pages of the file. “So someone was anonymously sending him flower arrangements at Quantico.”

I start picking through dozens of message slips that simply have “hang-up” written on them and the date and time. The calls were made to his direct line at the Behavioral Science Unit, all tracing back to out of area on Caller ID, meaning they were probably made on a cell phone. Benton’s only observation was pauses on the line before hanging up. McGovern informs us that flower orders were placed with a Lexington Avenue florist that Benton apparently checked out, and Lucy calls directory assistance to see if that same florist is still in business. It is.

“He makes a note here about payment.” It is so hard for me to look at Benton’s small, snarled penmanship. “Mail. The orders were placed by mail. Cash, he has the word ‘cash.’ So it sounds like the person sent cash and a written order.” I flip back to the table of contents. Sure enough, exhibits fifty-one through fifty-five are the actual orders received by the florist. I turn to those pages. “Computer-generated and unsigned. One small arrangement of tulips for twenty-five dollars with instructions to send it to Benton’s Quantico address. One small cactus for twenty-five dollars, and so on, envelopes postmarked New York.”

“Probably the same thing,” Lucy says. “They were mailed through the New York postmaster. Question is, where were they mailed from originally?”

We can’t know that without the outer envelopes, which certainly would have been tossed into the trash the instant post office employees opened them. Even if we had those envelopes, it is highly unlikely the sender wrote out his return address. The most we could have hoped for was a postmark.

“Guess the florist just assumed he was dealing with some nutcase who doesn’t believe in charge cards,” McGovern comments. “Or someone having an affair.”

“Or an inmate.” I am, of course, thinking of Carrie Grethen. I can imagine her sending out communications from Kirby. By slipping the letters in an outer envelope addressed to a postmaster, at the very least she prevented the hospital staff from seeing who she was sending the letters to, whether it was to a florist or to Benton directly. Using a New York post office makes sense, too. She would have had access to various office branches through the telephone directory, and in my gut I don’t think Carrie was concerned about anyone’s supposing the mail originated in the same city where she was incarcerated. She simply didn’t want to alert Kirby staff, and she was also the most manipulative person on this planet. Everything she did had its reason. She was just as busy profiling Benton as he was her.

“If it’s Carrie,” McGovern somberly remarks, “then you do have to wonder if she in any form or fashion was at least privy to Chandonne and his killings.”

“She would get off on it,” I reply with anger as I push back from the table. “And she would know damn well that by writing a letter to Benton dated the same day as Susan’s murder, it would send him through the ceiling. He’d make that connection, all right.”

“And picking a post office located in Susan’s neighborhood,” Lucy adds.

We speculate, postulate and go on until late afternoon, when we decide it is time for Christmas dinner. After rousing Marino, we tell him what we have discovered and continue to talk as we eat greens, sweet onions and tomatoes drenched in sweet red vinegar and cold-pressed olive oil. Marino shovels in food as if he hasn’t eaten in days, stuffing lasagna into his mouth while we debate and speculate and beg the question: If Carrie Grethen was the person harassing Benton and she had some link to the Chandonne family, was Benton’s murder more than a simple act of psychopathy? Was his slaying an organized crime hit disguised to seem personal, senseless, deranged, with Carrie the lieutenant who was more than eager to carry it out?

“In other words,” Marino says to me with his mouth full, “was his death like what you’re accused of.”

The table falls silent. None of us quite get his meaning, but then I do. “You’re saying, if there was a real motive for his murder but it was disguised to look like a serial killing?”

He shrugs. “Just like you being accused of murdering Bray and disguising it to look like Wolfman did it.”

“Maybe why Interpol got so hot and bothered,” Lucy considers.

Marino helps himself to excellent French wine he gulps down like Gatorade. “Yeah, Interpol. Maybe Benton got all tangled up with the cartel somehow and . . . ”

“Because of Chandonne,” I interrupt as my focus sharpens and I think I am on the trail that might just lead to the truth.

Jaime Berger has been our uninvited Christmas guest. She has shaded my thoughts all afternoon. I can’t stop thinking about one of the first things she asked when we met in my conference room. She wanted to know if anyone had profiled Chandonne’s Richmond murders. She was so quick to bring that up and so clearly believes profiling is important. Certainly, she would have had someone profile Susan Pless’s murder and I am increasingly suspicious that Benton very well may have known about that case.

I get up from the table. “Please be home,” I say out loud to Berger, and I experience a growing sense of desperation as I dig in my satchel for her business card. On it is her home number and I call from Anna’s kitchen where no one can hear what I say. A part of me is embarrassed. I am also frightened and mad. If I am wrong, I will sound foolish. If I am right, then she should have been more open with me, damn it, damn her.

“Hello?” A woman answers.

“Ms. Berger?” I say.

“Hold on.” The person calls out, “Mom! For you!”

The minute Berger gets on the line I say, “What else don’t I know about you? Because it’s becoming patently clear that I don’t know much.”

“Oh, Jill.” She must mean the person who answered the phone. “Actually, they’re from Greg’s first marriage. Two teenagers. And today I’d sell them to the first bidder. Hell, I’d pay someone to take them.”

“No, you wouldn’t!” Jill says in the background and laughs.

“Let me get to a quieter spot.” Berger talks as she moves into some other area of wherever it is she lives with a husband and two children she has never mentioned to me, even after all the hours we spent together. My resentment simmers. “What’s up, Kay?”

“Did you know Benton?” I ask her straight up.

Nothing.

“Are you there?” I speak again.

“I’m here,” she says and her tone has gotten quiet and serious. “I’m thinking how best to answer you. . . . ”

“Why not start with the truth. For once.”

“I’ve always told you the truth,” she replies.

“That’s ridiculous. I’ve heard even the best of you lie when you’re trying to manipulate someone. Suggesting lie detectors, or the big needle truth serum to get people to ’fess up, and there’s also such a thing as lying by omission. The whole truth. I demand it. For God’s sake, did Benton have something to do with the Susan Pless case?”

“Yes,” Berger replies. “Absolutely yes, Kay.”

“Talk to me, Ms. Berger. I’ve just spent the entire afternoon going through letters and other weird things he received before he was murdered. They were processed in the post office located in Susan’s neighborhood.”

A pause. “I’d met Benton numerous times and my office has certainly availed itself of the services the behavioral science unit has to offer. Back then, at least. We actually have a forensic psychiatrist we use now, someone here in New York. I’d worked with Benton on other cases over the years, that’s my point. And the minute I learned about Susan’s murder and went to the scene, I called him and got him up here. We went through her apartment, just as you and I went through the Richmond crime scenes.”

“Did he ever indicate to you that he was getting strange mail and phone calls and other things? And that just possibly there was a connection between whoever was doing it and whoever murdered Susan Pless?”

“I see,” is all she says.

“See? What the hell do you see?”

“I see you know,” she answers me. “Question is, how?”

I tell her about the Tlip file. I inform her that it appears Benton had the documents checked for fingerprints and I am wondering who did that and where and what the results might have been. She has no idea but says we should run any latent prints through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, known as AFIS. “There are postage stamps on the envelopes,” I inform her. “He didn’t remove them and he would have had to if he wanted them checked for DNA.”

It has only been in recent years that DNA analysis has become sophisticated enough, because of PCR, to make it worthwhile to analyze saliva, and just maybe whoever affixed postage stamps to the envelopes did so by licking them. I am not sure that even Carrie would have known back then that licking a stamp might give up her identity to us. I would have known. Had Benton showed these letters to me, I would have recommended he have the stamps examined. Maybe we would have gotten results. Maybe he wouldn’t be dead.

“Back then a lot of people, even those in law enforcement, just didn’t think about things like that,” Berger is still talking about the postage stamps. “Seems like all cops do these days is follow people for their coffee cups or sweaty towels, Kleenex, cigarette butts. Amazing.”

I have an incredible thought. What she is saying has brought to mind a case in England where a man was falsely accused of a burglary because of a cold hit on the Birmingham-based National DNA Database. The man’s solicitor demanded a retest of the DNA recovered from the crime, this time using ten loci, or locations, instead of the standard six that had been used. Loci, or alleles, are simply specific locations on your genetic map. Some alleles are more common than others, so the less common they are and the more locations used, the better your chances for a match—which isn’t literally a match, but rather a statistical probability that makes it almost impossible to believe the suspect didn’t commit the crime. In the British case, the alleged burglar was excluded upon retesting with additional loci. There was a one-in-thirty-seven-million chance of a mismatch, and sure enough, it happened.

“When you tested the DNA from Susan’s case, did you use STR?” I ask Berger.

STR is the newest technology in DNA profiling. All it means is we amplify the DNA with PCR and look at very discriminating repeated base pairs called Short Tandem Repeats. Typically, the requirement for DNA databases these days is that at least thirteen probes or loci be used, thus making it highly improbable that there will be any mismatches.

“I know our labs are very advanced,” Berger is saying. “They’ve been doing PCR for years.”

“It’s all PCR unless the lab is still doing the old RFLP, which is very reliable but just takes forever,” I reply. “In 1997, it was a matter of how many probes you used—or loci. Often in first screening of a sample, the lab may not do ten, thirteen or fifteen loci. That gets to be expensive. If only four loci were done in Susan’s case, for example, you could come up with an unusual exception. I’m assuming the ME’s office still has the extraction left in their freezer.”

“What sort of bizarre exception?”

“If we’re dealing with siblings. Brothers. And one left the seminal fluid and the other left the hair and saliva.”

“But you tested Thomas’s DNA, right? And it was similar to Jean-Baptiste’s but not the same?” I can’t believe it. Berger is getting agitated.

“We also did that just days ago with thirteen loci, not four or six,” I reply. “I’m assuming the profiles had a lot of the same alleles, but also some different ones. The more probes you do, the more you come up with differences. Especially in closed populations. And when you think of the Chandonne family, theirs is probably a very closed population, people who have lived on Île Saint-Louis for hundreds of years, probably married their own kind. In some cases, inbreeding—marrying cousins, which might also account for Jean-Baptiste Chandonne’s congenital deformity. The more people inbreed, the more they up their chances for genetic glitches.”

“We need to retest the seminal fluid from Susan’s case,” Berger decides.

“Your labs would do that anyway, since he’s up on murder charges,” I reply. “But you might want to encourage them to make it a priority.”

“God, let’s hope it doesn’t turn out to be someone else,” she says in frustration. “Jesus, that would be awful if the DNA doesn’t match when they do the retest. Talk about really screwing up my case.”

She is right. It certainly would. Even Berger might have a hard time making a jury believe that Chandonne killed Susan if his DNA doesn’t match the DNA of the seminal fluid recovered from her body.

“I’ll get Marino to submit the stamps and any latent prints to the Richmond labs,” she then says. “And Kay, I need to ask you not to look at anything in that file unless it’s witnessed; don’t look any further. That’s why it’s best you don’t submit any evidence yourself.”

“I understand.” Another reminder that I am under suspicion for murder.

“For your own protection,” she adds.

“Ms. Berger, if you knew about the letters, about what was happening to Benton, then what did you think when he was murdered?”

“Aside from the obvious shock and grief? That he was killed by whoever was harassing him. Yes, first thing that came to mind. However, when it became clear who his killers were and then they were gunned down, there didn’t seem to be anything to pursue further.”

“And if Carrie Grethen wrote those harassing letters, she wrote the worst one, it seems, on the very day Susan was killed.”

Silence.

“I think we must consider there could be a connection.” I am firm on this point. “Susan may have been Chandonne’s first victim in this country, and as Benton started poking around he might have started getting too close to other things that point to the cartel. Carrie was alive and in New York when Chandonne came there and killed Susan.”

“And maybe Benton was a hit?” Berger sounds doubtful.

“More than maybe,” I reply. “I knew Benton and the way he thought. For starters, why was he carrying the Tlip file in his briefcase—why did he take it with him to Philadelphia if he didn’t have some reason to think that the weird stuff in it was connected to what Carrie and her accomplice were doing? Killing people and cutting their faces off. Making them ugly. And the notes Benton was getting made it clear he was going to be made ugly, and he sure as hell was. . . .”

“I need a copy of that file,” Berger dismisses me. It is obvious by her tone that she suddenly wants to get off the phone. “I’ve got a fax machine here in the house.” She gives me the number.

I GO INTO Anna’s study and spend the nextt half hour photocopying everything in the Tlip file because I can’t feed laminated documents into the fax machine. Marino finished the burgundy and is asleep on the couch again when I return to the living room, where Lucy and McGovern sit in front of the fire talking, continuing to paint scenarios that are only getting wilder the more they are influenced by alcohol. Christmas speeds away from us. We finally get around to opening gifts at half past ten, and Marino groggily plays Santa, handing out boxes and trying to be festive. But his mood has gotten only darker and any attempts at humor have a bite. At eleven o’clock, Anna’s phone rings. It is Berger.

“Quid pro quo?” she launches in, referring to the letter dated December 5, 1997. “How many non-legal-minded people use that term? Just a crazy idea, but wonder if there’s a way we could get hold of Rocky Caggiano’s DNA. May as well turn over every stone and not be so quick to assume Carrie wrote these letters. Maybe she did. But maybe she didn’t.”

I can’t concentrate as I return to Christmas gifts beneath the tree. I try to smile and act abundantly thankful, but I don’t fool anyone. Lucy gives me a stainless-steel Breitling watch called a B52 while Marino’s gift to me is a coupon for a year of firewood that he will personally deliver and stack. Lucy loves the Whirly-Girls necklace I had made for her and Marino loves the leather jacket from Lucy and me. Anna would be pleased with an art glass vase I found for her, but she is somewhere on I-95, of course. Everybody goes through the motions quickly because questions hang heavy in the air. While we gather up rumpled ribbons and torn paper, I motion to Marino that I need a private word with him. We sit in the kitchen. He has been in some stage of drunkenness all day, and I can tell that he is probably getting drunk on a regular basis. There is a reason for it.

“You can’t keep drinking like this,” I say to him as I pour each of us a glass of water. “It doesn’t help anything.”

“Never has, never will.” He rubs his face. “And that don’t seem to make a damn difference when I’m feeling like shit. Right now, everything’s shit.” His bleary, bloodshot eyes meet mine. Marino looks like he is about to cry again.

“Any reason you might have something that could give us Rocky’s DNA?” I come right out and ask.

He flinches as if I have hit him. “What’d Berger tell you when she called? That it? She call about Rocky?”

“She’s just going down the list,” I reply. “Anybody connected with us or Benton who might have a link to organized crime. And Rocky certainly comes to mind.” I go on and tell him what Berger revealed about Benton and the Susan Pless case.

“But he was getting that whacko shit before Susan was murdered,” he says. “So why would someone be jerking him around if he wasn’t sticking his nose in anything yet? Why would Rocky, for example? And I assume that’s what you’re thinking, that maybe Rocky was sending him that weird shit?”

I have no answer. I don’t know.

“Well, I guess you’re gonna have to get DNA from Doris and me ’cause I don’t got anything of Rocky’s. Not even hair. You could do that, right? If you got the DNA of the mother and the father then you could compare something like saliva?”

“We could get a pedigree and at least know your son can’t be ruled out as a contributor of the DNA on the stamps.”

“Okay.” He blows out. “If that’s what you want to do. Since Anna’s split, think I can smoke in here?”

“I wouldn’t dare,” I reply. “What about Rocky’s fingerprints?”

“Forget that. Besides, it didn’t look to me like Benton had any luck with the prints. I mean, you can tell he tested the letters for them and that seems to be the end of it. And I know you don’t want to hear this, Doc, but maybe you’d better be sure why you’re getting into all this. Don’t go on a witch hunt ’cause you want to pay back the fucker who might have sent that shit to Benton and maybe had to do with him being killed. It ain’t worth it. Especially if you’re thinking Carrie did it. She’s dead. Let her rot.”

“It is worth it,” I say. “If I can know for sure who sent those letters to him, it’s worth it to me.”

“Huh. He said The Last Precinct was where he’d end up. Well, looks like he has,” Marino muses. “We’re The Last Precinct and we’re working his case. Ain’t that something?”

“Do you think he carried that file to Philadelphia because he wanted to make sure you or I got it?”

“Assuming something happened to him?”

I nod.

“Maybe,” he says. “He was worried he wasn’t going to be around much longer and he wanted us to find that file if something did happen to him. And it’s strange, too. It’s not like he says much in it, almost like he knew other people might see it and he didn’t want anything in it that maybe the wrong person would see. Don’t you find it interesting there ain’t any names in it? Like if he had suspects in mind, he never mentioned anybody?”

“The file’s cryptic,” I agree.

“So who was he afraid might see it? Cops? ’Cause if something happened to him, he would know cops are going through his shit. And they did. Philly cops went through everything in his hotel room and then turned it over to me. He would also figure you’re going to see his stuff at some point. Maybe Lucy, too.”

“I think the point is he couldn’t be sure of who might see the file. So he was cautious, period. And Benton was certainly known for being cautious.”

“Not to mention,” Marino goes on, “he was up there helping out ATF. So he might have thought ATF would see the file, right? Lucy’s ATF. McGovern’s ATF and was in charge of the response team working the fires Carrie and her asshole sidekick were setting to disguise the fact they had this nasty little hobby of cutting people’s faces off, right?” Marino’s eyes narrow. “Talley’s ATF,” he says. “Maybe we ought to get his DNA, the son of a bitch. Too bad.” He gets that look again. I don’t think Marino will ever forgive me for sleeping with Jay Talley. “You probably had his fucking DNA, no pun intended. In Paris. I don’t guess you got a stain you maybe forgot to wash out?”

“Shut up, Marino,” I say softly.

“I’m getting withdrawal.” He gets up and goes to the liquor cabinet. Now it’s time for bourbon. He pours Booker’s into a glass and comes back to the table. “Wouldn’t that just be something if it turns out Talley’s involved in everything from soup to nuts. Maybe that’s why he wanted you at Interpol. He wanted to pick your brain to see if you knew maybe what Benton knew? ’Cause guess what? Maybe when Benton was poking around after Susan’s murder, he started figuring out shit that started pulling him too close to a truth Talley can’t afford for nobody to know.”

“What are you two talking about?” Lucy is in the kitchen. I didn’t hear her walk in.

“Sounds like a job for you.” Marino gives her his puffy eyes as he swills bourbon in his glass. “Why don’t you and Teun investigate Talley and find out how dirty he is. ’Cause I believe with all my little heart they don’t come no dirtier. And by the way.” This to me. “In case you didn’t hear, he’s one of the guys who drove Chandonne up to New York. Now ain’t that interesting? He sits in on Berger’s interview. He spends six hours in the car with him. Hey, they’re probably drinking buddies by now—or maybe they already was.”

Lucy stares out the kitchen window, her hands in the pockets of her jeans, obviously put off by Marino and embarrassed by him. He is sweating and profane, and unsteady on his feet, and filled with hate and spite one minute, sullen the next.

“You know what I can’t stand?” Marino keeps at it. “I can’t stand bad cops who get away with it because everybody’s too damn chicken to go after them. And nobody wants to touch Talley or even try because he speaks all these languages and went to Harvard and is a big shot golden boy. . . .”

“You really don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lucy says to Marino, and by now, McGovern has wandered into the kitchen. “You’re wrong. Jay’s not off limits and you’re not the only person on this planet who has doubts about him.”

“Serious doubts,” McGovern echoes.

Marino shuts up and leans against the counter.

“I can tell you what we know so far,” Lucy says to me. She is reluctant and soft-spoken because nobody, really, is quite sure how I feel about Jay. “I kind of hate to, because there’s nothing definitive. But it’s not looking good so far.” She looks at me as if in search of a cue.

“Good,” I tell her. “Let’s hear it.”

“Yeah. I’m all ears,” Marino responds.

“I’ve run him through quite a number of databases. No criminal or civil court records, no liens or judgments, et cetera. Not that we expected him to be a registered sex offender or deadbeat parent or missing or wanted or whatever, and there’s no evidence that the FBI, CIA or even ATF has a file on him in their systems of records. But doing a simple search of real estate records raised a red flag. First of all, he has a condo in New York where he’s let certain select friends stay—including high-ranking people in law enforcement,” she says to Marino and me. “A three-million-plus place full of antiques, on Central Park. Jay has bragged that the condo is his. Well, it’s not. Comes back to a corporate name.”

“It’s not uncommon for wealthy people to have property in separate corporate names, for privacy reasons and also to protect various assets from litigation,” I point out.

“I know. But this corporation isn’t Jay’s,” Lucy replies. “Not unless he owns an air freight company.”

“Kind of eerie, right?” McGovern adds. “Considering how much shipping the Chandonne family is involved in. So maybe there’s a connection. It’s way too soon to say.”

“No big surprise,” Marino mutters, but his eyes light up. “Yeah, how well I remember him playing the big rich Harvard act, right, Doc? Remember, I wondered why we was suddenly on a Learjet, and next thing we’re on the Concorde going to France. I knew Interpol didn’t pay for all that shit.”

“He never should have bragged about that condo,” Lucy remarks. “Obviously he’s got the same Achilles’ heel other assholes do: ego.” She looks at me. “He wanted to impress you, so he flies you out supersonic—says he got the tickets comped because they were for law enforcement. And sure, we know the airlines do that sort of thing on occasion. But we’re tracking that, too, to see who made those reservations and what the story was.”

“My big question,” McGovern goes on, “is obviously whether or not that condo might be owned by the Chandonne family. And you can only imagine how many layers you’d have to go through to get to them.”

“Hell, they probably own the whole fucking building,” Marino says. “And half of Manhattan to go along with it.”

“What about corporate officers?” I ask. “Any interesting names come up?”

“We’ve got names but they don’t mean anything significant yet,” Lucy replies. “These paper cases take a lot of time. We run them and then everything and everybody they connect with, on and on it goes.”

“And where do Mitch Barbosa and Rosso Matos fit in?” I ask. “Or do they? Because somebody took a key out of my house and put it in Barbosa’s pocket. Do you think Jay did?”

Marino snorts and takes a swallow of bourbon. “Gets my vote,” he retorts. “That and swiping your chipping hammer. Can’t think of anybody else who’d do it. I know every guy who went in there, in your house. Unless Righter did it, and he’s too chicken and I really don’t think he’s dirty.”

It isn’t that Jay’s shadow hasn’t crossed our thoughts numerous times before. We know he was in my house. We know he is bitter toward me. We all have considerable questions about his character, but if he did plant the key or steal it from my house and pass it off to someone else, then this directly implicates him in Barbosa’s torture-homicide and most likely in Matos’s as well. “Where’s Jay right now? Anybody know?” I search their faces.

“Well, he was in New York. That was Wednesday. Then we saw him yesterday afternoon in James City County. Got no idea right this very minute,” Marino answers.

“There are a couple other things you might want to know.” Lucy addresses this to me. “One in particular is real odd but I can’t make heads or tails of it yet. On the credit search, I got hits on two Jay Talleys with different addresses and different social security numbers. One Jay Talley was issued his social security number in Phoenix between 1960 and 1961. Which couldn’t be Jay unless he’s in his forties, and he’s what? Not much older than me? Early thirties at the most? A second Jay Talley I got a hit on was issued his social security number between 1936 and ’37. No D-O-B, but he’d have to be one of the early timers who got a number shortly after the Social Security Act of 1935, so God knows how old this particular Jay Talley already was when he got his number. He’d have to be at least in his seventies and he sure moves around a lot and uses post office boxes instead of physical addresses. He’s also bought a lot of cars, sometimes changing vehicles a couple times a year.”

“Did Talley ever tell you where he was born?” Marino asks me.

“He said he spent most of his childhood in Paris and then his family moved to L.A.,” I reply. “You were sitting in the cafeteria when he said that. At Interpol.”

“No record of either Jay Talley ever living in L.A.,” Lucy says.

“And speaking of Interpol,” Marino says. “Wouldn’t they check him out before letting him work there?”

“Obviously, they might have checked into him, but not extensively,” Lucy replies. “He’s an ATF agent. You assume he’s clean.”

“What about a middle name?” Marino asks. “We know his?”

“He doesn’t have one. Nothing in his ATF personnel records.” McGovern smiles wryly. “And neither does the Jay Talley who got his social security number back before the Great Flood. That alone is unusual. Most people have middle names. In his file at headquarters it does say he was born in Paris and lived there until he was six. But after that he supposedly moved to New York with his French father and American mother and there’s no mention of Los Angeles. On his ATF application he claims to have gone to Harvard, but having looked into that we discovered there’s no record of any Jay Talley having ever attended Harvard.”

“Jesus,” Marino exclaims. “Don’t people check out nothing when they go through these applications? They just take your word for it that you went to Harvard or were a Rhodes scholar or pole-vaulted in the Olympics? And they hire you and give you a badge and a gun?”

“Well, I’m not going to give Internal Affairs a heads-up that they may want to check him out a little more closely,” McGovern offers. “We’ve got to be careful someone doesn’t tip him off, and it’s hard to say who his friends are at headquarters.”

Marino lifts his arms in the air and stretches. He cracks his neck. “I’m hungry again,” he says.

CHAPTER 32

THE GUEST ROOM in Anna’s house faces the river, and over passing days I have fashioned a makeshift desk before the window. This required a small table, which I covered with a cloth so I would not scratch the satin finish, and from the library I purloined an apple-green English leather swivel chair. At first, I was dismayed that I had forgotten my laptop computer, but I discovered an unexpected solace in putting fountain pen to paper and letting thoughts flow through my fingers and shimmer in black ink. My penmanship is awful, and the notion that it has something to do with being a doctor is probably true. There are days when I must sign my name or initials five hundred times, and I suppose scribbling gross descriptions and measurements with bloody gloved hands has taken its toll, too.

I have developed a ritual at Anna’s house. Each morning I slip into the kitchen and pour myself a cup of coffee that was timed to begin dripping at exactly half past five. I return to my room, shut the door and sit at the window writing before a glass square of utter darkness. My first morning here, I was outlining classes I am scheduled to teach at the Institute’s next death investigation school. But transportation fatalities, asphyxia and forensic radiology completely left my mind as life on the river was touched by first light.

This morning I have faithfully watched the show once again. At half past six, the darkness lightened to a charcoal gray, and within minutes I could make out the silhouettes of bare sycamores and oaks, then dark plains turned into water and land. Most mornings the river is warmer than the air, and fog rolls over the surface of the James. Right now it looks like the River Styx and I halfway expect a ghostly, gaunt man in rags to pole by in his boat through veils of mist. I don’t expect to see animals until closer to eight, and they have become a huge comfort to me. I have fallen in love with the Canada geese that congregate by Anna’s dock in a chorus of honking. Squirrels run errands up and down trees, tails curled like plumes of smoke. Birds hover at my window and look me straight in the eye as if to see what I am spying on. Deer run through bare winter woods on the opposite river bank and red-tailed hawks swoop.

At rare, privileged moments I am graced by bald eagles. Their enormous wingspans, white helmets and pantaloons make them unmistakable, and I am comforted because eagles fly higher and alone and don’t seem to have the same agendas other birds do. I watch them circle or perch briefly in a tree, never staying in one spot long before suddenly they are gone, leaving me to wonder, like Emerson, if I have just been sent a sign. I have found nature to be kind. The rest of what I live with these days is not.

It is Monday, January 17th, and I remain in exile at Anna’s house, or at least this is how I view it. Time has passed slowly, almost stagnantly, like the water beyond my window. The currents of my life are moving in a certain, barely perceptible direction, and there is no possibility of rerouting their inevitable progress. The holidays have come and gone, and my cast has been replaced by Ace bandages and a splint. I am driving a rental car because my Mercedes is being held for further investigation, at Hull Street and Commerce Road, at the impound lot, which is not attended by police twenty-four hours a day and there is no guard dog. On New Year’s Eve, someone smashed a window out of my car and stole the two-way radio, the AM-FM radio and CD player and God knows what else. So much for the chain of evidence, I told Marino.

There are new developments in the Chandonne case. As I suspected, when the seminal fluid in Susan Pless’s case was originally tested in 1997, only four probes were used. The New York medical examiner’s office still uses four probes for the first screening because they are developed in-house and therefore it is more economical to resort to them first. The frozen extraction was retested using fifteen loci, and the result is a non-match. Jean-Baptiste Chandonne was not the donor of the seminal fluid, nor was his brother, Thomas. But there are so many alleles in common, the DNA profiles are so incredibly close, that we can only assume there is a third brother, and it is this brother who had sex with Susan. We are baffled. Berger is on her head. “DNA has told the truth and fucked us,” Berger told me over the phone. Chandonne’s dentition matches the bite marks and his saliva and hair were on the bloody body, but he did not have vaginal sex with Susan Pless right before she died. That may not be enough for a jury in this day of DNA. A New York grand jury will have to decide if it is enough for an indictment, and it struck me as incredibly ironic when Berger said this. It doesn’t seem to require much to accuse me of murder, nothing more than rumor and alleged intent and the fact that I conducted experiments with a chipping hammer and barbecue sauce.

For weeks, I have waited for the subpoena. Yesterday it arrived, and the sheriff’s deputy was his usual cheerful self when he showed up at my office, not realizing, I suppose, that the case this time involves me as a defendant and not an expert witness. I have been asked to appear in room 302 of the John Marshall Courts Building to testify before the special grand jury. The hearing is set for Tuesday, February 1, at 2 P.M.

At a few minutes past seven, I stand inside the closet, pushing through suits and blouses as I run through all I need to do this day. I already know from Jack Fielding that we have six cases and two of the doctors are in court. I also have a ten o’clock telephone conference with Governor Mitchell. I pick out a black pants suit with blue pinstripes and a blue blouse with French cuffs. I wander into the kitchen for another cup of coffee and a bowl of high-protein cereal that Lucy brought over. I have to smile as I practically break my teeth on her healthy, crunchy gift. My niece is determined that I will emerge from my smoldering life a fit phoenix. I rinse dishes and finish getting dressed and am heading out the door when my pager vibrates. Marino’s number shows up on the video display and is followed by 911.

Parked in Anna’s driveway is the latest change in my life—the rental car. It is a midnight blue Ford Explorer that smells like ancient cigarettes and will always smell like ancient cigarettes unless I do what Marino suggested and stick an air freshener on the dash. I plug my cell phone into the cigarette lighter and call him.

“Where are you?” he asks right off.

“Heading out the driveway.” I turn on the heater and Anna’s gates open to let me out. I don’t even stop to pick up the newspaper, which Marino next tells me I need to see, because clearly I haven’t read it yet or I would have called him right away.

“Too late,” I tell him. “I’m already on Cherokee.” I harden myself like a little kid flexing his stomach muscles when he dares someone to sock him in the gut. “So go on and tell me. What’s in the paper?” I am expecting that the special grand jury investigation has been leaked to the press, and I am right. I drive along Cherokee as recent winter weather continues to dissolve in drips and puddles, and slushy snow sluggishly slides off roofs.

“Chief Medical Examiner Suspected in Grisly Slaying,” Marino reads the banner headline on the front page. “It’s got a picture of you, too,” he adds. “Looks like one maybe that bitch took out in front of your house. The lady that fell on the ice, remember? It shows you climbing in my truck. Pretty good of my truck. Not so hot of you . . .”

“Just tell me what it says,” I interrupt him.

He reads the highlights as I hug the hard curves of Cherokee Road. A Richmond special grand jury is investigating me in the murder of Deputy Police Chief Diane Bray, the newspaper says. The revelation is described as shocking and bizarre and has local law enforcement reeling. Although Commonwealth’s Attorney Buford Righter refused comment, unnamed sources say Righter instigated the investigation with great heartache after witnesses came forth with statements and police produced evidence that was impossible to ignore. Additional unnamed sources claim I was in a heated clash with Bray, who believed I was incompetent and no longer fit to be chief medical examiner of Virginia. Bray was trying to have me removed from office and told people before her murder that I had confronted her on several occasions and had bullied and threatened her. Sources say there are indicators pointing to the possibility that I staged Bray’s murder to look like the brutal murder of Kim Luong and on and on and on.

By now I am on Huguenot Road in the thick of rush-hour traffic. I tell Marino to stop. I have heard quite enough.

“It goes on forever,” he says.

“I’m sure it does.”

“They must have been working on it all during the holidays ’cause it’s got all kinds of shit about you and your background.” I hear pages turning. “Even stuff about Benton and his death, and Lucy. There’s this big sidebar with all your vital statistics, where you went to school. Cornell, Georgetown, Hopkins. The pictures on the inside are good. Even one of you and me together at a crime scene. Oh shit, it’s Bray’s crime scene.”

“What about Lucy?” I ask.

But Marino is bewitched by publicity, by what must be huge photographs that include him and me working together. “I ain’t never seen anything like this.” More pages turning. “It just goes on and on, Doc. So far I’ve counted five bylines. They must’ve had the entire fucking news staff working this thing without our having a clue. Including an aerial shot of your house . . .”

“What about Lucy?” I ask with more force. “What does it say about Lucy?”

“Well, I’ll be damned, there’s even a photo of you and Bray out in the parking lot at Luong’s scene, at the convenience store. Both of you look like you hate each other’s guts. . . .”

“Marino!” I raise my voice. It is all I can do to concentrate on my driving. “Okay, enough!”

A pause, then, “I’m sorry, Doc. Jesus, I know it’s awful, but I didn’t get a chance to look at much beyond the front page before I got hold of you. I had no idea. I’m sorry. I just never seen nothing like this unless somebody really famous suddenly dies.”

Tears smart. I don’t point out the irony of what he just said. I feel as if I have died.

“Let me look at this Lucy stuff,” Marino is saying. “Pretty much what you’d expect. She’s your niece but you’ve always been more like her mother, uh, graduated all-that-laude-shit from UVA, her DUI car wreck, fact she’s gay, flies a helicopter, FBI, ATF, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that she almost shot Chandonne in your front yard. I guess that’s the fucking point.” Marino returns to his irritated self. As much as he picks on Lucy, he doesn’t like it one bit if anybody else does. “Don’t say she’s on admin leave or that you’re hiding out at Anna’s house. Least there’s something those assholes haven’t dug up.”

I inch closer to West Cary Street. “Where are you?” I ask him.

“HQ. About to head your way,” he replies. “Because you’re gonna have quite a welcome party.” He means the press. “Thought you might like a little company. Plus, I got some stuff to go over with you. Also thought we might try a little trick, Doc. I’ll get to your office first and ditch my car. You pull in front on Jackson Street instead of going around to the back lot off Fourth, hop out and go in and I’ll park your car. Word from the troops—there’s about thirty reporters, photographers, TV guys camping out at your parking place, waiting for you to show up.”

I start to agree with him and then have second thoughts. No, I say. I am not about to start the charade of hiding, ducking and holding up files or my coat to hide my face from cameras as if I am a crime boss. Absolutely not. I tell Marino I will see him at my office, but I will park as usual and deal with the media. For one thing, my stubbornness has kicked in. For another, I don’t see what I have to lose by going about my business as usual and simply telling the truth, and the damn truth is I didn’t kill Diane Bray. I never even thought about it, although I certainly disliked her more than anyone else I have ever met in my life.

On 9th Street I stop at a red light and put on my suit jacket. I check myself in the rearview mirror to make sure I look reasonably glued together. I put on a dab of lipstick and comb my fingers through my hair. I turn on the radio, bracing myself for the first news spot. I anticipate that local stations will interrupt their programs frequently to remind everybody that I am the first scandal of the new millennium.

“. . . So, I gotta say this, Jim. I mean, talk about someone who could get away with the perfect murder. . . .”

“No kidding. You know, I interviewed her once. . . .”

I switch to a different station and then another one as I am mocked and degraded or simply reported on because someone has leaked to the media what is supposed to be the most secret and sacred of all legal proceedings. I wonder who violated his code of silence, and what is even sadder, several names come to mind. I don’t trust Righter. I don’t trust anyone he has contacted for telephone or bank records. But I have another suspect in mind—Jay Talley—and I am betting that he has been subpoenaed, too. I compose myself as I pull into my parking lot and see the television and radio vans lining 4th Street and the dozens of people waiting for me with cameras, microphones and notepads.

NOT ONE OF the reporters notices my dark blue Explorer because they aren’t expecting it, and this is when I realize I have made a serious tactical error. I have been driving a rental car for days and it didn’t occur to me until this moment that I might be asked why. I turn into my reserved space by the front door and am sighted. The pack moves toward me like hunters after big game, and I will myself to go into my role. I am the chief. I am reserved, poised and unafraid. I have done nothing wrong. I climb out and take my time gathering my briefcase and a stack of folders out of the backseat. My elbow aches beneath layers of elasticized wrappings, and cameras click and microphones point at me like guns cocking and finding their mark.

“Dr. Scarpetta? Can you comment about . . . ?”

“Dr. Scarpetta . . . ?”

“When did you find out a special grand jury is investigating you?”

“Isn’t it true you and Diane Bray were at odds . . . ?”

“Where’s your car?”

“Can you confirm that you’ve basically been run out of your home and don’t even have your own car right now?”

“Will you resign?”

I face them on the sidewalk. I am silent but steady as I wait for them to get quiet. When they realize I intend to address their questions I catch surprised looks and their aggression quickly settles down. I recognize many faces but can’t remember names. I am not sure I have ever known the names of the media’s real troops who gather the news behind the scenes. I remind myself they are simply doing their jobs and there is no reason for me to take any of this personally. That’s right, nothing personal. Rude, inhumane, inappropriate, insensitive and largely inaccurate, but not personal. “I’ve no prepared statement,” I start to say.

“Where were you the night Diane Bray was murdered . . . ?”

“Please,” I interrupt them. “Like you, I’ve recently learned there is a special grand jury investigation into her murder, and I ask you to honor the very necessary confidentiality of such a proceeding. Please understand why I’m not at liberty to discuss it with you.”

“But did you . . . ?”

“Isn’t it true you aren’t driving your own car because the police have it?”

Questions and accusations rip the morning air like shrapnel as I walk toward my building. I have nothing more to say. I am the chief. I am poised and calm and unafraid. I did nothing wrong. There is one reporter whom I do remember, because how could I forget a tall, white-haired, chisel-featured African American whose name is Washington George? He wears a long leather trench coat and presses behind me as I struggle to open the glass door leading inside the building.

“Can I just ask you one thing?” he says. “You remember me? That’s not my question.” A smile. “I’m Washington George. I work for the AP.”

“I remember you.”

“Here, let me help you with that.” He holds the door and we go inside the lobby, where the security guard looks at me, and I know that look now. My notoriety is reflected in people’s eyes. My heart sinks. “Good morning, Jeff,” I say as I walk past the console.

A nod.

I pass my plastic ID over the electronic eye and the door leading into my side of the building unlocks. Washington George is still with me, and he is saying something about information he has that he thinks I need to know, but I am not listening. A woman sits in my reception area. She huddles in a chair and seems sad and small amid polished granite and glass blocks. This is not a good place to be. I always ache for anyone who finds himself in my reception area. “Is someone helping you?” I ask her.

She is dressed in a black skirt and nurses’ shoes, a dark raincoat pulled tightly around her. She hugs her pocketbook as if someone might steal it. “I’m just waiting,” she says in a hushed voice.

“Who are you here to see?”

“Well, I don’t rightly know,” she stammers, her eyes swimming in tears. Sobs well up inside her and her nose begins to run. “It’s about my boy. Do you think I might see him? I don’t understand what y’all are doing to him in there.” Her chin trembles and she wipes her nose on the back of her hand. “I just need to see him.”

Fielding left me a message about today’s cases, and I know that one of them is a teenage boy who supposedly hanged himself. What was the name? White? I ask her and she nods. Benny, she gives me his first name. I presume she is Mrs. White and she nods again and explains that she and her son changed their last name to White after she got remarried a few years back. I tell her to come on with me—and now she is crying hard—and we will find out what is going on with Benny. Whatever Washington George has to tell me will have to wait.

“I don’t think you’re going to want it to wait,” he replies.

“All right, all right. Come on in with me and I’ll get to you as soon as I can.” I am saying this as I let us into my office with another pass of my ID key. Cleta is entering cases into our computer, and she instantly blushes when she sees me.

“Good morning,” she tries to be her usual cheerful self. But she has that look in her eye, the look I’ve grown to hate and fear. I can only imagine what my staff has been saying among themselves this morning, and it doesn’t escape my attention that the newspaper is folded on top of Cleta’s desk and she has tried to cover it with her sweater. Cleta has put on weight over the holidays and has dark circles under her eyes. I am making everybody miserable.

“Who’s taking care of Benny White?” I ask her.

“I think Dr. Fielding is.” She looks at Mrs. White and gets up from her workstation. “Can I take your coat? What about some coffee?”

I tell Cleta to take Mrs. White to my conference room and Washington George can wait in the medical library. I find my secretary, Rose. I am so relieved to see her that I forget about my troubles, nor does she reflect them to me by giving me a look—that secretive, curious, embarrassed look. Rose is just Rose. If anything, disaster irons more starch in her than usual. She meets my eyes and shakes her head. “I’m so disgusted I could spit nails,” she says when I show up in her doorway. “The most ridiculous hogwash I’ve ever heard of my entire life.” She picks up her copy of the paper and shakes it at me as if I am a bad dog. “Don’t you let this bother you, Dr. Scarpetta.” As if it is that simple. “More chicken crap than Kentucky Fried, that damn Buford Righter. He can’t come out and just tell you to your face, can he? So you have to find out this way?” Shaking the paper again.

“Rose, is Jack in the morgue?” I ask.

“Oh God, working on that poor kid.” Rose gets off the subject of me, and her indignation turns to pity. “Lord, Lord. Have you seen him?”

“I just got here . . .”

“Looks like a little choir boy. Just the most beautiful blue-eyed blond. Lord, Lord. If that was my child . . .”

I interrupt Rose by putting a finger to my lips as I hear Cleta coming up the hallway with the boy’s poor mother. I mouth his mother to Rose and she gets quiet. Her eyes linger on mine. She is fidgety and high-strung this morning, and dressed severely in black, her hair pulled back and pinned up, reminding me of Grant Wood’s American Gothic. “I’m okay,” I tell her quietly.

“Well, I don’t believe that.” Her eyes get dewy and she nervously busies herself with paperwork.

Jean-Baptiste Chandonne has decimated my entire staff. Everyone who knows and depends on me is dismayed, bewildered. They don’t completely trust me anymore and secretly anguish over what will happen to their lives and jobs. I am reminded of my worst moment in school when I was twelve—like Lucy, precocious, the youngest in my class. My father died that school year on December 23, and the only thing good I can find in his waiting until two days before Christmas is at least the neighbors were winding down from work, most of them home and cooking and baking. In the good Italian-Catholic tradition, my father’s life was celebrated with abundance. For several days, our house was filled with laughter, tears, food, drink and song.

When I returned to school after the New Year, I became even more relentless in my cerebral conquests and explorations. Making perfect scores on tests was no longer enough. I was desperate for attention, desperate to please, and begged the nuns for special projects, any project, I didn’t care what. Eventually, I was hanging around the parochial school all afternoon, beating chalkboard erasers on the school steps, helping the teachers grade tests, putting together bulletin boards. I got very good with scissors and staplers. When there was a need to cut out letters of the alphabet or numbers and exactly assemble them into words, sentences, calendars, the nuns came looking for me.

Martha was a girl in my math class who sat in front of me and never spoke. She glanced back at me a lot, cold but curious, always trying to catch a peek at the grades circled in red on top of my folded homework and tests, hopeful she had scored better than I had. One day, after an especially difficult algebra test, I noticed that Sister Teresa’s demeanor toward me decidedly chilled. She waited until I was cleaning erasers again, squatting outside on stucco steps, pounding, creating clouds of chalk dust in the winter tropical sun, and I looked up. There she was in her habit, towering over me like a giant, frowning Antarctic bird wearing a crucifix. Someone had accused me of cheating on my algebra test, and although Sister Teresa did not identify the source of this lie, I had no doubt of the culprit: Martha. The only way I could prove my innocence was to take the test again and make another perfect score.

Sister Teresa watched me closely after that. I dared never let my eyes stray from what I was doing at my desk. Several days passed. I was emptying the trash baskets, just the two of us alone in the classroom, and she told me I must pray constantly that God would keep me free of sin. I must thank our Heavenly Father for the great gifts I have and look to Him to keep me honest, because I was so smart I could get away with a lot of things. God knows everything, Sister Teresa said. I can’t fool God. I protested that I was honest and not trying to fool God and she could ask God herself. I began to cry. “I am not a cheater,” I sobbed. “I want my daddy.”

When I was at Johns Hopkins in my first year of medical school, I wrote Sister Teresa a letter and recounted that wrenching, unfair incident. I reiterated my innocence, still bothered, still furious that I had been falsely accused and the nuns didn’t defend me and never seemed quite as sure of me afterward.

As I stand in Rose’s office now, more than twenty years later, I think about what Jaime Berger said the first time we met. She promised that the hurt had only begun. Of course, she was right. “Before everybody leaves today,” I say to my secretary, “I’d like to talk to them. If you’d pass that along, Rose. We’ll see how the day goes and find a time. I’m going to check on Benny White. Please make sure his mother is all right, and I’ll be in shortly to talk to her.”

I head down the hallway past the break room and find Washington George in the medical library. “I just have a minute,” I tell him in a distracted way.

He is scanning books on a shelf, notepad down by his side like a gun he might use. “I heard a rumor,” he says. “If you know it’s true, maybe you can verify it. If you don’t know, well, maybe you should. Buford Righter’s not going to be the prosecutor in your special grand jury hearing.”

“I know nothing about it,” I reply, masking the indignation I always feel when the press knows details before I do. “But we’ve worked a lot of cases together,” I add. “I wouldn’t expect him to want to deal with this himself.”

“I guess so, and what I understand is a special prosecutor has been appointed. That’s the part I’m getting to. You aware of this?” He tries to read my face.

“No.” I am trying to read his face, too, hoping to catch a foreshadowing that might prevent me from being broadsided.

“No one’s indicated to you that Jaime Berger’s been appointed to get you indicted, Dr. Scarpetta?” He stares me in the eye. “From what I understand, that’s one of the reasons she came to town. You’ve been going through the Luong and Bray cases with her and all that, but I have it from a very good source it’s a setup. She’s been undercover, I guess you would say. Righter set it up before Chandonne allegedly showed up at your house. I understand Berger’s been in the picture for weeks.”

All I can think to say is, “Allegedly?” I am shocked.

“Well,” Washington George says, “I assume by your reaction that you haven’t heard any of this.”

“I don’t guess you can tell me who your reliable source is,” I respond.

“Naw.” He smiles a little, somewhat sheepishly. “So you can’t confirm?”

“Of course I can’t,” I say as I gather my wits about me.

“Look, I’m going to keep digging, but I want you to know I like you and you’ve always been nice enough to me.” He goes on. I am barely hearing a word of it. All I can think of is Berger spending hours with me in the dark, in her car, in my house, in Bray’s house, and all along she was making mental notes to use against me in the special grand jury hearing. God, no wonder she seems to know so much about my life. She has probably been through my phone records, bank statements, credit reports and interviewed everyone who knows me. “Washington,” I say, “I’ve got the mother of some poor person who just died, and I can’t stand here and talk to you any longer.” I walk off. I don’t care if he thinks I am rude.

I cut through the ladies’ room and in the changing area I put on a lab coat and slip paper covers over my shoes. The autopsy suite is full of sounds, every table occupied with the unfortunate. Jack Fielding is splashed with blood. He has already opened up Mrs. White’s son and is inserting a syringe with a fourteen-gauge needle into the aorta to draw blood. Jack gives me a rather frantic, wild-eyed look when I walk over to his table. The morning news is all over his face.

“Later.” I raise my hand before he can ask a question. “His mother’s in my office.” I indicate the body.

“Shit,” Fielding says. “Shit is all I gotta say about this entire fucking world.”

“She wants to see him.” I take a rag from a bag on a gurney and wipe the boy’s delicately pretty face. His hair is the color of hay and, except for his suffused face, his skin is like rose milk. He has fuzz on his upper lip and the first hint of pubic hair, his hormones just beginning to stir, preparing for an adult life he was not destined to have. A narrow, dark furrow around the neck angles up to the right ear where the rope was knotted. Otherwise, his strong, young body bears no evidence of violence, no hint that he should have had any reason in the world not to live. Suicides can be very challenging. Contrary to popular belief, people rarely leave notes. People don’t always talk about their feelings in life and sometimes their dead bodies don’t have much to say, either.

“Goddamn,” Jack mutters.

“What do we know about this?” I ask him.

“Just that he started acting weird at school right about Christmas.” Jack picks up the hose and rinses out the chest cavity until it gleams like the inside of a tulip. “Dad died of lung cancer a few years ago.” Water slaps. “That damn Stanfield, Jesus Christ. What we got out there? Some kind of special? Three fucking cases from him in four fucking weeks.” Jack rinses off the bloc of organs. They shimmer in deep hues on the cutting board, waiting for their ultimate violation. “He keeps turning up like a fucking bad penny.” Jack grabs a large surgical knife from the cart. “So this kid goes to church yesterday, comes home and hangs himself in the woods.”

The more times Jack Fielding uses the word “fuck,” the more upset he is. He is extremely upset. “What about Stanfield?” I ask darkly. “I thought he was quitting.”

“I wish he would. The guy’s an idiot. He calls about this case and guess what else? Apparently, he goes to the scene. The kid’s hanging from a tree and Stanfield cuts him down.”

I have a feeling I know what’s coming.

“He cuts through the knot.”

I was right. “He took photographs first, let’s hope.”

“Over there.” He nods at the counter on the other side of the room.

I go to look at the photographs. They are painful. It appears Benny didn’t even stop to change clothes when he came home from church, but went straight into the woods, threw a nylon rope over a tree branch, looped one end and threaded the other end through it. Then he made another loop with a simple slip knot and put it over his head. In the photographs, he is dressed in a navy blue suit and a white shirt. A red-and-blue-striped clip-on tie is on the ground, either dislodged by the rope or maybe he took it off first. He is kneeling, arms dangling by his sides, his head bent, a typical position for suicidal hangings. I don’t have many cases where people are fully suspended, their feet off the ground. The point is to put enough compression on the blood vessels of the neck so that insufficient oxygenated blood reaches the brain. It takes only 4.4 pounds of pressure to compress the jugular veins, and a little more than twice that to occlude the carotids. The weight of the head against the noose is enough. Unconsciousness is quick. Death takes minutes.

“Let’s do this.” I get back to Jack. “Cover him up. We’ll put some plasticized sheets over him so blood won’t soak through. And let’s give his mother a viewing before you do anything else to him.”

He takes a deep breath and tosses his scalpel back on the cart.

“I’ll go talk to her and see what else we can find out.” I walk off. “Buzz Rose when you’re ready. Thanks, Jack.” I pause to meet his eyes. “We’ll talk later? We’ve never had that cup of coffee. We never even wished each other Merry Christmas.”

I find Mrs. White in my conference room. She has stopped crying and is in a deep, depressed space, staring without blinking, lifeless. She barely focuses on me when I walk in and shut the door. I tell her I just looked at Benny and am going to give her a chance to see him in a few minutes. Her eyes fill with tears again and she wants to know if he suffered. I tell her he would have slipped into unconsciousness rapidly. She wants to know if he died because he couldn’t breathe. I reply that we don’t know all the answers right now, but it is unlikely that his airway was obstructed.

Benny may have died from hypoxic brain damage, but I am more inclined to suspect that the compression of blood vessels caused a vaso-vagal response. In other words, his heart slowed down and he died. When I mention he was kneeling, she suggests that maybe he was praying for the Lord to take him home. Maybe, I reply. He very well could have been praying. I comfort Mrs. White as best I can. She informs me that a hunter was looking for a deer he shot earlier and found her son’s body, and Benny couldn’t have been dead very long because he disappeared right after church, about twelve-thirty, and the police came by her house around five. They told her the hunter found Benny at around two. So at least he wasn’t out there all by himself for very long, she keeps saying. And it was a good thing he had his New Testament in his suit pocket because it had his name and address in it. That was how the police figured out who he was and located his family.

“Mrs. White,” I say, “was something going on with Benny of late? What about at church yesterday morning? Anything happen that you know about?”

“Well, he’s been moody.” She is steadier now. She is talking about Benny as if he is sitting out in the reception area waiting for her. “He’ll be twelve next month, and you know how that goes.”

“What do you mean by ‘moody’?”

“He would go in his room a lot and shut the door. Stay in there listening to music with the headphones on. He gets a smart mouth now and again, and he didn’t used to be that way. I’ve been concerned.” Her voice catches. She blinks, suddenly remembering where she is and why. “I just don’t know why he had to do something like that!” Tears seem to spurt out of her eyes. “I know there’re some boys at church he’s been having a hard time with. They tease him a lot, calling him pretty boy.”

“Did anyone tease him yesterday?” I ask.

“That very well could be. They’re all in Sunday School together. And there’s been a lot of talk, you know, about those killings in the area.” She pauses again. She doesn’t want to continue down a path that leads to a subject both foreign and aberrant to her.

“The two men killed right before Christmas?”

“Uh huh. The ones they say were cursed, because that’s not how America started, you know. With people doing things like that.”

“Cursed? Who says they were cursed?”

“It’s the talk. A lot of talk,” she goes on, taking a deep breath. “With Jamestown being just down the road. There’s always been stories about people seeing ghosts of John Smith and Pocahontas and all the rest of it. Then these men are murdered right near there, near Jamestown Island, and all this talk about them being, well, you know. Being unnatural, which is why someone killed them, I guess. Or at least that’s what I hear.”

“Did you and Benny talk about all this?” My heart is getting heavier by the moment.

“Some. I mean, everybody’s been talking about those men killed and burned and tortured. People’ve been locking their doors more than usual. It’s been spooky, I must admit. So Benny and I’ve discussed it, yes we have. To tell you the truth, he’s been a lot moodier since all that happened. So maybe that’s what had him upset.” Silence. She stares at the tabletop. She can’t decide which tense to use when she talks about her dead son. “That and the other boys calling him pretty. Benny hated that, and I don’t blame him. I’m always telling him, Just wait until you grow up and are handsomer than all the rest. And the girls are just lining up. That’ll teach ’em.” She smiles a little and starts crying again. “He’s real touchy about it. And you know how children can tease.”

“Possibly he got teased a lot yesterday at church?” I guide her along. “Do you think maybe the boys made comments about so-called hate crimes, about gays and maybe implied . . . ?”

“Well,” she blurts out. “Well, yes. About curses against people who are unnatural and wicked. The Bible makes itself very clear. ‘God gave them up to their own lust,’” she quotes.

“Any possibility Benny’s been worried about his sexuality, Mrs. White?” I am very gentle but firm. “That’s pretty normal for kids entering adolescence. A lot of sexual identity confusion, that sort of thing. Especially these days. The world’s a complicated place, much more complicated than it used to be.” The phone rings. “Excuse me a minute.”

Jack is on the line. Benny is ready to be viewed. “And Marino’s in here looking for you. Says he’s got important information.”

“Tell him where I am.” I hang up.

“Benny did ask me if those men had those awful things done to them because they’re . . . He used the word queer,” Mrs. White is saying. “I said that very well may have been God’s punishment.”

“How did he react to that?” I ask her.

“I don’t remember him saying anything.”

“When was this?”

“Maybe three weeks ago. Right after they found that second body and all the news came out about them being hate crimes.”

I wonder if Stanfield has any idea how much damage he has caused by leaking investigative details to his goddamn brother-in-law. Mrs. White is chattering nervously as dread builds with her every step down the hallway. I escort her to the front of the office and through a door that takes us into the small viewing room. Inside are a couch and table. There is a painting of a peaceful English countryside on the wall. Opposite the sitting area is a wall of glass. It is covered with a curtain. On the other side is the walk-in refrigerator.

“Why don’t you just sit and make yourself comfortable,” I tell Mrs. White and touch her shoulder.

She is tense, frightened, her eyes riveted to the drawn blue curtain. She perches on the edge of the couch, her hands tightly clasped in her lap. I open the curtain and Benny is swathed in blue, a blue sheet tucked under his chin to hide the ligature mark. His wet hair is combed back, eyes shut. His mother is frozen on the edge of the couch. She doesn’t seem to breathe. She stares blankly, without comprehension. She frowns. “How come his face is all red like that?” she asks almost accusingly.

“The rope prevented the blood from flowing back to his heart,” I explain. “So his face is congested.”

She gets up and moves closer to the window. “Oh my baby,” she whispers. “My sweet child. You’re in heaven now. In Jesus’ arms in paradise. Look, his hair’s all wet like he’s just been baptized. You must have given him a bath. I just need to know he didn’t suffer.”

I can’t tell her that. I imagine when he first tightened the noose around his neck, the roaring pressure in his head was very frightening. He had begun the process of terminating his own life, and he was awake and alert long enough to feel it coming. Yes, he suffered. “Not long,” is what I say. “He didn’t suffer long, Mrs. White.”

She covers her face with her hands and weeps. I draw the curtain and lead her out.

“What will you do to him now?” she asks as she woodenly follows me out.

“We’ll finish looking at him and do some tests, just to see if there’s anything else we need to know.”

She nods.

“Would you like to sit for a while? Can we get you anything?”

“No, no. I’ll just go on.”

“I’m very sorry about your son, Mrs. White. I can’t tell you how sorry. If you have any questions, just call. If I’m not available, someone here will help you. It’s going to be hard, and you’ll go through a lot of things. So please call if we can help.”

She stops in the hallway and grabs my hand. She looks intensely into my eyes. “You’re sure someone didn’t do this to him? How do we know for a fact he did it to himself?”

“Right now, there’s nothing to make us think someone else did this,” I assure her. “But we’ll investigate every possibility. We’re not finished yet. Some of these tests take weeks.”

“You won’t keep him here for weeks!”

“No, he’ll be ready to go in a few hours. The funeral home can come for him.”

We are in the front office and I escort her through a glass door, back into the lobby. She hesitates, as if not quite sure what to do next. “Thank you,” she says. “You’ve been very kind.”

It isn’t often I am thanked. My thoughts are so heavy as I return to my office that I almost run into Marino before I notice him. He is waiting for me just inside my doorway and has paperwork in hand, his face radiating excitement. “You aren’t going to fucking believe this,” he says.

“I’m to the point of believing just about anything,” I grimly reply as I almost fall into the big leather chair behind my piled-up desk. I sigh. I expect Marino has come to tell me that Jaime Berger is the special prosecutor. “If it’s about Berger, I already know,” I say. “An AP reporter told me she’s been appointed to get me indicted. I haven’t decided if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. Hell, I can’t decide if I even care.”

Marino has a puzzled expression on his face. “No kidding? She is? How’s she gonna do that? She pass the bar in Virginia?”

“Doesn’t have to,” I reply. “She can appear pro hac vice.” The phrase means for this one particular occasion, and I go on to explain that at a special jury’s request, the court can grant an out-of-state lawyer special permission to participate in a case even if that person is not licensed to practice law in Virginia.

“So what about Righter?” Marino asks. “What will he be doing during all this?”

“Someone from the commonwealth’s attorney’s office will have to work with her. My guess is he’ll be second chair and leave the questioning to her.”

“We’ve had a weird break in The Fort James Motel case.” He gives me his news. “Vander’s been working like hell on the prints he got inside the room, and you aren’t gonna fucking believe it,” he says again. “Guess whose popped up? Diane Bray’s. I’m not shitting you. A perfect latent by the light switch when you first come in the room—her latent, Bray’s damn fingerprint. Of course, we got the dead guy’s prints, but no hit on any others except Bev Kiffin, as you’d expect. Her prints are on the Gideon Bible, for example, but not his, not Matos’s. And that’s kind of interesting, too. It’s looking like Kiffin might have been the one who opened the Bible to whatever it was.”

“Ecclesiastes,” I remind him.

“Yeah. A latent on the open pages, Kiffin’s fingerprint. And remember, she said she didn’t open the Bible, so I asked her about it over the phone and she still says she didn’t open it. So I’m getting mighty suspicious about what her involvement is, especially now that we know Bray was in that very room before the guy was killed in there. What was Bray doing at that motel? You want to tell me that?”

“Maybe her drug-dealing brought her there,” I reply. “I can’t think of another reason. Certainly, the motel isn’t the sort of place you would expect her to stay.”

“Bingo.” Marino fires his finger at me like a gun. “And Kiffin’s husband supposedly works for the same trucking company that Barbosa did, right? Although we still ain’t found no record of someone named Kiffin who drives a truck or whatever—can’t even track him down at all, which I have to admit is strange. And we know Overland’s into smuggling drugs and guns, right? Maybe it’s making more sense if it turns out that Chandonne’s the one who left those hairs at the campsite. Maybe we’re talking his family cartel, huh? Maybe that’s what fucking brought him to Richmond to begin with—the family business. And while he was in the area, he just couldn’t control his habit of whacking women.”

“Might also help explain what Matos was doing there,” I add.

“No kidding. Maybe he and John the Baptist were pals. Or maybe someone in the family sent Matos to Virginia to snuff Johnny-boy, take him out of commission so he don’t sing to anyone about the family business.”

There are endless possibilities. “What none of this explains is why Matos was murdered and who did it. Or why Barbosa was killed,” I point out.

“No, but I feel like we’re getting warmer,” Marino replies. “And I got an itch and I think if we scratch it, we might find Talley. Maybe he’s the missing link in all this.”

“Well, he apparently knew Bray in Washington,” I say. “And he’s been living in the same city where the Chandonne family is headquartered.”

“And he always manages to be on the scene when John the Baptist is, too,” Marino adds. “And I think I saw the asshole the other day. Was pulled up at a red light and there’s this big black Honda motorcycle in the lane next to me. Didn’t recognize him at first because he had a helmet on with this tinted shield covering his face, but he was staring at my truck. I’m pretty sure it was Talley and he looked away real quick. Asshole.”

Rose buzzes me to say that the governor is calling for our ten o’clock telephone appointment. I motion for Marino to shut my office door while I wait on the line for Mitchell. Reality again intrudes. I am returned to my predicament and its wide broadcast. I have a feeling I know exactly what the governor has on his mind. “Kay?” Mike Mitchell is somber. “I was very sorry to see the paper this morning.”

“I’m not happy about it, either,” I let him know.

“I’m supportive of you and will continue to be,” he says, maybe to ease me into the rest of what he plans to relay, which can’t be good. I don’t respond. I also suspect he knows about Berger and probably had something to do with her being appointed the special prosecutor. I don’t bring it up. There is no point. “I think in light of your current circumstances,” he goes on, “that it’s best you relinquish your duties until this matter is resolved. And Kay, it’s not because I believe a word of it.” This is also not the same thing as saying that he thinks I am innocent. “But until things calm down, I believe your continuing to run the medical examiner system for the commonwealth would be unwise.”

“Are you firing me, Mike?” I ask him point-blank.

“No, no,” he is quick to say, and his tone is gentler. “Let’s just get through the special grand jury hearing, and we’ll go from there. I haven’t given up on you or your idea of being a private contractor, either. Let’s just get through this,” he says again.

“Of course, I will do whatever you wish,” I tell him with all due respect. “But I have to say that I don’t think it’s in the best interest of the commonwealth for me to withdraw from ongoing cases that still need my attention.”

“Kay, it’s not possible.” He is the politician. “We’re only talking two weeks, assuming your hearing turns out all right.”

“Good God,” I reply. “It has to.”

“And I’m sure it will.”

I get off the phone and look at Marino. “Well, that’s that.” I start throwing things in my briefcase. “I hope they don’t change the locks the minute I’m out the door.”

“Really, what could he do? When you think about it, Doc, what could he do?” Marino has resigned himself to this inevitability.

“I would just like to know who the hell leaked it to the media.” I shut my briefcase and snap in the locks. “Have you been subpoenaed, Marino?” I go ahead and ask. “Nothing’s confidential. May as well tell me.”

“You knew I would be.” He has a pained expression on his face. “Don’t let the bastards get you, Doc. Don’t give up.”

I pick up my briefcase and open the office door. “I’m doing anything but give up. In fact, I’ve got a lot to do.”

His expression asks, what? I’ve just been ordered by the governor to do nothing. “Mike’s a good guy,” Marino says. “But don’t push him. Don’t give him a reason to fire you. Why don’t you go somewhere for a few days? Maybe go see Lucy in New York. Didn’t she head on up to New York? Her and Teun? Just get the hell out of here until the hearing. I wish you would so I don’t have to worry about you every other minute. I don’t even like you being out there in Anna’s house all by yourself.”

I take a deep breath and try to tuck in my fury and hurt. Marino is right. There is no point in pissing off the governor and making matters worse. But now I feel run out of town on top of everything else, and I have not heard a word from Anna, and that stings, too. I am almost in tears, and I refuse to cry in my office. I avert my eyes from Marino, but he catches my feelings.

“Hey,” he says, “you got every right not to feel good. All of this sucks, Doc.”

I cross the hallway and cut through the ladies’ room, on my way to the morgue. Turk is sewing up Benny White and Jack is sitting at the counter doing paperwork. I pull out a chair next to my assistant chief and pluck several stray hairs off his scrubs. “You got to quit shedding,” I say, trying to hide my upset. “You going to tell me why your hair keeps falling out?” I have been meaning to ask him for weeks. As usual, so much has happened and Jack and I have not talked.

“All you got to do is read the paper,” he says, putting down his pen. “That should tell you why my hair’s falling out.” His eyes are heavy.

I nod as I get his meaning. It is what I expect. Jack has known for a while that I am in serious trouble. Maybe Righter contacted him weeks ago and started fishing, just as he did with Anna. I ask Jack if this is the case, and he admits it. He says he has been a wreck. He hates politics and administration and does not want my job and never will.

“You make me look good,” he says. “You always have, Dr. Scarpetta. They might think I should be appointed chief. Then what do I do? I don’t know.” He runs his fingers through his hair and loses more. “I just wish everything could go back to normal.”

“Believe me, so do I,” I say as the phone rings and Turk answers it.

“That reminds me,” Jack says. “We’re getting weird phone calls down here. I tell you about that?”

“I was down here when we got one,” I reply. “Someone claiming to be Benton.”

“Sick,” he says in disgust.

“That’s the only one I’m aware of,” I add.

“Dr. Scarpetta?” Turk calls out. “Can you take it? It’s Paul.”

I go to the phone. “How are you, Paul?” I ask Paul Monty, the statewide director of the forensic labs.

“First, I just want you to know everybody in this damn building is pulling for you, Kay,” he says. “Bullshit. I read all that bullshit and practically spit my coffee out. And we’re working our fannies off.” By this he means evidence testing. There is supposed to be an egalitarian order in the workup of evidence—appropriately, no one victim should be more important than another and moved to the front of the line. But there is also an unspoken code, same as in police shootings. People take care of their own. It is a fact. “Got some interesting test results that I wanted to pass on to you personally,” Paul Monty goes on. “The hairs from the campground—the ones that you suspect are Chandonne’s? Well, the DNA matches. What’s of even more interest is that a fiber comparison shows that the cotton linens from that campsite match fibers collected from the mattress in Diane Bray’s bedroom.”

A scenario forms. Chandonne took Diane Bray’s linens after her murder and fled to the campground. Maybe he slept on them. Or maybe he simply disposed of them. But either way, we can definitely place Chandonne at The Fort James Motel. Paul has nothing more to report at the moment.

“What about the dental floss I found in the toilet?” I ask Paul. “In the room where Matos was killed?”

“No hit on that. The DNA’s not Chandonne’s or Bray’s or any of the usual suspects,” he tells me. “Maybe some previous guest at the motel? Could be unrelated.”

I return to the counter, where Jack resumes telling me about the strange phone calls. He says there have been several of them.

“One I happened to answer and the person, a guy, asked for you, says he’s Benton and then hangs up,” Jack reports. “Turk answered the second time. The guy says to tell you he called and will be an hour late to dinner, identifies himself as Benton and hangs up. So add that to the mix. No wonder I’m going bald.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I absently pick up Polaroid photographs of Benny White’s body on the gurney before he was unclothed.

“Thought you had enough shit going on. I should have told you. I was wrong.”

The sight of this young boy dressed in his Sunday best and inside an unzipped body pouch on top of a steel gurney is so incongruous. I feel deeply saddened as I notice his pants are a little short and his socks don’t quite match, one blue, one black. I feel worse. “You find anything unexpected with him?” I have talked enough about my problems. My problems, as a matter of fact, do not seem very important when I look at photographs of Benny and think about his mother in the viewing room.

“Yeah, one thing puzzled me,” Jack says. “The story I got is he came home from church and never went inside the house. He gets out of the car and heads out to the barn, saying he’ll be right in and is trying to find his pocket knife—thinks it might be in his tackle box and he forgot to take it out when he came home from fishing the other day. He never comes back to the house. In other words, he never ate Sunday dinner. But this little guy had a full stomach.”

“Could you tell what he might have eaten?” I ask.

“Yeah. Popcorn, for one thing. And looks like he ate hotdogs. So I call his house and talk to his stepdad. I ask if Benny might have eaten anything at church and am told no. His stepdad’s got no idea where the food came from,” Jack replies.

“That’s very odd,” I comment. “So he comes home from church and goes out to hang himself, but stops off someplace to eat popcorn and hotdogs first?” I get up from the counter. “Something’s wrong with that picture.”

“If it wasn’t for the gastric contents, I’d say it’s a straightforward suicide.” Jack remains seated, looking up at me. “I could kill Stanfield for cutting through the knot. The fuckhead.”

“Maybe we should take a look at where Benny was hanged,” I decide. “Go to the scene.”

“They live on a farm in James City County,” Jacks says. “Right on the river, and apparently the woods where he was hanged are at the edge of the field, not even a mile from the house.”

“Let’s go,” I tell him. “Maybe Lucy can give us a ride.”

IT IS A two-hour flight from the hangar in New York to HeloAir in Richmond, and Lucy was more than happy to show off her new company vehicle. The plan is simple. She will pick up Jack and me and land us at the farm, then the three of us will check out where Benny White allegedly killed himself. I also want to see his bedroom. Afterwards, we will drop Jack off in Richmond and I will return to New York with Lucy, where I will stay until the special grand jury hearing. This is all planned for tomorrow morning, and Detective Stanfield has no interest in meeting us at the scene.

“What for?” are the first words out of his mouth. “What you need to go there for?”

I almost mention the gastric contents that don’t make sense. I come close to inquiring as to whether there was anything Stanfield observed that made him suspicious. But I catch myself. Something stops me. “If you can just give me directions to their place,” I tell him.

He describes where Benny White’s family lives, just off Route 5, I can’t miss it because there is a small country store at the intersection, and I need to turn left at that store. He gives me landmarks that will not be helpful from the air. I finally get it out of him that the farm is less than a mile from the ferry near Jamestown, and that’s when I realize for the first time that Benny White’s farm is very close to The Fort James Motel and Camp Ground.

“Oh yeah,” Stanfield says when I ask him about this. “He was right there in the same area as the other ones. That’s what had him so upset, according to his mom.”

“How far is the farm from the motel?” I ask.

“Right across the creek from it. It’s not much of a farm.”

“Detective Stanfield, is there any possibility Benny knew Bev Kiffin’s children, her two boys? I understand Benny liked to fish.” I envision the fishing pole leaning against the upstairs window in Mitch Barbosa’s townhouse.

“Now, I know the story about him supposedly getting his pocket knife out of his tackle box, but I don’t think that’s what he did. I think he just wanted an excuse to get away from everybody,” Stanfield replies.

“Do we know where he got the rope?” I push aside his annoying assumptions.

“His stepdaddy says there’s all kinds of rope in the barn,” Stanfield replies. “Well, they call it a barn but it’s where they just keep junk. I asked him what was in there, and he said just junk. You know, I got a hunch Benny might have run into Barbosa out there, you know, fishing, and we know Barbosa was nice to kids. That sure would help explain it. And his mama did say the boy had been having nightmares and was mighty upset by the killings. Was scared to death, is the way she put it. Now what you’re gonna want to do is go straight to the creek. You’ll see the barn at the edge of the field, and then the woods right off to the left. There’s an overgrown footpath and where he hung himself is maybe fifty feet down that path where a deer stand is. You can’t miss it. I didn’t climb up it, up the deer stand, to cut down the rope, only cut off the end that was around his neck. So it should still be right where it was. The rope should be right there where it was.”

I refrain from showing my complete disgust with Stanfield’s sloppy policing. I don’t probe any further or suggest to him he ought to do exactly what he threatened: quit. I call Mrs. White to let her know my plans. Her voice is small and wounded. She is dazed and can’t seem to comprehend that we want to land a helicopter on her farm. “We need a clearing. A level field, an area where there are no telephone lines or a lot of trees,” I explain.

“We don’t have a runway.” She says this several times.

Finally, she puts her husband on the phone. His name is Marcus. He tells me they have a soybean field between their house and Route 5 and there’s a silo painted dark green, too. There isn’t another silo in that area, not one painted dark green, he adds. It is fine with him if we land in his field.

The rest of my day is long. I work at the office and catch my staff before they head home. I explain to them what is happening in my life and assure each person that his job is not in jeopardy. I also make it clear that I have done nothing wrong and am confident my name will be cleared. I don’t tell them I have resigned. They have suffered enough tremors and don’t need an earthquake. I don’t pack items in my office or head out with anything other than my briefcase, as if all is well and I’ll see everybody in the morning, as usual.

Now it is nine P.M. I sit in Anna’s kitchen, picking at a thick slice of cheddar cheese and sipping a glass of red wine, going easy, unwilling to cloud my thinking and simply finding it almost impossible to swallow solid food. I have lost weight. I don’t know how much. I have no appetite and have developed a wretched routine of going outside periodically to smoke. Every half hour or so, I try to contact Marino with no success. And I keep thinking about the Tlip file. It has hardly been out of my mind since I looked at it on Christmas Day. The telephone rings at close to midnight and I assume it is Marino finally returning my page. “Scarpetta,” I answer.

“It’s Jaime,” Berger’s distinctive, confident voice sounds over the line.

I pause in surprise. But then I remember: Berger seems to have no hesitation in talking to people she intends to send to jail, doesn’t matter the hour.

“I’ve been on the phone with Marino,” she starts off. “So I realize you know my situation. Or I guess I should say, our situation. And actually you ought to feel all right about it, Kay. I’m not going to coach you, but let me say this. Just talk to the jury the same way you do to me. And try not to worry.”

“I think I’m beyond worrying,” I reply.

“Mainly I’m calling to pass on some information. We got DNA on the stamps. The stamps from the letters in the Tlip file,” she informs me as if she is in my mind again. So now the Richmond labs are dealing directly with her, it occurs to me. “It appears Diane Bray was all over the map, Kay. At least she licked those stamps, and I will assume she wrote the letters and was smart enough not to leave her prints on them. The prints that were left on several of the letters are Benton’s, probably from when he opened them before he realized what they were. I assume he knew they were his prints. Don’t know why he didn’t make a note of it. I’m just wondering if Benton ever mentioned Bray to you. Any reason to think they knew each other?”

“I don’t remember him mentioning her,” I reply. My thoughts are locked. I can’t believe what Berger has just said.

“Well, he certainly could have known her,” Berger goes on. “She was in D.C. He was a few miles down the road in Quantico. I don’t know. But it baffles me that she would send this stuff to him, and I’m wondering if she wanted it posted in New York so he would go down the path of believing the crank mail was from Carrie Grethen.”

“And we know he did go down that path,” I remind her.

“Then we also have to wonder if Bray possibly—just possibly—had anything to do with his murder,” Berger adds the final touch.

It flashes in my mind that she is testing me again. What is she hoping? That I will blurt out something incriminating. Good. Bray got what was coming to her or She got what she deserved. At the same time, I don’t know. Maybe it is my paranoia speaking and not reality. Maybe Berger is simply saying what is on her mind, nothing more.

“I don’t guess she ever mentioned Benton to you,” Berger is saying.

“Not that I recall,” I reply. “I don’t remember Bray ever saying a word about Benton.”

“What I just can’t get,” Berger goes on, “is this Chandonne thing. If we consider that Jean-Baptiste Chandonne knew Bray—saying they were in business together—then why would he kill her? And in the manner he killed her? That strikes me as a non-fit. It doesn’t profile right. What do you think?”

“Maybe you should Mirandize me before you ask me what I think about Bray’s murderer,” is what I say. “Or maybe you should save your questions for the hearing.”

“You haven’t been arrested,” she replies, and I can’t believe it. She has a smile in her tone. I have amused her. “You don’t need to be Mirandized.” She gets serious. “I’m not toying with you, Kay. I’m asking for your help. You should be goddamn glad it will be me in that room interviewing witnesses and not Righter.”

“I’m just sorry anyone will be in that room. No one should be. Not on my account,” I tell her.

“Well, there are two key pieces that we’ve got to figure out.” She is impervious and has more to tell me. “The seminal fluid in Susan Pless’s case isn’t Chandonne’s. And now we have this newest information about Diane Bray. It’s just instinct. But I don’t think Chandonne knew Diane Bray. Not personally. Not at all. I think all of his victims are people he had experienced only from a distance. He watched and stalked and fantasized. And that, by the way, was Benton’s opinion, too, when he profiled Susan’s case.”

“Was it his opinion that the person who murdered her also left the seminal fluid?” I ask.

“He never thought more than one person was involved,” Berger concedes. “Until your cases in Richmond, we were still looking for that well-dressed, good-looking guy who ate with her in Lumi. We sure weren’t looking for some self-proclaimed werewolf with a genetic disorder, not back then we weren’t.”

AS IF I am supposed to sleep well after all this. I don’t. I fade in and out, now and then picking up the alarm clock to check the time. Hours advance imperceptibly and weightily, like glaciers. I dream I am in my house and have a puppy, an adorable female yellow Labrador retriever with long, heavy ears and huge feet and the sweetest face imaginable. She reminds me of Gund stuffed animals in FAO Schwarz, that wonderful toy store in New York where I used to pick up surprises for Lucy when she was a child. In my dream, this wounded fiction I spin in my semi-conscious state, I am playing with the puppy, tickling her, and she is licking me, her tail wagging furiously. Then somehow I am walking into my house again, and it is dark and chilled and I sense nobody home, no life, absolute silence. I call out to the puppy—I can’t remember her name—and frantically search every room for her. I wake up in Anna’s guest room, crying, sobbing, just bawling.

CHAPTER 33

MORNING COMES AND haze drifts like smoke as we fly low over trees. Lucy and I are alone in her new machine because Jack woke up with aches and chills. He stayed home, and I have a suspicion that his illness is self-induced. I think he is hung over, and I fear that the unbearable stress I have brought upon the office has encouraged bad habits in him. He was perfectly satisfied with his life. Now everything has changed.

The Bell 407 is black with bright stripes. It smells like a new car and moves with the smooth strength of heavy silk as we fly east, eight hundred feet above the ground. I am preoccupied with the sectional map in my lap, trying to match depictions of power lines, roads and railroad tracks with those we pass over. It isn’t that we don’t know exactly where we are, because Lucy’s helicopter has enough navigational equipment to pilot the Concorde. But whenever I feel the way I do right now, I tend to obsess over a task, any task.

“Two antennas about one o’clock.” I show her on the map. “Five hundred and thirty feet above sea level. Shouldn’t be a factor, but don’t see them yet.”

“I’m looking,” she says.

The antennas will be well below horizon, meaning they aren’t a danger even if we get close. But I have a special phobia of obstructions, and there are more of them going up all the time in this world of constant communication. Richmond air traffic control comes over the air, telling us radar service is terminated and we can squawk VFR. I change the frequency to twelve hundred on the transponder as I barely make out the antennas several miles ahead. They don’t have high-intensity strobes and are nothing more than ghostly, straight pencil lines in thick, gray haze. I point them out.

“Got ’em,” Lucy replies. “Hate those things.” She pressures the cyclic right, curving well to the north of them, wanting nothing personal with antenna guy wires, for the heavy steel cables are the snipers. They will get you first.

“The governor going to be pissed at you if he finds out you’re doing this?” Lucy’s question sounds inside my headset.

“He told me to take a vacation from the office,” I reply. “I’m out of the office.”

“So you’ll come to New York with me,” she says. “You can stay in my apartment. I’m really glad you’re leaving the job, giving up being chief, striking out on your own. Maybe you’ll end up in New York working with Teun and me?”

I don’t want to hurt her feelings. I don’t tell her I am not glad. I want to be here. I want to be in my home and working my job as usual, and that will never be possible. I feel like a fugitive, I tell my niece, whose attention is outside the cockpit, eyes never straying from what she is doing. Talking to someone who is piloting a helicopter is like being on the phone. The person really doesn’t see you. There is no gesturing or touching. The sun is getting brighter, the haze thinning the farther east we fly. Below us, creeks glisten like entrails of the earth, and the James River shines white like snow. We get lower and slower, passing over the Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery, the full-size replicas of the ships that carried one hundred and four men and boys to Virginia in 1607. In the distance, I make out the obelisk peeking up through the trees of Jamestown Island, where archaeologists are raising the first English settlement in America from the dead. A ferry slowly carries cars across the water toward Surry.

“I see a green silo at nine o’clock,” Lucy observes. “Think that’s it?”

I follow her eyes to a small farm that backs up to a creek. On the other side of the narrow, muddy lick of water, rooftops and old campers peeking out of thick pines become The Fort James Motel and Camp Ground. Lucy circles the farm at five hundred feet, making sure there are no hazards such as power lines. She sizes up the area and seems satisfied as she lowers the collective and reins us back to sixty knots. We begin our approach to a clearing between woods and the small brick house where Benny White spent his twelve short years. Dead grass storms as Lucy gently sets us down, subtly feeling for the ground, making sure it is level. Mrs. White comes out of the house. She stares at us, a hand shielding her eyes from the sun, and then a tall man in a suit joins her. They stay on the porch while we go through the two-minute shutdown. As we climb out and walk toward the house, I realize that Benny’s parents have dressed up for us. They look as if they have just come from church.

“Never thought something like that would land on my farm.” Mr. White gazes off at the helicopter, a heavy expression on his face.

“Do come in,” Mrs. White says. “Can I get you some coffee or something?”

We chat about our flight, make small talk, anxiety thick. The Whites know I am here because I must be entertaining ominous scenarios about what really happened to their son. They seem to assume Lucy is part of the investigation and address both of us whenever they speak. The house is very neat and pleasantly furnished with big comfortable chairs, braided rugs and brass lamps. The floor is wide heart of pine, and wooden walls are whitewashed and hung with watercolors of Civil War scenes. By the fireplace in the living room are shelves that are full of cannonballs, minié balls, a mess kit, old bottles and all sort of artifacts that probably are from the Civil War. When Mr. White notices my interest, he explains that he is a collector. He is a treasure hunter and scours the area with a metal detector when he is not busy at the office. He is an accountant. His farm is not an active one, but has been in the family for more than a hundred years, he tells Lucy and me.

“I guess I’m just a history nut,” he goes on. “I’ve even found a few buttons from the American Revolution. Just never know what you’re going to find around here.”

We are in the kitchen and Mrs. White is getting a glass of water for Lucy.

“What about Benny?” I ask. “Was he interested in treasure hunting?”

“Oh, he sure was,” his mother replies. “Of course, he was always hoping to find real treasure. Like gold.” She has begun to accept his death and speaks of him in the past tense.

“You know, the old story about the Confederates hiding all this gold that’s never been found. Well, Benny thought he was going to find it,” Mr. White says, holding a glass of water as if he isn’t sure what to do with it. He sets it down on the countertop without drinking a drop. “He loved being outside, that one did. I’ve often thought it was too bad we don’t work the farm anymore because I think he would have really liked it.”

“Especially animals,” Mrs. White adds. “That child loved animals more than anyone I’ve ever met. Just so tenderhearted.” She tears up. “If a bird flew into a window, he’d go running out of the house to try and find it, and then he’d come in just in hysterics if the poor thing broke its neck, which is usually what happens.”

Benny’s stepfather stares out the window, a pained expression on his face. His mother falls silent. She is fighting to hold herself together.

“Benny had something to eat before he died,” I tell them. “I think Dr. Fielding might have asked you about that to see if he possibly was given something to eat at the church.”

Mr. White shakes his head, still staring out. “No, ma’am. They don’t serve food at the church except at the Wednesday-night suppers. If Benny had something to eat, I sure don’t know where.”

“He didn’t eat here,” Mrs. White adds with emphasis. “I fixed a pot roast for Sunday dinner, and well, he never had his dinner. Pot roast was one of his favorites.”

“He had popcorn and hotdogs in his stomach,” I say. “It appears he ate them not long before he died.” I make sure they understand the oddity of this and that it demands an explanation.

Both parents have baffled expressions. Their eyes light up with both fascination and confusion. They say they have no earthly idea where Benny would have gotten hold of junk food, as they call it. Lucy asks about neighbors, if perhaps Benny might have dropped by someone’s house before he went into the woods. Again, they can’t imagine him doing something like that, not at dinner time, and the neighbors are mostly elderly and would never give Benny a meal or even a snack without calling his parents first to make certain it was all right. “They wouldn’t spoil his dinner without asking us.” Mrs. White is certain of this.

“Would you mind if I see his bedroom?” I then say. “Sometimes I get a better feel for a patient if I can see where he spent his private time.”

The Whites look a little uncertain. “Well, I guess that would be all right,” the stepfather decides.

They take us down a hallway to the back of the house, and along the way we pass a bedroom off to the left that looks like a girl’s bedroom, with pale pink curtains and a pink bedspread. There are posters of horses on the walls, and Mrs. White explains that this is Lori’s bedroom. She is Benny’s younger sister and is at her grandmother’s house in Williamsburg right now. She hasn’t gone back to school yet and won’t until after the funeral, which is tomorrow. Although they don’t say it, I infer that they didn’t think it was a good idea for the child to be here when the medical examiner dropped in out of the sky and started asking questions about her brother’s violent death.

Benny’s room is a menagerie of stuffed animals: dragons, bears, birds, squirrels, fuzzy and sweet, many of them comical. There are dozens. His parents and Lucy stay outside the doorway while I walk in and pause in the middle of the room, looking around, letting the surroundings speak to me. Taped to the walls are bright pictures done in Magic Marker, again of animals, and they show imagination and a great deal of talent. Benny was an artist. Mr. White tells me from the doorway that Benny loved to take his sketchpad outside and draw trees, birds, whatever he saw. He was always drawing pictures to give people for presents, too. Mr. White talks on while his wife cries silently, tears rolling down her face.

I am looking at a drawing on the wall to the right of the dresser. The colorful, imaginative picture depicts a man in a small boat. He wears a wide-brim hat and is fishing, his rod bent as if he might just be having some luck. Benny has drawn a bright sun and a few clouds, and in the background, on the shore, is a square building with lots of windows and doors. “Is this the creek behind your farm?” I inquire.

“That’s right,” Mr. White says, hooking an arm around his wife. “It’s all right, sugar,” he keeps saying to her, swallowing hard, as if he might start crying, too.

“Benny liked to fish?” Lucy’s voice sounds from the hallway. “I’m just wondering, because some people who are big animal lovers don’t like to fish. Or else they let everything go.”

“Interesting point,” I say. “All right to look inside his closet?” I ask the Whites.

“Go right ahead,” Mr. White says without hesitation. “No, Benny didn’t like to catch anything. Truth is, he just liked to go out in the boat or find him a spot on the shore. Most of the time he’d sit there drawing.”

“Then this must be you, Mr. White.” I look back at the picture of the man in the boat.

“No, I think that would be his daddy,” Mr. White answers somberly. “His daddy used to go out in the boat with him. Truth is, I don’t go out in the boat.” He pauses. “Well, I don’t know how to swim, so I just have this uneasiness about being in the water.”

“Benny was a little shy about his drawing,” Mrs. White says in a shaky voice. “I think he liked to carry his fishing pole around because, well you know, he thought it made him look like other boys. I don’t think he even bothered bringing bait. Can’t imagine him killing even a worm, much less a fish.”

“Bread,” Mr. White says. “He’d take bread, like he was going to roll it up in bread balls. I used to tell him he wasn’t going to catch anything very big if all he used for bait was bread.”

I scan suits, slacks and shirts on hangers, and shoes lined on the floor. The clothing is conservative and looks as if it was picked out by his parents. Leaning against the back of the closet is a Daisy BB gun and Mr. White says Benny would shoot targets and tin cans. No, he never used the BB gun on birds or anything like that. Of course not. He couldn’t even bring himself to catch a fish, both parents make that point again.

On the desk is a stack of schoolbooks and a box of Magic Markers. On top of these is a sketchpad and I ask his parents if they have looked through it. They say they have not. Is it okay if I do? And they nod. I stand at the desk. I don’t sit or in any way make myself at home in their dead son’s room. I am respectful of the sketchpad and turn pages carefully, going through meticulous drawings in pencil. The first one is a horse in a pasture and it is surprisingly good. This is followed by several sketches of a hawk sitting in a bare tree, water in the background. Benny drew an old broken-down fence. He drew several snow scenes. The pad is half filled, and all of the sketches are consistent with each other until I get to the last few. Then the mood and the subject decidedly change. There is a night scene of a cemetery, a full moon behind bare trees softly illuminating tilting headstones. Next I turn to a hand, a muscular hand clenched in a fist, and then I find the dog. She is fat and homely and is baring her teeth, her hackles up, and she cowers, as if threatened.

I look up at the Whites. “Did Benny ever talk about the Kiffins’ dog?” I ask them. “A dog named Mr. Peanut?”

The stepfather gets a peculiar expression, and his eyes brighten with tears. He sighs. “Lori’s allergic,” he says, as if that answers my question.

“He was always complaining about the way they treated that dog,” Mrs. White helps out. “Benny wanted to know if we could take Mr. Peanut. He wanted the dog and said he thought the Kiffins would give it up, but we couldn’t.”

“Because of Lori,” I infer.

“It was an old dog, too,” Mrs. White adds.

“Was?” I ask.

“Well, it’s real sad,” she says. “Right after Christmas, Mr. Peanut didn’t seem to be feeling well. Benny said the poor dog was shaking and licking itself a lot, like it was in pain, you know. Then maybe a week ago it must have gone off to die. You know how animals will do that. Benny went out looking for Mr. Peanut every day. It just broke my heart. That child sure did love that dog,” Mrs. White adds. “I think that’s the main reason he’d go over there—to play with Mr. Peanut—and he just searched high and low for her.”

“Was this when his behavior started changing?” I suggest. “After Mr. Peanut disappeared?”

“It was about that time,” Mr. White replies, and neither parent seems able to bear stepping inside Benny’s room. They cling to the doorway as if holding up the walls. “You don’t think he did something like that because of a dog, do you?” He is almost pitiful when he asks.

MAYBE FIFTEEN MINUTES later, Lucy and I heard out to the woods together, leaving the parents at the house. They have not been to the deer stand where Benny was hanged. Mr. White told me he knew about the stand and has seen it many times when he has been out with his metal detector, but neither he nor his wife can bring themselves to go out there right now. I asked them if they thought other people knew the spot where Benny died—I am worried about the curious having tramped around out there, but the parents don’t think anybody knows exactly where Benny’s body was found. Not unless the detective told people around here, Mr. White adds.

The field where we landed is between the house and the creek, a barren acre that doesn’t appear to have seen a plow in many years. To the east are miles of woods, the silo almost at the shore and jutting up rusty and dark like a tired, thick lighthouse that seems to look out across the water at The Fort James Motel and Camp Ground. As I imagine Benny visiting the Kiffins, I wonder how he got there. There is no bridge across the creek, which is about a hundred feet wide and has no outlet. Lucy and I follow the footpath through the woods, scanning everywhere we step. Tangled fishing line is caught in trees close to the water, and I note a few old shotgun shells and soft drink cans. We have walked no more than five minutes when we come upon the deer blind. It looks like a decapitated tree house that someone threw up in a hurry, with wooden rungs nailed up the trunk. A severed yellow nylon rope dangles from a crossbeam and stirs in a light cold breeze that blows off the water and whispers through trees.

We stop and are silent as we look around. I don’t see any trash—no bags or popcorn containers or any sign that Benny might have eaten out here. I get closer to the rope. Stanfield cut it about four feet from the ground and since Lucy is more athletic than I am, I suggest that maybe she could climb up into the stand and remove the rope properly. At least we can take a look at the knot on the other end. I take photographs first. We test the rungs nailed into the tree, and they seem sturdy enough. Lucy is bundled in a thick down-filled jacket that doesn’t seem to slow her down as she climbs up, and she is careful as she reaches the platform, pushing and tugging boards to make sure they can bear her weight. “Seems pretty sturdy,” she lets me know.

I toss up a roll of evidence tape and she opens a Buck Tool. One thing about ATF agents, they all carry their own portable tool kits that include knife blades, screwdrivers, pliers, scissors. It goes back to needing them at fire scenes, if for no other reason, to pull nails out of the soles of your steel-reinforced boots. ATF agents get dirty. They step in all sorts of hazards. Lucy cuts the rope above the knot and tapes the ends back together. “Just a simple double square knot,” she says, dropping the rope and tape down to me. “Just a good ol’ Boy Scout knot, and the end’s melted. Whoever cut the end, melted it so it wouldn’t unravel.”

That surprises me a little. I wouldn’t expect someone to bother with a detail like that if he were cutting off rope so he could hang himself with it. “Atypical,” I comment to Lucy when she climbs down. “Tell you what, I’m going to be bold and take a look.”

“Just be careful, Aunt Kay. There are a few rusty nails sticking out. And watch out for splinters,” she says.

I am wondering if Benny might have adopted this old stand as a tree fort. I grip weathered gray boards one after the other and work my way up, grateful that I wore khakis and ankle boots. Inside the deer blind is a bench seat where the hunter can sit as he waits for an unsuspecting buck to wander into his sights. I test the seat by pushing against it, and it seems fine, so I sit. Benny was only an inch taller than I am, so I now have his view, assuming he came up here. I have a strong feeling that he did. Someone has been up here. Otherwise the floor of the stand would be thick with dead leaves, and it isn’t at all. “You notice how neat it is up here?” I call down to Lucy.

“It’s probably still being used by hunters,” she replies.

“What hunter is going to bother sweeping out leaves at five o’clock in the morning?” From this vantage point, I have a sweeping view of the water and can see the back of the motel and its dark and slimy swimming pool. Smoke curls out the chimney of the Kiffin house. I envision Benny sitting up here and spying on life as he sketched and perhaps escaped the sadness he must have felt since his father’s death. I can imagine only too well as I remember my own young life. The deer blind would be a perfect spot for a lonely, creative boy, and just a stone’s throw ahead at the water’s edge is a tall oak tree wearing kudzu around its trunk like spats. I can picture a red-tailed hawk sitting high up on a branch. “I think he might have drawn that tree over there,” I say to Lucy. “And he had a damn good view of the campground.”

“Wonder if he saw something,” Lucy floats this up to me.

“No kidding,” I reply grimly. “And someone might have been looking back,” I add. “This time of year with no leaves on the trees, he might have been visible up here. Especially if someone had binoculars and had a reason to be looking over this way.” Even as I say this, it occurs to me that someone might be looking at us right now. A chill touches my flesh as I climb back down. “You got your gun in that butt pack, don’t you?” I say to Lucy when my feet are on the ground. “I’d like to follow this path and see where it goes.”

I pick up the rope, coil it and tuck it inside a plastic bag, which I then shove into a coat pocket. The evidence tape goes inside my satchel. Lucy and I start out on the path. We find more shotgun shells and even an arrow from bow season. Deeper into the woods we walk, the path bending around the creek, no sound but trees groaning when the wind gusts and the snap of twigs beneath our feet. I want to see if the path might take us all the way around to the other side of the creek, and it does. It is a mere fifteen-minute hike to The Fort James Motel, and we end up in woods between the motel and Route 5. Benny certainly could have walked over here after church. There are half a dozen cars in the motel parking lot, some of them rentals, and a big Honda touring motorcycle is near the Coke machine.

Lucy and I walk toward the Kiffin house. I point out the campsite where we found the bed linens and baby carriage, and experience a combination of anger and sadness about Mr. Peanut. I don’t trust the story about the dog’s supposedly going off to die. I worry that Bev Kiffin did something cruel, maybe even poisoned her, and I intend to ask her what happened along with a number of other questions. I don’t care how Bev Kiffin reacts. After today, I am grounded, out of commission, suspended from my profession. I can’t know for a fact I will ever practice forensic medicine again. I might be fired and branded for life. Hell, I might end up in prison. I feel eyes on us as we climb the Kiffins’ front-porch steps.

“Creepy place,” Lucy says under her breath.

A face peeks out from behind curtains and then ducks out of sight when Bev Kiffin’s older son catches me looking back at him. I ring the bell and the boy answers the door, the same boy I saw when I was here. He is big and heavy-set and has a cruel face speckled with acne. I can’t tell how old he is, but I place him at twelve, maybe fourteen.

“You’re the lady who was out here the other day,” he says to me with a hard look.

“That’s right,” I reply. “Can you tell your mother that Dr. Scarpetta is here and I need a word with her?”

He smiles as if he knows a mean secret that he thinks is funny. He stifles a laugh. “She ain’t in here right now. She’s busy.” His eyes get harder and wander in the direction of the motel.

“What’s your name?” Lucy asks him.

“Sonny.”

“Sonny, what happened to Mr. Peanut?” I casually ask.

“That dumb dog,” he says. “All we can figure is somebody stole her.”

I find it impossible to believe that anyone would have stolen that old, worn-out dog. In the first place, she wasn’t friendly to strangers. If anything, I might have expected her to get hit by a car.

“Oh yeah? That’s too bad,” Lucy answers Sonny. “What makes you think somebody stole her?”

Sonny gets caught on this. He gets a vapid look in his eyes and starts to tell several lies and keeps interrupting himself. “Uh, some car pulled in at night. I heard it, you know, and a door shut and she was barking, then that was it. She was gone. Zack’s all tore up about it.”

“She disappeared when?” I want to know.

“Oh, I don’t know.” A shrug. “Last week.”

“Well, Benny was pretty torn up about it, too,” I comment, watching for his reaction.

That cold look in his eyes again. “The kids at school called him a sissy. And he was one, too. That’s why he killed himself. Everybody says so,” Sonny replies with stunning callousness.

“I thought the two of you were friends?” Lucy is getting aggressive with him.

“He bugged me,” Sonny answers. “Always coming over here to play with the dang dog. He wasn’t my friend. He was Zack and Mr. Peanut’s friend. I don’t hang out with no sissies.”

A motorcycle engine roars and rumbles to life. Zack’s face pops up in the window to the right of the front door, and he is crying.

“Did Benny come over here last Sunday?” I come right out and ask Sonny. “After church? Maybe twelve-thirty, one o’clock. Did he eat hotdogs with you?”

Sonny is caught again. He wasn’t expecting the detail about hotdogs and now he is in a bind. His curiosity overwhelms his untruthfulness and he says, “How’d you know we had hotdogs?” He frowns as the motorcycle we saw a few minutes ago rumbles and bumps along the dirt path that leads from the motel to the Kiffin house. Whoever is on it heads right toward us, dressed in red-and-black leather, his face obscured by a dark helmet with a tinted face shield. Yet there is something familiar about the person. The realization stuns me. Jay Talley stops and gets off his motorcycle, nimbly swinging a leg over the big saddle seat.

“Sonny, get in the house,” Jay orders. “Now.” He says this with cool ease, as if he knows the boy very well.

Sonny steps back inside the house and the door shuts. Zack has vanished from the window. Jay takes off his helmet.

“What are you doing out here?” Lucy asks him, and in the distance I spot Bev Kiffin walking this way, carrying a shotgun, coming from the direction of the motel, where I can only assume she has been with Jay. Red flags are popping up all over the place inside my head, and neither Lucy nor I make the connection fast enough. Jay is unzipping his thick leather jacket and almost instantly he has a gun in his hand, a black pistol relaxed by his side.

“Christ,” Lucy says. “For God’s sake, Jay.”

“I really wish you hadn’t come here,” he says to me in a calm, cold way. “I really wish you hadn’t.” He motions the gun toward the motel. “Come on. We’re going to have a little talk.”

Run. But there is no place to run. He might shoot Lucy if I run. He might shoot me in the back. He raises the pistol and points it at Lucy’s chest as he unfastens her butt pack. He of all people knows what is in it. He takes my satchel and pats me down, making sure he explores my body intimately, to degrade me, to put me in my place, to enjoy the fury that dances across Lucy’s face as she has to watch. “Don’t,” I quietly say to him. “Jay, you can stop now.”

He smiles and dark rage sparks in a face that could be Greek. It could be Italian. It could be French. Bev Kiffin reaches us and her eyes narrow as they fix on me. She wears the same red lumberman’s jacket she had on the other week, and her hair is tousled as if she has just gotten out of bed. “Well, well,” she says. “Some folks just never get the message they aren’t welcome, isn’t that right?” Her eyes slide to Jay and linger.

I know without being told that they have been sleeping together, and every word Jay has ever told me turns to fable. Now I understand why Agent Jilison McIntyre was perplexed when I said that Bev Kiffin’s husband was a truck driver for Overland. McIntyre was undercover. She did the company’s books. She would be aware of it if there was an employee named Kiffin. The only connection to that criminal-infested trucking company is Bev Kiffin herself, and the gun and drug smuggling that goes on is connected to the Chandonne cartel. Answers. I have them, and now it is too late.

Lucy walks close to me, her face concrete. She shows no reaction as we are walked at gunpoint past rusty campers that I suspect are unoccupied for a reason. “Drug labs,” I say to Jay. “You making designer drugs out here, too? Or maybe just storing assault rifles and other things that end up on the street and kill people?”

“Kay, shut up,” he softly says. “Bev, you take care of her.” He indicates Lucy. “Find her a nice room and make sure she’s comfortable.”

Kiffin smiles a little. She taps the back of Lucy’s leg with the shotgun. We are at the motel now, and I scan parked cars and find no sign of another human being. Benton flashes in my mind. My heart pounds and the realization roars through my brain. Bonnie and Clyde. We used to refer to Carrie Grethen and Newton Joyce as Bonnie and Clyde. The killing couple. All along we have been so certain they were responsible for Benton’s murder. Yet we have never known for a fact who he was meeting that afternoon in Philadelphia. Why did he go off alone and not tell any of us? He was smarter than that. He never would have agreed to meet Carrie Grethen or Newton Joyce or even a stranger with information, because he would never have trusted a stranger with so-called information when he was in a city trying to track down a cunning, evil serial killer like Carrie. I stop in the parking lot as Kiffin opens a door and waits for Lucy to walk ahead of her into one of those rooms. Room 14. Lucy doesn’t look back at me, and the door shuts after her and Kiffin.

“You killed Benton, didn’t you, Jay.” I state it as a fact.

He lays a hand on my back, the pistol pointed and touching me as he pauses behind me and says for me to open the door. We enter room 15, the same room Kiffin showed me when I wanted to see what kind of mattresses and linens she used in this dump. “You and Bray,” I say to Jay. “That’s why she sent letters from New York, trying to make it seem they were from Carrie, to make Benton assume they were written from up there where she was locked up in Kirby.”

Jay shuts the door and waves the gun almost wearily, as if I am tiresome and he is not enjoying this. “Sit down.”

My eyes wander up to the ceiling, looking for eyebolts. I wonder where the heat gun is and if it is part of my fate. I keep standing where I am, near the dresser with its Gideon Bible, this one not opened to any special chapter about vanity or anything else. “I just want to know if I slept with the person who killed Benton.” I am looking right at Jay. “You’re going to kill me? Go ahead. But you already did that when you killed him. So I guess you can kill me twice, Jay.” It is odd, I feel no fear, only resignation. My pain, my anguish is over my niece, and I wait for the sound of a shotgun to rock these walls. “Can’t you just leave her out of it?” I ask anyway, and Jay knows I mean Lucy.

“I didn’t kill Benton,” he says, and he has the livid face of people who walk up and shoot a president. Pale, no expression, a zombie. “Carrie and her asshole friend did that. I made the call.”

“The call?”

“Called him to meet. That wasn’t too hard. I’m an agent,” he enjoys reminding me. “Carrie handled it from there. Carrie and that whacko scarface she got hooked up with.”

“So you set him up,” I say, simply. “Probably helped Carrie escape, too.”

“She didn’t need much help. Just some,” he replies with no inflection. “She was like a lot of people in this business. They get into the goods and fuck up an already fucked-up brain. She started doing her own thing. Years ago. If you guys hadn’t solved the problem, we would have. She was at the end of her usefulness.”

“Involved in the family business, Jay?” My eyes pin his. The gun is by his side and he leans against the door. He has no fear of me. I am like a bowstring wound too tightly, about to snap, waiting, listening for any sound next door. “All these women murdered—how many of them did you sleep with first? Like Susan Pless.” I shake my head. “I just want to know if you helped out Chandonne or did he follow you and help himself to what you left behind?”

Jay’s eyes focus more sharply on me. I have probed the truth.

“You know, you’re much too young to be Jay Talley, whoever he was,” I say next. “Jay Talley with no middle name. And you didn’t go to Harvard, and I doubt you ever lived in Los Angeles, not as a child. He’s your brother, isn’t he, Jay? That horrible deformity who calls himself a werewolf? He’s your brother, and your DNA is so close that on a routine screening you could be identical twins. Did you know your DNA is the same as his on a routine screening? At a four-probe level, the two of you are exactly the same.”

Anger flashes. Vain, beautiful Jay would never want to think that his DNA was even similar to someone’s as ugly and hideous as Jean-Baptiste Chandonne.

“And the body in the cargo container. The one you helped us believe is the brother—Thomas. His DNA had many points in common, too, but not as many as yours does—yours from the seminal fluid you left in Susan Pless’s body before she was brutalized. Thomas a relative? Not a brother? What? A cousin? You kill him, too? You drown him in Antwerp or did Jean-Baptiste do that? And then you lure me over to Interpol, not because you need my help with the case, but because you want to see what I know. You want to make sure I don’t know what Benton was probably starting to figure out: That you are a Chandonne,” I say, and Jay does not react. “You probably mastermind the business for your father and that’s why you got into law enforcement, to be an undercover asshole, a spy. God knows how much business you’ve diverted—knowing everything the good guys are doing and then turning it against them behind their backs.” I shake my head. “Let Lucy go,” I tell him. “I’ll do what you want. Just let her go.”

“Can’t.” He doesn’t even begin to argue with what I have said.

Jay glances at the wall, as if he can see through it. I can tell he is wondering what is going on next door, why it is so quiet. My nerves wind tighter. Please God, please God. Please. Or make it quick, at least. Don’t let her suffer.

Jay pushes the lock in and fastens the burglar chain. “Take your clothes off,” he says, no longer using my name. It is easier to kill people you have depersonalized. “Don’t worry,” he bizarrely adds. “I’m not going to do anything. I just have to make it look like something else.”

I glance up at the ceiling. He knows what I am thinking. He is pale and sweating as he opens a dresser drawer and pulls out several eyebolts and a heat gun, a red heat gun.

“Why?” I ask him. “Why them?” I refer to the two men I now believe Jay murdered.

“You’re going to screw these into the ceiling for me,” Jay tells me. “Up there in the crossbeam. Now get on the bed and do it and don’t try anything.”

He places the eyebolts on the bed and nods for me to pick them up and do what he orders. “It’s all about what becomes necessary when people get into something they shouldn’t.” He gets a rag and rope out of the drawer.

I stand where I am, just looking at him. The eyebolts gleam like pewter on the bed.

“Matos came here to find Jean-Baptiste and it took a little coaxing to know exactly what he had in mind and who gave him the order, which wasn’t what you think.” Jay takes off his leather jacket and drapes it over a chair. “Not the family, but a first lieutenant who doesn’t want Jean-Baptiste to start talking and ruin a good thing for a lot of people. One thing about the family . . .”

“Your family, Jay,” I remind him of his family and that I know him by name.

“Yeah.” He stares at me. “Fuck yeah, my family. We take care of each other. Doesn’t matter what you do, family is family. Jean-Baptiste’s a fuck-up, I mean, anybody can look at him and see that, and understand why he’s got his problem.”

I say nothing.

“Of course we don’t approve,” Jay goes on as if he is talking about a kid who is shooting out streetlights or drinking too much beer. “But he’s blood, our blood, and you don’t touch our blood.”

“Someone touched Thomas,” I reply, and I have not picked up the eyebolts or climbed up on the bed. I have no intention of helping him torment me.

“You want to know the truth? That was an accident. Thomas couldn’t swim. He tripped over a rope and fell off the dock, or something like that,” Jay tells me. “I wasn’t there. He drowned. Jean-Baptiste wanted to get his body a long way from the shipyard, away from other stuff going on there and didn’t want him identified.”

“Bullshit,” I reply. “Sorry, but Jean-Baptiste left a note with the body. Bon Voyage Le Loup-Garou. You do that when you don’t want to draw attention to something? I don’t think so. Maybe you better recheck your brother’s story. Maybe your family takes care of family. Maybe Jean-Baptiste’s an exception. Sounds like he doesn’t take care of family at all.”

“Thomas was a cousin.” As if that lessens the crime. “Get up and do what I say.” Jay indicates the eyebolts, and he is beginning to get angry, very angry.

“No,” I refuse. “Do what you’re going to do, Jay,” and I keep saying his name. I know him. I am not going to let him do this to me without my saying his name and looking him in the eye. “I’m not going to help you kill me, Jay.”

A thud sounds next door, as if something has turned over or fallen to the floor, and then an explosion and my heart lurches. Tears choke me and fill my eyes. Jay flinches and then his face is impassive. “Sit down,” he tells me. When I don’t comply, he comes closer and shoves me down on the bed as I cry. I cry for Lucy.

“You fucking son of a bitch,” I exclaim. “You kill that boy, too? You take Benny out and hang him, a goddamn twelve-year-old kid?”

“He shouldn’t have come out here. Mitch shouldn’t have. I knew Mitch. He saw me. There was nothing I could do.” Jay stands over me as if not sure what to do next.

“Then you killed the boy.” I wipe my eyes with the backs of both hands.

Confusion flickers in Jay’s eyes. He has a problem with the boy. The rest of us don’t bother him, but the boy does.

“How could you stand there and watch him hang? A kid? A kid in his Sunday suit.”

Jay swings back his hand and slaps me across the face. It happens so fast I don’t even feel it at first. My mouth and nose go numb and begin to sting, and something wet drips. Blood drips into my lap. I let it drip as I tremble all over and stare up at Jay. Now it is easier for him. He has begun the process. He pushes me down on the bed and straddles me, pinning my arms with his knees, and my healing fractured elbow screams in pain as he forces my hands above my head and struggles to tie them with the rope. All the while he is snarling about Diane Bray. He is mocking me, telling me that she knew Benton, and didn’t Benton ever tell me that Bray had a thing for Benton? And if Benton had been a little nicer to her maybe she would have left him alone. Maybe she would have left me alone. My head pounds. I barely comprehend.

Did I really think that Benton had an affair only with me? Was I so stupid to think that Benton would cheat on his wife but never on me? How fucking stupid am I? Jay gets up for the heat gun. What people do is what they do, he says. Benton had something with Bray up in D.C., and then when he dumped her, and he did it pretty quickly, to give him credit, she wasn’t going to let that pass. Not Diane Bray. Jay is trying to gag me and I keep jerking my head from side to side. My nose is bleeding. I won’t be able to breathe. Bray got Benton good, all right, and this is partly why she wanted to move to Richmond, to make sure she ruined my life, too. “Quite a price to pay for fucking somebody a few times.” Jay gets up from the bed again. He is sweating, his face pale.

I struggle to breathe through my nose and my heart is hammering like a machine gun as my entire body begins to panic. I try to will myself to calm down. Hyperventilating will only make it harder for me to get air. Panic. I try to inhale and blood is dripping down the back of my throat and I cough and gag as my heart explodes against my ribs like fists trying to pound down a door. Pounding, pounding, pounding and the room turns grainy and I can’t move.

CHAPTER 34

Two Weeks Later

THOSE WHO HAVE assembled in my honor are ordinary people. They sit quietly, even reverently, almost in shock. It is not possible that they have not heard everything that has been in the news. You would have to live in the hinterlands of Africa not to know what has gone on in recent weeks, especially what happened in James City County at a cesspool of a tourist trap that has turned out to be the eye of a monstrous storm of corruption and evil.

All seemed so quiet in that rundown, overgrown campground. I can’t imagine how many people have stayed in tents or in the motel and had no idea what was raging around them. Like a hurricane blown out to sea, the raging forces have fled. As far as we know, Bev Kiffin isn’t dead. Neither is Jay Talley. Ironically, he is now considered a red notice by Interpol: The very people he once worked with are after him in a furious full-court press. Kiffin is a red notice, too. The supposition is that Jay and Kiffin have fled the United States and are hiding abroad somewhere.

Jaime Berger stands before me. I am in the witness stand facing a jury of three women and five men. Two are white, five are African-American, one is Asian. The races of all of Chandonne’s victims are represented, even though that was not deliberate on anybody’s part, I am sure. But it seems just, and I am glad. Brown paper has been taped over the courtroom’s glass door to ensure that the curious, the media, can’t look in. Jurors and witnesses and I entered the courthouse by an underground ramp the same way prisoners are escorted to their trials. Secrecy chills the air and the jurors stare at me as if I am a ghost. My face is greenish yellow from old bruises, my left arm is in a cast again and I still have rope burns around my wrists. I am alive only because Lucy happened to wear body armor. I had no idea. When she picked me up in the helicopter, she had on a bulletproof vest underneath her down-filled jacket.

Berger is asking me about the night Diane Bray was murdered. It is as if I am a house where different music is playing in every room. I am answering her questions, and yet I am thinking other thoughts and other images are coming to me and I hear other sounds in different areas of my psyche. Somehow I am able to concentrate on my testimony. The cash register tape for the chipping hammer I purchased is mentioned. Then Berger reads from the actual lab report that was turned over to the court as a matter of record, just as the autopsy protocol, the toxicology and all other reports have been. Berger describes the chipping hammer to the jurors and asks me to explain how the hammer’s surfaces correlate with Bray’s horrendous injuries.

This goes on for a while, and I look at the faces of those here to judge me. Expressions range from passive to intrigued to horrified. One woman gets visibly queasy when I describe punched-out areas of skull and an eyeball that was virtually avulsed, or hanging out of the socket. Berger points out that according to the lab report, the chipping hammer recovered from my house had rust on it. She asks me if the hammer I bought from the hardware store after Bray’s murder was rusty. I say it wasn’t. “Could a tool like this rust in a matter of a few weeks?” she asks me. “In your opinion, Dr. Scarpetta, could blood on the chipping hammer have caused it to be in this condition—in the condition of the one recovered from your house, the one you say Chandonne brought with him when he attacked you?”

“Not in my opinion,” I reply, knowing that it is in my best interest to answer such. But it doesn’t matter. I would tell the truth even if it were not in my best interest. “For one thing, the police should as a matter of routine make sure the hammer is dry when it is placed in an evidence bag,” I add.

“And the scientists who received the chipping hammer for examination say it was rusty, is this not right? I mean, I am reading this lab report correctly, aren’t I?” She smiles slightly. She is dressed in a black suit with pale blue pinstripes, and paces in little steps as she works through the case.

“I don’t know what the labs have said,” I answer. “I haven’t seen those reports.”

“Of course not. You’ve not been in the office for ten days or so. And, ummm, this report was just turned in day before yesterday.” She glances at the date typed on it. “But it does say the chipping hammer that has Bray’s blood on it was rusty. It looked old, and I believe the clerk at Pleasants Hardware Store claims the hammer you bought on the night of December seventeen—almost twenty-four hours after Bray’s murder—certainly didn’t look old. It was brand new. Correct?”

Again, I can’t say what the hardware store clerk claimed, I remind Berger from the stand as jurors take in every word, every gesture. I have been excluded from all witness testimony. Berger is simply asking me questions I can’t answer so she can tell the jurors what she wants them to know. What is treacherous and wonderful about any grand jury proceeding is that defense counsel is not present and there is no judge—no one to object to Berger’s questions. She can ask me anything, and she does, because in one of the rare instances on this planet, a prosecutor is trying to show the defendant is innocent.

Berger asks what time I got home from Paris and went grocery shopping. She mentions my going to the hospital to visit Jo that night, and the phone conversation with Lucy afterward. The window narrows. It gets tighter and tighter. When did I have time to rush over to Bray’s house, beat her to death, plant evidence and stage the crime? And why would I bother buying a chipping hammer almost twenty-four hours after the fact unless it was for the very purpose I have stated all along: to conduct tests? She lets these questions hover while Buford Righter sits at the prosecution table and studies notes on a legal pad. He avoids looking at me as much as he can.

I answer Berger point by point. It gets harder and harder for me to talk. The inside of my mouth was abraded from the gag, and then the wounds became ulcerated. I haven’t had mouth sores since I was a child and had forgotten how painful they are. When my ulcerated tongue hits my teeth as I speak, it sounds as if I have a speech impediment. I feel weak and strung out. My left arm throbs, in a cast again because it was re-injured when Jay wrenched my arms above my head and bound them to the bed’s headboard.

“I notice you’re having some trouble talking.” Berger pauses to point this out. “Dr. Scarpetta, I know this is off the subject.” Nothing is off the subject for Jaime Berger. She has a reason for every breath she takes, every step she makes, every expression on her face—everything, absolutely everything. “But can we digress for a moment?” She stops pacing and raises her palms in a shrug. “I think it would be instructive if you would tell the jury what happened to you last week. I know the jury must be wondering why you’re bruised and having difficulty speaking.”

She digs her hands in the pockets of her trousers and patiently encourages me to tell my story. I apologize for not being the sharpest knife in the drawer at the moment, I say, and the jurors smile. I tell them about Benny and their faces are pained. One man’s eyes fill with tears as I describe the boy’s drawings that led me up into the deer stand where I believe Benny spent much of his time watching the world and recording it in images on his sketchpad. I express my fears that young Benny may have met up with foul play. His gastric contents, I explain, could not be explained by what we knew about the last few hours of his life.

“And sometimes pedophiles—child molesters—lure children with candy, food, something that will entice them. You’ve had cases like this, Dr. Scarpetta?” Berger questions me.

“Yes,” I reply. “Unfortunately.”

“Can you give us an example of a case in which a child was lured by food or candy?”

“Some years ago we got in the body of an eight-year-old boy,” I offer a case from personal experience. “On autopsy I determined he had asphyxiated when the perpetrator forced the boy, this eight-year-old child, to perform oral sex. I recovered gum from the child’s stomach, a rather large wad of chewing gum. It turned out an adult male neighbor had given the boy four sticks of gum, Dentyne gum, and this man did, in fact, confess to the killing.”

“So you had good reason, based upon your years of experience, to be concerned when you found popcorn and hotdogs in Benny White’s stomach,” Berger states.

“That is correct. I was very concerned,” I answer.

“Please continue, Dr. Scarpetta,” Berger says. “What happened when you left the deer stand and followed the footpath through the woods?”

THERE IS A woman juror. She is on the front row of the jury box, second from the left, and she reminds me of my mother. She is very overweight and must be close to seventy, at least, and wears a frumpy black dress with big red flowers on it. She doesn’t take her eyes off me, and I smile at her. She seems like a kind woman with a lot of sense, and I am so glad my mother isn’t here, that she is in Miami. I don’t think she has any idea what is happening in my life. I haven’t told her. My mother’s health is poor and she doesn’t need to worry about me. I keep going back to the juror in the flower-printed dress as I describe what happened at The Fort James Motel.

Berger prompts me to give background information on Jay Talley, how we met and became intimate in Paris. Woven into Berger’s prompting and conclusions are the seemingly inexplicable events that transpired after Chandonne attacked me: the disappearance of the chipping hammer I had bought for research purposes; the key to my house found in Mitch Barbosa’s pocket—an undercover FBI agent who was tortured and murdered and whom I had never even met. Berger asks if Jay was ever inside my house, and of course, he was. So he would have had access to a key and the burglar alarm code. He would have had access to evidence. Yes, I confirm.

And it would have been in Jay Talley’s best interest to frame me and confuse the issue of his brother’s guilt, right? Berger stops pacing again, fixing those eyes on me. I am not sure I can answer the question. She moves on. When he attacked me in the motel room and gagged me, I scratched his arms, didn’t I?

“I know I struggled with him,” I reply. “And after it was over, I had blood under my fingernails. And skin.”

“Not your skin? Did you perhaps scratch yourself during the struggle?”

“No.”

She goes back to her table and shuffles through paperwork for another lab analysis report. Buford Righter is turned to slate, sitting rigidly, tensely. DNA done on my fingernail scrapings doesn’t match my DNA. It does match the DNA of the person who ejaculated inside Susan Pless’s vagina. “And that would have been Jay Talley,” Berger says, nodding, pacing again. “So we have a federal law enforcement officer who had sex with a woman right before she was brutally murdered. This man’s DNA also so closely resembles Jean-Baptiste Chandonne’s DNA that we can conclude almost with certainty that Jay Talley is a close relative, most likely a sibling of Jean-Baptiste Chandonne.” She walks a few steps, a finger on her lips. “We do know Jay Talley’s real name isn’t Jay Talley. He is a living lie. He beat you, Dr. Scarpetta?”

“Yes. He struck my face.”

“He tied you to the bed and apparently intended to torture you with a heat gun?”

“That was my impression.”

“He ordered you to undress, he bound and gagged you, and clearly was going to kill you?”

“Yes. He made it clear he was going to kill me.”

“Why didn’t he, Dr. Scarpetta?” Berger says this as if she doesn’t believe me. But it is an act. She believes me. I know she does.

I look at the juror who reminds me of my mother. I explain that I was having a terribly hard time breathing after Jay tied me up and gagged me. I was panicking and began to hyperventilate, which means, I explain, that I was taking such rapid, shallow breaths, I couldn’t get sufficient oxygen. My nose was bleeding and swelling and the gag prevented me from breathing out of my mouth. I went unconscious and when I came to, Lucy was in the room. I was untied, the gag removed, and Jay Talley and Bev Kiffin were gone.

“Now we’ve already heard Lucy’s testimony,” Berger says, pensively moving toward the jury box. “So we know from her testimony what happened after you passed out. What did she tell you when you came to, Dr. Scarpetta?” In a trial, for me to say what Lucy said would constitute hearsay. Again, Berger can get away with almost anything in this uniquely private proceeding.

“She told me she’d worn a bulletproof vest, uh, body armor,” I answer the question. “Lucy said there was some conversation in the room. . . .”

“Between Lucy and Bev Kiffin,” Berger clarifies.

“Yes. Lucy said she was against the wall and Bev Kiffin had the shotgun pointed at her. And she fired it and Lucy’s vest absorbed the shot, and although she was badly bruised, she was all right, and she grabbed the shotgun away from Mrs. Kiffin and ran from the room.”

“Because her primary concern at this point was you. She didn’t stick around to subdue Bev Kiffin because Lucy’s priority was you.”

“Yes. She told me she started kicking doors. She didn’t know which room I was in, so then she ran around to the back of the motel because there are windows in back overlooking the pool. She found my room, saw me on the bed and broke out the window with the butt of the shotgun and came inside. He was gone. Apparently, he and Bev Kiffin went out the front and got on his motorcycle and fled. Lucy says she remembers hearing a motorcycle while she was trying to revive me.”

“Have you heard from Jay Talley since?” Berger pauses to meet my eyes.

“No,” I say, and for the first time this long day, anger stirs.

“What about from Bev Kiffin? Got any idea where she is?”

“No. No idea.”

“So they are fugitives. She leaves behind two children. And a dog—the family dog. The dog Benny White was so fond of. Perhaps even the reason he came to the motel after church. Correct me if my memory is failing me. But didn’t Sonny Kiffin, the son, say something about teasing Benny? Something about Benny’s calling the Kiffins’ house right before church to see if Mr. Peanut had been found? That the dog had, quote, just been for a swim and if Benny came over he could see Mr. Peanut? Didn’t Sonny tell Detective Marino all this after the fact, after Jay Talley and Bev Kiffin tried to kill you and your niece and then escaped?”

“I don’t know firsthand what Sonny told Pete Marino,” I reply—not that Berger really wants me to answer. She just wants the jury to hear the question. My eyes mist over as I think of that old, pitiful dog and what I know for a fact happened to her.

“The dog hadn’t been for a swim—not voluntarily—right, Dr. Scarpetta? Didn’t you and Lucy find Mr. Peanut as you waited at the campground for the police to come?” Berger goes on.

“Yes.” Tears well up.

MR. PEANUT WAS behind the motel, in the bottom of the swimming pool. She had bricks tied to her back legs. The juror in the flower-printed dress begins to cry. Another woman juror gasps and puts a hand over her eyes. Looks of outrage and even hate pass from face to face, and Berger lets the moment, this painful, awful moment stay in the room. The cruel image of Mr. Peanut is an imagined courtroom display that is vivid and unbearable, and Berger won’t take it away. Silence.

“How could anybody do something like that!” the juror in the flower-printed dress exclaims as she snaps shut her pocketbook and wipes her eyes. “What evil people!”

“Sons of bitches is what they are.”

“Thank God. The good Lord was looking after you, He sure was.” A juror shakes his head, the comment directed at me.

Berger paces three steps. Her gaze sweeps the jury. She looks a long moment at me. “Thank you, Dr. Scarpetta,” she quietly says. “There certainly are some evil, awful people out there,” she gently says for the jury’s benefit. “Thank you for spending this time with us when we all know you’re in pain and have been through hell. That’s right.” She looks back at the jury. “Hell.”

Nods all around.

“Hell is right,” the juror in the flower-printed dress tells me, as if I don’t know. “You’ve sure been through it. Can I ask a question. We can ask, can’t we?”

“Please,” Berger replies.

“I know what I think,” the juror in the flower-printed dress comments to me. “But you know what? I’ll tell you something. The way I grew up, if you didn’t tell the truth you got your bottom spanked, and I mean hard.” She juts out her chin in righteous indignation. “Never heard of people doing the things you all have talked about in here. I don’t think I’ll sleep a wink ever again. Now, I’m no nonsense.”

“Somehow I can tell,” I reply.

“So I’m just going to come right out with it.” She stares at me, her arms hugging her big green pocketbook. “Did you do it? Did you kill that police lady?”

“No, ma’am,” I say as strongly as I have ever said anything in my life. “I did not.”

We wait for a reaction. Everyone sits very quietly, no more talking, no more questions. The jurors are done. Jaime Berger goes to her table and picks up paperwork. She straightens it and gets the edges flush by knocking them on the table. She lets things settle before she looks up. She picks out each juror with her eyes, then looks at me. “I have no further questions,” she says. “Ladies and gentlemen.” She goes right up to the railing, leaning into the jury as if she is peering into a great ship, and she is, really. The lady in the flower-printed dress and her colleagues are my passage out of troubled, dangerous waters.

“I am a professional truth-seeker,” Berger describes herself in words I have never heard a prosecutor use. “It my mission—always—to find the truth and honor it. That is why I was asked to come here to Richmond—to reveal the absolute, certain truth. Now all of you have heard that justice is blind.” She waits, acknowledging nods. “Well, justice is blind in that it is supposed to be supremely nonpartisan, impartial, perfectly fair to all people. But”—she scans faces—“we aren’t blind to the truth, now are we? We’ve seen what has gone on inside this room. I can tell you understand what has gone on inside this room and are anything but blind. You would have to be blind not to see what is so apparent. This woman—” she glances back at me and points—“Dr. Kay Scarpetta deserves no more of our inquiries, our doubts, our painful probing. In good conscience, I can’t allow it.”

Berger pauses. The jurors are transfixed, barely blinking as they stare at her. “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your decency, your time, your desire to do what is right. You can go back to your jobs now, back to your homes and families. You are dismissed. There is no case. Case dismissed. Good day.”

The lady in the flower-printed dress smiles and sighs. The jurors start clapping. Buford Righter stares down at his hands clasped on top of the table. I get to my feet and the room spins as I open the saloon-type swinging door and leave the witness stand.

MINUTES LATER

I FEEL AS if I am emerging from a brownout and avoid eye contact with reporters and others who wait beyond the paper-shrouded glass door that hid me from the outside world and now returns me to it.

Berger accompanies me to the small, nearby witness room, and Marino, Lucy and Anna are instantly on their feet, waiting with dread and excitement. They sense what has happened and I simply nod an affirmation and manage to say, “Well, it’s okay. Jaime was masterful.” I finally call Berger by her first name as it vaguely registers that although I have been inside this witness room countless times over the past decade, waiting to explain death to jurors, I never imagined I would one day be in this courthouse to explain myself.

Lucy grabs me, hugging me off my feet and I wince because of my injured arm and laugh at the same time. I hug Anna. I hug Marino. Berger waits in the doorway, for once not intruding. I hug her, too. She begins tucking files, legal pads into her briefcase and puts on her coat. “I’m out of here,” she announces, all business again but I detect her elation. Goddamn, she is proud of herself and ought to be.

“I don’t know how to thank you,” I tell her with a heart full of gratitude and respect. “I don’t even know what to say, Jaime.”

“Amen to that,” Lucy exclaims. My niece is dressed in a sharp dark suit and looks like a gorgeous lawyer or doctor or whatever the hell she wants to be. I can tell by the way her eyes fix on Berger that Lucy recognizes what an attractive, impressive woman Berger is. Lucy won’t stop looking at her and congratulating her. My niece is effusive. Actually, she is flirting. She is flirting with my special prosecutor.

“Got to head back to New York,” Berger tells me. “Remember my big case up there?” she dryly reminds me of Susan Pless. “Well, there’s work to be done. How soon can you come up so we can go over Susan’s case?” Berger is serious, I think.

“Go,” says Marino in his rumpled navy suit, wearing a solid red tie that is too short. Sadness crosses his face. “Go to New York, Doc. Go now. You sure as hell don’t want to be around here for a while. Let the hoopla die down.”

I don’t reply, but he is right. I am rather speechless at the moment.

“You like helicopters?” Lucy asks Berger.

“Never would you get me in that thing,” Anna pipes up. “There is no law in physics that accounts for one of those things being able to fly. Not one.”

“Yup, and there’s no law in physics for why bumblebees can fly, either,” Lucy good-naturedly replies. “Big fat things with teeny wings. Blllbbllblllblll.” She imitates a bumblebee flying, both arms going like mad, just giddy.

“Shit, you on drugs again?” Marino rolls his eyes at my niece.

Lucy puts her arm around me and we walk out of the witness room. Berger by now has made it to the elevator, alone, her briefcase under her arm. The down arrow glows and the doors open. Rather unsavory-looking people step out, coming for their judgment day or about to watch someone else go through hell. Berger holds the doors for Marino, Lucy, Anna and me. Reporters are on the prowl, but they don’t bother trying to approach me as I make it clear by shakes of my head that I have no comment and to leave me alone. The press doesn’t know what just happened in the special grand jury proceeding. The world doesn’t know. Journalists were not allowed inside the courtroom, even if they obviously are aware that I was scheduled to appear today. Leaks. There will be more, I am sure. It doesn’t matter, but I realize Marino is wise to suggest I get out of town, at least for a while. My mood slowly descends as the elevator does. We bump to a stop on the first floor. I face reality and make a decision.

“I’ll come,” I quietly tell Jaime Berger as we get out of the elevator. “Let’s take the helicopter and go to New York. I’d be honored to help you in any way I can. It’s my turn, Ms. Berger.”

Berger pauses in the busy, noisy lobby and shifts her fat ratty briefcase to her other arm. One of the leather straps has come off. She meets my eyes. “Jaime,” she reminds me. “See you in court, Kay,” she says.

PATRICIA CORNWELL

BLOW FLY

G . P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Blow Fly

A Putnam Book / published by arrangement with the author

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2003 by Patricia Cornwell

This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

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ISBN: 1-101-15592-2

A PUTNAM BOOK®

Putnam Books first published by The Putnam Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

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PUTNAM and the “P” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

Electronic edition: October, 2003

To Dr. Louis Cataldie
Coroner of East Baton Rouge Parish
A man of excellence, honor, humanity and truth
—The world is a better place because of you.

They shall lie down alike in the dust, and the worms shall cover them.
JOB 21:26

BLOW FLY

DR. KAY SCARPETTA moves the tiny glass vial close to candlelight, illuminating a maggot drifting in a poisonous bath of ethanol. At a glance, she knows the exact stage of metamorphosis before the creamy carcass, no larger than a grain of rice, was preserved in a specimen vessel fitted with a black screw cap. Had the larva lived, it would have matured into a bluebottle Calliphora vicina, a blow fly. It might have laid its eggs in a dead human body’s mouth or eyes, or in a living person’s malodorous wounds.

“Thank you very much,” Scarpetta says, looking around the table at the fourteen cops and crime-scene technicians of the National Forensic Academy’s class of 2003. Her eyes linger on Nic Robillard’s innocent face. “I don’t know who collected this from a location best not to contemplate at the dinner table, and preserved it with me in mind . . . but . . .”

Blank looks and shrugs.

“I have to say that this is the first time I’ve been given a maggot as a gift.”

No one claims responsibility, but if there is a fact Scarpetta has never doubted, it is a cop’s ability to bluff and, when necessary, outright lie. Having noticed a tug at the corner of Nic Robillard’s mouth before anyone else realized that a maggot had joined them at the dinner table, Scarpetta has a suspect in mind.

The light of the flame moves over the vial in Scarpetta’s fingertips, her nails neatly filed short and square, her hand steady and elegant but strong from years of manipulating the unwilling dead and cutting through their stubborn tissue and bone.

Unfortunately for Nic, her classmates aren’t laughing, and humiliation finds her like a frigid draft. After ten weeks with cops she should now count as comrades and friends, she is still Nic the Hick from Zachary, Louisiana, a town of twelve thousand, where, until recently, murder was an almost unheard-of atrocity. It was not unusual for Zachary to go for years without one.

Most of Nic’s classmates are so jaded by working homicides that they have come up with their own categories for them: real murders, misdemeanor murders, even urban renewal. Nic doesn’t have her own pet categories. Murder is murder. So far in her eight-year career, she has worked only two, both of them domestic shootings. It was awful the first day of class when an instructor went from one cop to another, asking how many homicides each of their departments averaged a year. None, Nic said. Then he asked the size of each cop’s department. Thirty-five, Nic said. Or smaller than my eighth-grade class, as one of her new classmates put it. From the beginning of what was supposed to be the greatest opportunity of her life, Nic quit trying to fit in, accepting that in the police way of defining the universe, she was a them, not an us.

Her rather whimsical maggot mischief, she realizes with regret, was a breach of something (she’s not sure what), but without a doubt she should never have decided to give a gift, serious or otherwise, to the legendary forensic pathologist Dr. Kay Scarpetta. Nic’s face heats up, and a cold sweat dampens her armpits as she watches for her hero’s reaction, unable to read it, probably because Nic is stunned stupid by insecurity and embarrassment.

“So I’ll call her Maggie, although we really can’t determine gender yet,” Scarpetta decides, her wire-rim glasses reflecting shifting candlelight. “But a good enough name for a maggot, I think.” A ceiling fan snaps and whips the candle flame inside its glass globe as she holds up the vial. “Who’s going to tell me which instar Maggie is? What life stage was she in before someone”—she scans the faces at the table, pausing on Nic’s again—“dropped her in this little bottle of ethanol? And by the way, I suspect Maggie aspirated and drowned. Maggots need air the same way we do.”

“What asshole drowned a maggot?” one of the cops snipes.

“Yeah. Imagine inhaling alcohol . . .”

“What’cha talking about, Joey? You been inhaling it all night.”

A dark, ominous humor begins to rumble like a distant storm, and Nic doesn’t know how to duck out of it. She leans back in her chair, crossing her arms at her chest, doing her best to look indifferent as her mind unexpectedly plays one of her father’s worn-out storm warnings: Now, Nic, honey, when there’s lightning, don’t stand alone or think you’ll be protected by hiding in the trees. Find the nearest ditch and lie as low in it as you can. At the moment, she has no place to hide but in her own silence.

“Hey Doc, we already took our last test.”

“Who brought homework to our party?”

“Yeah, we’re off duty.”

“Off duty, I see,” Scarpetta muses. “So if you’re off duty when the dead body of a missing person has just been found, you’re not going to respond. Is that what you’re saying?”

“I’d have to wait until my bourbon wears off,” says a cop whose shaved head is so shiny it looks waxed.

“That’s a thought,” she says.

Now the cops are laughing—everyone but Nic.

“It can happen.” Scarpetta sets the vial next to her wineglass. “At any given moment, we can get a call. It may prove to be the worst call of our careers, and here we are, slightly buzzed from a few drinks on our time off, or maybe sick, or in the middle of a fight with a lover, a friend, one of the kids.”

She pushes away her half-eaten yellowfin tuna and folds her hands on top of the checkered tablecloth.

“But cases can’t wait,” she adds.

“Seriously. Isn’t it true that some can?” asks a Chicago detective his classmates call Popeye because of the anchor tattooed on his left forearm. “Like bones in a well or buried in a basement. Or a body under a slab of concrete. I mean, they ain’t going anywhere.”

“The dead are impatient,” Scarpetta says.

NIGHT ON THE BAYOU reminds Jay Talley of a Cajun band of bullfrogs playing bass, and peepers screaming on electric guitars, and cicadas and crickets rasping washboards and sawing fiddles.

He shines a flashlight near the dark, arthritic shape of an old cypress tree, and alligator eyes flash and vanish beneath black water. The light simmers with the ominous soft sound of mosquitoes as the BayStealth drifts, the outboard motor cut. Jay sits in the captain’s chair and idly surveys the woman in the fish box not far below his feet. When he was boat shopping several years ago, this particular BayStealth excited him. The fish box beneath the floor is long and deep enough to hold more than a hundred and twenty pounds of ice and fish, or a woman built the way he likes.

Her wide, panicked eyes shine in the dark. In daylight, they are blue, a deep, beautiful blue. She painfully screws them shut as Jay caresses her with the beam of the flashlight, starting with her mature, pretty face, all the way down to her red painted toenails. She is blonde, probably in her early- to mid-forties, but looks younger than that, petite but curvaceous. The fiberglass fish box is lined with orange boat cushions, dirty and stained black from old blood. Jay was thoughtful, even sweet when he bound her wrists and ankles loosely so the yellow nylon rope wouldn’t cut off her circulation. He told her that the rope wouldn’t abrade her soft flesh as long as she didn’t struggle.

“No point in struggling, anyway,” he said in a baritone voice that goes perfectly with his blond-god good looks. “And I’m not going to gag you. No point in screaming, either, right?”

She nodded her head, which made him laugh, because she was nodding as if answering yes when, of course, she meant no. But he understands how haywire people think and act when they are terrified, a word that has always struck him as so completely inadequate. He supposes that when Samuel Johnson was toiling at the many editions of his dictionary, he had no idea what a human being feels when he or she anticipates horror and death. The anticipation creates a frenzy of panic in every neuron, in every cell of the body, that goes far, far beyond mere terror, but even Jay, who is fluent in many languages, has no better word to describe what his victims suffer.

A frisson of horror.

No.

He studies the woman. She is a lamb. In life, there are only two types of people: wolves and lambs.

Jay’s determination to perfectly describe the way his lambs feel has become a relentless, obsessive quest. The hormone epinephrine—adrenaline—is the alchemy that turns a normal person into a lower form of life with no more control or logic than a gigged frog. Added to the physiological response that precipitates what criminologists, psychologists and other so-called experts refer to as fight-or-flight are the additional elements of the lamb’s past experiences and imagination. The more violence a lamb has experienced through books, television, movies or the news, for example, the more the lamb can imagine the nightmare of what might happen.

But the word. The perfect word. It eludes him tonight.

He gets down on the boat floor and listens to his lamb’s rapid, shallow breaths. She trembles as the earthquake of horror (for lack of the perfect word) shifts her every molecule, creating unbearable havoc. He reaches down into the fish box and touches her hand. It is as cold as death. He presses two fingers against the side of her neck, finding her carotid artery and using the luminescent dial of his watch to take her pulse.

“One-eighty, more or less,” he tells her. “Don’t have a heart attack. I had one who did.”

She stares at him with eyes bigger than a full moon, her lower lip twitching.

“I mean it. Don’t have a heart attack.” He is serious.

It is an order.

“Take a deep breath.”

She does, her lungs shaky.

“Better?”

“Yes. Please . . .”

“Why is it that all of you little lambs are so fucking polite?”

Her dirty magenta cotton shirt had been torn open days ago, and he spreads the ripped front, exposing her more than ample breasts. They tremble and shimmer in the faint light, and he follows their round slopes down to her heaving rib cage, to the hollow of her flat abdomen, down to the unzipped fly of her jeans.

“I’m sorry,” she tries to whisper as a tear rolls down her dirt-streaked face.

“Now, there you go again.” He sits back in his throne of the captain’s chair. “Do you really, really believe that being polite is going to change my plans?” The politeness sets off a slow burning rage. “Do you know what politeness means to me?”

He expects an answer.

She tries to wet her lips, her tongue as dry as paper. Her pulse visibly pounds in her neck, as if a tiny bird is trapped in there.

“No.” She chokes on the word, tears flowing into her ears and hair.

“Weakness,” he says.

Several frogs strike up the band. Jay studies his prisoner’s nakedness, her pale skin shiny with bug repellent, a small humane act on his part, motivated by his distaste for red welts. Mosquitoes are a gray, chaotic storm around her but do not land. He gets down from his chair again and gives her a sip of bottled water. Most of it runs down her chin. Touching her sexually is of no interest to him. Three nights now he has brought her out here in his boat, because he wants the privacy to talk and stare at her nakedness, hoping that somehow her body will become Kay Scarpetta’s, and finally becomes furious because it can’t, furious because Scarpetta wouldn’t be polite, furious because Scarpetta isn’t weak. A rabid part of him fears he is a failure because Scarpetta is a wolf and he captures only lambs, and he can’t find the perfect word, the word.

He realizes the word will not come to him with this lamb in the fish box, just as it hasn’t come with the others.

“I’m getting bored,” he tells his lamb. “I’ll ask you again. One last chance. What is the word?”

She swallows hard, her voice reminding him of a broken axle as she tries to move her tongue to speak. He can hear it sticking to her upper palate.

“I don’t understand. I’m sorry . . .”

“Fuck the politeness, do you hear me? How many times do I have to say it?”

The tiny bird inside her neck beats frantically, and her tears flow faster.

“What is the word? Tell me what you feel. And don’t say scared. You’re a goddamn schoolteacher. You must have a vocabulary with more than five words in it.”

“I feel . . . I feel acceptance,” she says, sobbing.

“You feel what?”

“You’re not going to let me go,” she says. “I know it now.”

SCARPETTA’S SUBTLE WIT reminds Nic of heat lightning. It doesn’t rip and crack and show off like regular lightning but is a quiet, shimmering flash that her mother used to tell her meant God was taking pictures.

He takes pictures of everything you’re doing, Nic, so you’d better behave yourself because one day there will be the Final Judgment, and those pictures are going to be passed around for all to see.

Nic stopped believing such nonsense by the time she reached high school, but her silent partner, as she thinks of her conscience, will probably never stop warning her that her sins will find her out. And Nic believes her sins are many.

“Investigator Robillard?” Scarpetta is saying.

Nic is startled by the sound of her own name. Her focus returns to the cozy, dark dining room and the cops who fill it.

“Tell us what you’d do if your phone rang at two a.m. and you’d had a few drinks but were needed at a bad, really bad, crime scene,” Scarpetta presents to her. “Let me preface this by saying that no one wants to be left out when there’s a bad, really bad, crime scene. Maybe we don’t like to admit that, but it’s true.”

“I don’t drink very much.” Nic instantly regrets the remark as her classmates groan.

“Lordy, where’d you grow up, girlfriend, Sunday school?”

“What I mean is, I really can’t because I have a five-year-old son . . .” Nic’s voice trails off, and she feels like crying. This is the longest she’s ever been away from him.

The table falls silent. Shame and awkwardness flatten the mood.

“Hey, Nic,” Popeye says, “you got his picture with you? His name’s Buddy,” he tells Scarpetta. “You gotta see his picture. A really ass-kicking little hombre sitting on a pony . . .”

Nic is in no mood to pass around the wallet-size photograph that by now is worn soft, the writing on the back faded and smeared from her taking it out and looking at it all the time. She wishes Popeye would change the subject or give her the silent treatment again.

“How many of you have children?” Scarpetta asks the table.

About a dozen hands go up.

“One of the painful aspects of this work,” she points out, “maybe the worst thing about this work—or shall I call it a mission—is what it does to the people we love, no matter how hard we try to protect them.”

No heat lightning at all. Just a silky black darkness, cool and lovely to the touch, Nic thinks as she watches Scarpetta.

She’s gentle. Behind that wall of fiery fearlessness and brilliance, she’s kind and gentle.

“In this work, relationships can also become fatalities. Often they do,” Scarpetta goes on, always trying to teach because it is easier for her to share her mind than to touch feelings she is masterful at keeping out of reach.

“So, Doc, you got kids?” Reba, a crime-scene technician from San Francisco, starts on another whiskey sour. She has begun to slur her words and has no tact.

Scarpetta hesitates. “I have a niece.”

“Oh yeah! Now I ’member. Lucy. She’s been in the news a lot. Or was, I mean . . .”

Stupid, drunk idiot, Nic silently protests with a flash of anger.

“Yes, Lucy is my niece,” Scarpetta replies.

“FBI. Computer whiz.” Reba won’t stop. “Then what? Let me think. Something about flying helicopters and AFT.”

ATF, you stupid drunk. Thunder cracks in the back of Nic’s mind.

“I dunno. Wasn’t there a big fire or something and someone got killed? So what’s she doing now?” She drains her whiskey sour and looks for the waitress.

“That was a long time ago.” Scarpetta doesn’t answer her questions, and Nic detects a weariness, a sadness as immutable and maimed as the stumps and knees of cypress trees in the swamps and bayous of her South Louisiana home.

“Isn’t that something, I forgot all about her being your niece. Now she’s something, all right. Or was,” Reba rudely says again, shoving her short dark hair out of her bloodshot eyes. “Got into some trouble, didn’t she?”

Fucking dyke. Shut up.

Lightning rips the black curtain of night, and for an instant, Nic can see the white daylight on the other side. That’s how her father always explained it. You see, Nic, he would say as they gazed out the window during angry storms, and lightning suddenly and without warning cut zigzags like a bright blade. There’s tomorrow, see? You got to look quick, Nic. There’s tomorrow on the other side, that bright white light. And see how quick it heals. God heals just that fast.

“Reba, go back to the hotel,” Nic tells her in the same firm, controlled voice she uses when Buddy throws a tantrum. “You’ve had enough whiskey for one night.”

“Well, ’scuse me, Miss Teacher’s Pet.” Reba is careening toward unconsciousness, and she talks as if she has rubber bands in her mouth.

Nic feels Scarpetta’s eyes on her and wishes she could send her a signal that might be reassuring or serve as an apology for Reba’s outrageous display.

Lucy has entered the room like a hologram, and Scarpetta’s subtle but deeply emotional response shocks Nic with jealousy, with envy she didn’t know she had. She feels inferior to her hero’s super-cop niece, whose talents and world are enormous compared to Nic’s. Her heart aches like a frozen joint that is finally unbent, the way her mother gently straightened out Nic’s healing broken arm every time the splint came off.

Hurting’s good, baby. If you didn’t feel something, this little arm of yours would be dead and fall right off. You wouldn’t want that, would you?

No, Mama. I’m sorry for what I did.

Why, Nicci, that’s the silliest thing. You didn’t hurt yourself on purpose!

But I didn’t do what Papa said. I ran right into the woods and that’s when I tripped . . . .

We all make mistakes when we’re scared, baby. Maybe it’s a good thing you fell down—you were low to the ground when the lightning was flying all around.

NIC’S MEMORIES OF HER childhood in the Deep South are full of storms.

It seems the heavens threw terrible fits every week, exploding in rageful thunder and trying to drown or electrocute every living creature on the Earth. Whenever thunderheads raised their ugly warnings and boomed their threats, her papa preached about safety, and her pretty blonde mother stood at the screen door, motioning for Nic to hurry into the house, hurry into a warm, dry place, hurry into her arms.

Papa always turned off the lights, and the three of them sat in the dark, telling Bible stories and seeing how many verses and psalms they could quote from memory. A perfect recitation was worth a quarter, but her father wouldn’t pay out until the storm passed, because quarters are made of metal, and metal attracts lightning.

Thou shalt not covet.

Nic’s excitement had been almost unbearable when she learned that one of the Academy’s visiting lecturers was Dr. Kay Scarpetta, who would teach death investigation the tenth and final week of training. Nic counted the days. She felt as though the first nine weeks would never pass. Then Scarpetta arrived here in Knoxville, and to Nic’s acute embarrassment, she met her for the first time in the ladies’ room, right after Nic flushed the toilet and emerged from a stall, zipping up the dark navy cargo pants of her Battle Dress Uniform.

Scarpetta was washing her hands at a sink, and Nic recalled the first time she had seen a photograph of her and how surprised she had been that Scarpetta wasn’t of dark Spanish stock. That was about eight years ago, when Nic knew only Scarpetta’s name and had no reason to expect that she would be a blue-eyed blonde whose ancestors came from Northern Italy, some of them farmers along the Austrian border and as Aryan in appearance as Germans.

“Hi, I’m Dr. Scarpetta,” her hero said, as if oblivious that the flushing toilet and Nic were related. “And let me guess, you’re Nicole Robillard.”

Nic turned into a mute, her face bright red. “How . . .”

Before she could sputter the rest of the question, Scarpetta explained, “I requested copies of everyone’s application, including photographs.”

“You did?” Not only was Nic stunned that Scarpetta would have asked for their applications, but she couldn’t fathom why she would have had the time or interest in looking at them. “Guess that means you know my Social Security number,” Nic tried to be funny.

“Now, I don’t remember that,” Scarpetta said, drying her hands on paper towels. “But I know enough.”

SECOND INSTAR.” Nic shows off by answering the forgotten question about Maggie the maggot.

The cops around the table shake their heads and cut their eyes at one another. Nic has the capacity to irritate her comrades and has done so on and off for the past two and a half months. In some ways, she reminds Scarpetta of Lucy, who spent the first twenty years of her young life accusing people of slights they hadn’t quite committed and flexing her gifts to the extreme of exhibitionism.

“That’s very good, Nic,” Scarpetta commends her.

“Who invited smarty pants?” Reba, who refuses to return to the Holiday Inn, is just plain obnoxious when she isn’t nodding off into her plate.

“I think Nic hasn’t been drinking enough and is having the D. T.’s and seeing maggots crawling everywhere,” says the detective with the shiny shaved head.

The way he looks at Nic is pretty obvious. Despite her being the class nerd, he is attracted to her.

“And you probably think an instar is a position on a baseball field.” Nic wants to be funny but can’t escape the gravity of her mood. “See that little maggot I gave Dr. Scarpetta . . . ?”

“Ah! At last she confesses.”

“It’s second instar.” Nic knows she should stop. “Already shed its skin once since it hatched.”

“Oh, yeah? How do you know? You an eyewitness? You actually see little Maggie shed her little skin?” the detective with the shaved head persists, winking at her.

“Nic’s got a tent in the Body Farm, sleeps out there with all her creepy-crawly friends,” someone else says.

“I would if I needed to.”

No one argues with that. Nic is well known for her ventures into the two-acre, wooded decay research facility at the University of Tennessee, where the decomposition of donated human bodies is studied to determine many important facts of death, not the least of which is when death occurred. The joke is, she visits the Body Farm as if she’s dropping by the old folks’ home and checking on her relatives.

“Bet Nic’s got a name for every maggot, fly, beetle and buzzard out there.”

The quips and gross-out jokes continue until Reba drops her fork with a loud clatter.

“Not while I’m eating rare steak!” she protests much too loudly.

“The spinach adds a nice touch of green, girlfriend.”

“Too bad you didn’t get no rice . . .”

“Hey, it ain’t too late! Waitress! Bring this lady a nice bowl of rice. With gravy.”

“And what are these tiny black dots that look like Maggie’s eyes?” Scarpetta lifts the vial to the candlelight again, hoping her students will settle down before they all get kicked out of the restaurant.

“Eyes,” says the cop with the shaved head. “They’re eyes, right?”

Reba begins to sway in her chair.

“No, they’re not eyes,” Scarpetta replies. “Come on. I already gave you a hint a few minutes ago.”

“Look like eyes to me. Little beady black eyes like Magilla’s.”

In the past ten weeks, Sergeant Magil from Houston has become “Magilla the Gorilla” because of his hairy, muscle-bound body.

“Hey!” he protests. “You ask my girlfriend if I got maggot eyes. She looks deep into these eyes of mine”—he points to them—“and faints.”

“Exactly what we’re saying, Magilla. I looked into those eyes of yours, I’d pass out cold, too.”

“They gotta be eyes. How the hell else does a maggot see where it’s going?”

“They’re spiracles, not eyes,” Nic answers. “That’s what the little black dots are. Like little snorkels so the maggot can breathe.”

“Snorkels?”

“Wait a minute. Hey, hand that thing over, Dr. Scarpetta. I wanna see if Maggie’s wearing a mask and fins.”

A skinny state police investigator from Michigan has her head on the table, she is laughing so hard.

“Next time we find a ripe one, just look for little snorkels sticking up . . .”

The guffaws turn to fits, Magilla sliding off his chair, prone on the floor. “Oh, shit! I’m gonna throw up,” he shrieks with laughter.

“Snorkels!”

Scarpetta surrenders, sitting back in silence, the situation out of her control.

“Hey, Nic! Didn’t know you were a Navy SEAL!”

This goes on until the manager of Ye Old Steak House silently appears in the doorway—his way of indicating that the party in his back room is disturbing the other diners.

“Okay, boys and girls,” Scarpetta says in a tone that is slightly scary. “Enough.”

The hilarity is gone as quickly as a sonic boom, the maggot jokes end, and then there are other gifts for Scarpetta: a space pen that can supposedly write in “rain, blizzards, and if you accidentally drop it in a chest cavity while you’re doing an autopsy”; a Mini Maglite “to see in those hard-to-reach places”; and a dark blue baseball cap embellished with enough gold braid for a general.

“General Dr. Scarpetta. Salute!”

Everybody does as they eagerly look for her response, irreverent remarks flying around again like shotgun pellets. Magilla tops off Scarpetta’s wine glass from a gallon paper carton with a push-button spout. She figures the cheap Chardonnay is probably made from grapes grown at the lowest level of the slopes, where the drainage is terrible. If she’s lucky, the vintage is four months old. She will be sick tomorrow. She is sure of it.

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING in New York’s Kennedy Airport, a security guard recommends that Lucy Farinelli remove her oversized stainless-steel Breitling watch, empty her pockets of coins and place them in a tray.

It is not a suggestion but an order when she is asked to remove her running shoes, jacket and belt and place them and her briefcase on the conveyor that will carry them through the X-ray machine, where nothing but a cell phone, a hairbrush and a tube of lipstick will fluoresce. British Air attendants are friendly enough in their dark blazers and navy blue dresses with red and white checks, but airport police are especially tense. Although she doesn’t set off the doorframe-shaped scanner as she walks through in her athletic socks, her jeans hanging loose, she is searched with the hand scanner, and her underwire bra sets it off with a beep-beep-beep.

“Hold up your arms,” the hefty female officer tells her.

Lucy smiles and holds out her arms crucifixion-style, and the officer pats her down quickly, her hands fluttering under Lucy’s arms, under her breasts, up and down her thighs, all the way to her crotch—very professionally, of course. Other passengers pass by unmolested, and the men, in particular, find the good-looking young woman with arms and legs spread of keen interest. Lucy could care less. She has lived through too much to waste energy in being modest and is tempted to unbutton her shirt and point out the underwire bra, assuring the officer that no battery and tiny—very tiny—explosive device are attached.

“It’s my bra,” she casually says to the startled guard, who is far more unnerved than her suspect. “Damn it, I always forget to wear a bra without wire in it, maybe a sports bra, or no bra. I’m really sorry to inconvenience you, Officer Washington.” She’s already read her name tag. “Thank you for doing your job so well. What a world we live in. I understand the terrorist alert is orange again.”

Lucy leaves the bewildered guard and plucks her watch and coins out of the tray and collects her briefcase, jacket and belt. Sitting on the cold, hard floor, out of the way of traffic, she puts on her running shoes, not bothering to lace them. She gets up, still polite and sweet to any police or British Air employees watching her. Reaching around to her back pocket, she slips out her ticket and passport, both of them issued to one of her many false names. She strolls nonchalantly, laces flopping, deep inside the winding carpeted gate 10, and ducks inside the small doorway of Concorde flight 01. A British Air attendant smiles at her as she checks Lucy’s boarding pass.

“Seat one-C.” She points the way to the first row, the bulkhead aisle seat, as if Lucy has never traveled on the Concorde before.

Last time she did, it was under yet another name, and she was wearing glasses and green contact lenses, her hair dyed funky blue and purple, easily washed out and matching the photograph on that particular passport. Her occupation was “musician.” Although no one could possibly have been familiar with her nonexistent techno band, Yellow Hell, there were plenty of people who said, “Oh yes, I’ve heard of it! Cool!”

Lucy counts on the dismal observation skills of the general masses. She counts on their fear of showing ignorance, on their accepting lies as familiar truths. She counts on her enemies noticing all that goes on around them, and like them, she notices all that goes on around her, too. For example, when the customs agent studied her passport at great length, she recognized his behavior and understood why security is at a feverish pitch. Interpol has sent a Red Notice screaming over the Internet to approximately 182 countries, alerting them to look out for a fugitive named Rocco Caggiano, wanted in Italy and France for murder. Rocco has no idea he is a fugitive. He has no idea that Lucy sent information to Interpol’s Central Bureau in Washington, D.C., her credible tip thoroughly checked out before it was relayed through cyberspace to Interpol’s headquarters in Lyon, France, where the Red Notice was issued and rocketed to law enforcement all around the world. All this in a matter of hours.

Rocco does not know Lucy, although he knows who she is. She knows him very well, although they have never met. At this moment, as she straps herself into her seat and the Concorde starts its Rolls Royce engines, she can’t wait to see Rocco Caggiano, her anticipation fueled by intense anger that will evolve into a nervous dread by the time she finally gets to Eastern Europe.

I
SURE HOPE YOU’RE NOT FEELING as bad as I am,” Nic says to Scarpetta.

They sit inside the living room of Scarpetta’s suite at the Marriott, waiting for room service. It is nine a.m., and twice now Nic has inquired about Scarpetta’s health, her banality partly due to her flattered disbelief that this woman she admires so intensely invited her to have breakfast.

Why me? The question bounces inside Nic’s head like a bingo ball. Maybe she feels sorry for me.

“I’ve felt better,” Scarpetta replies with a smile.

“Popeye and his wine. But he’s brought worse poison than that.”

“I don’t know how anything could be worse,” Scarpetta says as a knock sounds on the door. “Unless it really is poison. Excuse me.”

She gets up from the couch. Room service has arrived on a table wheeled inside. Scarpetta signs the check and tips in cash. Nic notes that she is generous.

“Popeye’s room—room one-oh-six—is the watering hole,” Nic says. “Any night, just go on in with your six-pack and dump it in the bathtub. Starting around eight p.m., he does nothing but haul twenty-pound bags of ice to his room. Good thing he’s on the first floor. I went once.”

“Only once in ten weeks?” Scarpetta watches her closely, probing.

When Nic returns to Louisiana, she will face the worst homicide cases she may ever have in her life. So far, she hasn’t said a word about them, and Scarpetta is concerned about her.

“When I was in medical school at Johns Hopkins,” Scarpetta offers as she pours coffee, “I was one of three women in my class. If there was a bathtub full of beer anywhere, I can assure you I was never told. What do you take?”

“Lots of cream and sugar. You shouldn’t be serving me. Here I am, just sitting.” She pops up from her wing chair.

“Sit down, sit down.” Scarpetta sets Nic’s coffee on a table. “There are croissants and rather inedible-looking bagels. I’ll let you help yourself.”

“But when you were in medical school, you weren’t a small-town . . .” Nic catches herself before saying hick. “Miami’s not exactly some little mud puddle in Louisiana. All these guys in my class are from big cities.”

She fixes her attention on Scarpetta’s coffee cup, on how perfectly steady it is as she lifts it to her lips. She drinks her coffee black and seems uninterested in food.

“When my chief told me the department was offered a fully funded slot at the Academy and would I go, I can’t tell you what I felt like,” Nic goes on, worrying that she’s talking too much about herself. “I really couldn’t believe it and had to go to a world of trouble to make it possible for me to leave home for close to three months. Then I got here to Knoxville and found myself with Reba as a roommate.

“I can’t say it’s been fun, and I feel terrible sitting here and complaining.” She nervously drinks her coffee, setting it down, then picking it up again, clenching her napkin tightly in her lap. “Especially to you.”

“Why especially to me?”

“Truth is, I guess I was hoping to impress you.”

“You have.”

“And you don’t seem the sort to appreciate whining.” Nic looks up at her. “It’s not like people are always nice to you, either.”

Scarpetta laughs. “Shall I call that an understatement?”

“That didn’t come out right. People are jealous out there. You’ve had your battles. What I’m saying is, you don’t complain.”

“Ask Rose about that.” Scarpetta is quite amused.

Nic’s mind locks, as if she should know who Rose is but can’t make a connection.

“My secretary,” Scarpetta explains, sipping her coffee.

An awkward silence follows, and Nic asks, “What happened to the other two?”

Scarpetta is confused.

“The other two women in your medical class.”

“One dropped out. I think the other got married and never practiced medicine.”

“I wonder what they’re feeling now. Probably regret.”

“They probably wonder about me, too,” Scarpetta replies. “They probably think I feel regret.”

Nic’s lips part in disbelief. “You?”

“Everything comes with sacrifices. And it’s human nature to have a hard time accepting anyone who’s different. Usually, you don’t figure that out until you get what you asked for in life and are shocked that in some instances your reward is hatred instead of applause.”

“I don’t see myself as different or hated. Maybe picked on a lot, but not back home,” Nic quickly replies. “Just because I’m with a small department instead of LAPD doesn’t mean I’m stupid.” Her spirit rises, her voice heating up. “I’m not some mudbug swamp-rat redneck . . .”

“Mudbug.” Scarpetta frowns. “I don’t believe I know what that is.”

“A crawfish.”

“Did someone in the class call you a crawfish?”

Nic can’t help but lighten up. “Oh, hell. None of them have ever even eaten a crawfish. They probably think it’s a fish that crawls along the bottom of the ocean or something.”

“I see.”

“I know what you mean, though. Sort of,” Nic says. “In Zachary, only two street cops are women. I’m the only female investigator, and it’s not that the chief dislikes women or anything like that. In fact, the mayor’s a woman. But most times when I’m in the break room, getting coffee or eating or whatever, I’m the only woman in there. Truth is, I rarely think about it. But I have thought about it a lot here at the Academy. I realize I try too hard to prove I’m really not a hick, and then I annoy everyone. Well, I know you need to go. You probably have to pack, and I don’t want you to miss your plane.”

“Not so fast,” Scarpetta replies. “I don’t think we’re finished talking.”

Nic relaxes, her attractive face more animated, her slender body less rigid in the chair. When she speaks this time, she doesn’t sound as nervous.

“I will tell you the nicest thing anybody’s said to me during this entire ten weeks. Reba said I look a little bit like you. ’Course, it was when she was drunk. Hope I didn’t just insult you.”

“You may have insulted yourself,” Scarpetta modestly replies. “I’m somewhat older than you, if what I read on your application is to be trusted.”

“Thirty-six in August. It’s amazing what you pick up about people.”

“I make it my business to know as much about people as I can. It’s important to listen. Most people are too busy making assumptions, too self-absorbed to listen. And in the morgue, my patients speak very quietly and are unforgiving if I don’t listen and find out everything I can about them.”

“Sometimes I don’t listen to Buddy like I should—when I’m frantic or just too tired.” Sadness crosses her eyes. “I of all people ought to know how that feels, since Ricky hardly ever listened to me, which is one reason we didn’t get along. One of many reasons.”

Scarpetta has suspected that Nic’s marriage is in trouble or has ended. People who are unhappy in relationships carry about them a distinct air of discontent and isolation. In Nic’s case, the signs are there, especially the anger that she thinks she hides.

“How bad?” Scarpetta asks her.

“Separated, well on our way to divorce.” Nic reaches for her coffee cup again but changes her mind. “Thank God my father lives nearby in Baton Rouge or I don’t know what I’d do about Buddy. I know damn well Ricky would take him from me just to pay me back.”

“Pay you back? For what?” Scarpetta inquires, and she has a reason for all these questions.

“A long story. Been going on more than a year, from bad to worse, not that it was ever all that good.”

“About as long as these women have been disappearing from your area.” Scarpetta finally gets to her point. “I want to know how you’re handling that, because it will get you if you let it. When you least expect it. It’s not escaped my notice that you haven’t brought up the cases once, not once, not while I’ve been here. Ten women in fourteen months. Vanished, from their homes, vehicles, parking lots, all in the Baton Rouge area. Presumed dead. I can assure you they are. I can assure you they were murdered by the same person, who is shrewd—very shrewd. Intelligent and experienced enough to gain trust, then abduct, then dispose of the bodies. He’s killed before, and he’ll kill again. The latest disappearance was just four days ago—in Zachary. That makes two cases in Zachary, the first one several months ago. So you’re going home to that, Nic. Serial murders. Ten of them.”

“Not ten. Just the two in Zachary. I’m not on the task force,” Nic replies with restrained resentment. “I don’t run with the big boys. They don’t need help from little country cops like me, at least that’s the way the U.S. Attorney looks at it.”

“What’s the U.S. Attorney got to do with it?” Scarpetta asks. “These cases aren’t the jurisdiction of the feds.”

“Weldon Winn’s not only an egotistical asshole, but he’s stupid. Nothing worse than someone who’s stupid and arrogant and has power. The cases are high-profile, all over the news. He wants to be part of them, maybe end up a federal judge or senator someday.

“And you’re right. I know what I’m going home to, but all I can do is work the two disappearances we’ve had in Zachary, even if I know damn well they’re connected to the other eight.”

“Interesting the abductions are now happening farther north of Baton Rouge,” Scarpetta says. “He may be finding his earlier killing field too risky.”

“The only thing good I can say about that is Zachary may be in the East Baton Rouge Parish, but at least it isn’t the jurisdiction of the Baton Rouge police. So the high and mighty task force can’t boss me around about my cases.”

“Tell me about them.”

“Let’s see. The most recent one. What I know about it. What anybody knows about it. Two days after Easter, just four nights ago,” she begins. “A forty-year-old schoolteacher named Glenda Marler. She’s a teacher at the high school—same high school I went to. Blonde, blue-eyed, pretty, very smart. Divorced, no children. This past Tuesday night, she goes to the Road Side Bar Be Q, gets pulled pork, hush puppies and slaw to go. She has a ’94 Honda Accord, blue, and is observed driving away from the restaurant, south on Main Street, right through the middle of town. She vanishes, her car found abandoned in the parking lot of the high school where she taught. Of course, the task force is suggesting she was having a rendezvous with one of her students, that the case isn’t related to the others, that it’s a copycat. Bullshit.”

“Her own high school parking lot,” Scarpetta thoughtfully observes. “So he talked to her, found out about her after he had her in his car, maybe asked her where she worked, and she told him. Or else he stalked her.”

“Which do you think it is?”

“I don’t know. Most serial killers stalk their victims. But there’s no set rule, despite what most profilers would like to think.”

“The other victim,” Nic continues, “vanished right before I came here. Ivy Ford. Forty-two years old, blonde, blue-eyed, attractive, worked as a bank teller. Kids are off in college, and her husband was up in Jackson, Mississippi, on a business trip, so she was home alone when someone must have showed up at her door. As usual, no sign of a struggle. No nothing. And she’s gone without a trace.”

“Nothing is ever without a trace,” Scarpetta says as she envisions each scenario, contemplating the obvious: The victim has no reason to fear her attacker until it is too late.

“Is Ivy Ford’s house still secured?” Scarpetta doubts it after all this time.

“Family’s still living in it. I don’t know how people return to homes where such awful things have happened.”

Nic starts to say that she wouldn’t. But that isn’t true. Earlier in her life, she did.

“The car in this most recent case, Glenda Marler’s case, is impounded and was thoroughly examined?” Scarpetta asks.

“Hours and hours we . . . well, as you know, I was here.” This detail disappoints her. “But I’ve gotten the full report, and I know we spent a lot of time on it. My guys lifted every print they could find. Entered the useable ones in AFIS, and no matches. Personally, I don’t think that matters because I believe that whoever grabbed Glenda Marler was never inside her car. So his prints wouldn’t be in there, anyway. And the only prints on the door handles were hers.”

“What about her keys and wallet and any other personal effects?”

“Keys in the ignition, her pocketbook and wallet in the high school parking lot about twenty feet from the car.”

“Money in the wallet?” Scarpetta asks.

Nic shakes her head. “But her checkbook and charge cards weren’t touched. She wasn’t one to carry much cash. Whatever she had, it was gone, and I know she had at least six dollars and thirty-two cents because that was the change she got when she gave the guy at the barbeque a ten-dollar bill to pay for her food. I had my guys check, because oddly, the bag of food wasn’t inside her car. So there was no receipt. We had to go back to the barbeque and have him pull her receipt.”

“Then it would appear that the perpetrator took her food, too.”

This is odd, more typical of a burglary or robbery, certainly not the usual in a psychopathic violent crime.

“As far as you know, is robbery involved in the cases of the other eight missing women?” Scarpetta asks.

“Rumor has it that their billfolds were cleaned out of cash and tossed not far from where they were snatched.”

“No fingerprints in any of the cases, as far as you know?”

“I don’t know for a fact.”

“Perhaps DNA from skin cells where the perpetrator touched the billfold?”

“I don’t know what the Baton Rouge police have done, because they don’t tell anybody shit. But the guys at my department swabbed everything we could, including Ivy Ford’s wallet, and did get her DNA profile—and another one that isn’t in the FBI’s database, CODIS. Louisiana, as you know, is just getting started on a DNA database and is so backed up on entering samples, you may as well forget it.”

“But you do have an unknown profile,” Scarpetta says with interest. “Although we have to accept right off that it could be anybody’s. What about her children, her husband?”

“The DNA’s not theirs.”

Scarpetta nods. “Then you have to start wondering who else would have had good reason to touch Ivy Ford’s wallet. Who else besides the killer.”

“I wonder about that twenty-four hours a day.”

“And this most recent case, Glenda Marler?”

“The state police labs have the evidence. The tests results will be a while, even though there’s a rush on them.”

“An alternate light source used on the inside of the car?”

“Yes. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing,” Nic says in frustration. “No crime scenes, no bodies, like it’s all a bad dream. If even just one body would show up. The coroner’s great. You’ve heard of him? Dr. Sam Lanier.”

Scarpetta doesn’t know him.

THE EAST BATON ROUGE PARISH Coroner’s Office overlooks a long straight reach of the Mississippi River and the former art deco state capitol where the wily, fearless and despotic Huey Long was assassinated.

Muddy, sluggish water carries Dr. Sam Lanier’s eye to a riverboat casino and past the USS Kidd battleship to the distant Old Mississippi Bridge, as he stands before his office window on the fifth floor of the Governmental Building. He is a fit man in his early sixties with a head of gray hair that naturally parts neatly on the right side. Unlike most men of his power, he shuns suits except when he is in court or attending the political functions he cannot avoid.

His may be a political office, but he despises politics and virtually all people involved in it. Contrary by nature, Dr. Lanier wears the same outfit pretty much every day, even if he’s meeting with the mayor: comfortable shoes capable of walking him into unpleasant places, dark slacks and a polo shirt embroidered with the East Baton Rouge Parish coroner’s crest.

Deliberate man that he is, he ponders how to handle the bizarre communication he received yesterday morning, a letter enclosed in a National Academy of Justice postage-paid mailing. Dr. Lanier has been a member of the organization for years. The large white NAJ envelope was sealed. It did not look tampered with in any way until Dr. Lanier opened it and found another envelope, also sealed. It was addressed to him by hand in block printing, the return address the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Polunsky Unit. A search on the Internet revealed that the Polunsky Unit is death row. The letter, also written by hand in block printing, reads:

Greetings Monsieur Lanier,

Of course you remember Madame Charlotte Dard, whose untimely, sad death occurred on 14 September 1995. You witnessed her autopsy, and I do envy you for that delicious experience, having never seen one myself, not in person. I will be executed soon and am relieving myself of secrets.

Madame Dard was murdered very cleverly.

Mais non! Not by me.

A person of interest, as they stupidly refer to possible suspects these days, fled to Palm Desert shortly after Madame Dard’s death. This person is not there now. This person’s location and identity you must discover for yourself. I very much encourage you to seek assistance. Might I suggest the great skills of Detective Pete Marino? He knows me very well from my joyous Richmond days. Surely you must have heard of the great Marino?

Your surname, mon cher monsieur, implies you are of French descent. Perhaps we are related.

Á bientôt,
Jean-Baptiste Chandonne

Dr. Lanier has heard of Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. He has not heard of Pete Marino but is introduced to him easily enough by sending out a few search engines to chug through cyberspace and find him. It is true. Marino led the investigation when Chandonne was murdering women in Richmond. What interests Dr. Lanier more, however, is that Marino is best known for his close professional relationship with Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a gifted forensic pathologist. Dr. Lanier has always respected her and was more than a little impressed when he heard her lecture at a regional meeting of coroners. Most forensic pathologists, particularly ones with her status, look down on coroners, think they’re all funeral home directors who got voted into office. Of course, some of them are.

Trouble stuck out its big foot and tripped Dr. Scarpetta, hurting her badly, several years back. For that she has Dr. Lanier’s sympathy. Not a day goes by when trouble doesn’t stomp around looking for him, too.

Now some notorious serial killer seems to think Dr. Lanier needs the help of her colleague Marino. Maybe he does. Maybe he’s being set up. With the election not even six months away, Dr. Lanier is suspicious of any deviation from routine, and a letter from Jean-Baptiste Chandonne makes him as leery as hell. The only reason he can’t dismiss it is simple: Jean-Baptiste Chandonne, if the letter is really from him, knows about Charlotte Dard. Her case has been forgotten by the public and was never all that newsworthy outside of Baton Rouge. Her cause of death was undetermined. Dr. Lanier has always entertained the possibility that she was murdered.

He’s always believed that the best way to identify a cottonmouth is to poke at it. If the inside of its mouth is white, whack off its head. Otherwise, the critter’s nothing more than a harmless water snake.

He may as well poke at the truth and see what he finds. While sitting at his desk, he picks up the phone and discovers Marino doesn’t care who finds him—he has what Dr. Lanier calls a bring-’em-on attitude. He envisions Marino as the type who would ride a Fat Boy Harley, probably without a helmet. The cop’s answering machine doesn’t say he can’t answer the phone because he’s not in or is on the other line, which is what most professional, polite people record as greetings. The recorded gruff male voice says, “Don’t call me at home,” and offers another number for the person to try.

Dr. Lanier tries the other number. The voice that answers sounds like the recorded one.

“Detective Marino?”

“Who wants to know?”

He’s from New Jersey and doesn’t trust anyone, probably doesn’t like hardly anyone, either.

Dr. Lanier introduces himself, and he’s careful about what he says, too. In the trust and like department, Marino’s met his match.

“We had a death down here about eight years ago. You ever heard of a woman named Charlotte Dard?”

“Nope.”

Dr. Lanier gives him a few details of the case.

“Nope.”

Dr. Lanier gives him a few more.

“Let me ask you something. Why the hell would I know anything about some drug overdose in Baton Rouge?” Marino’s not at all nice about it.

“Same question I have.”

“Huh? What is this? Are you some asshole bullshitting me?”

“A lot of people think I’m an asshole,” Dr. Lanier replies. “But I’m not bullshitting you.”

He debates whether he should tell Marino about the letter from Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. He decides that no useful purpose would be served. He’s already found out what he needed to know: Marino is clueless about Charlotte Dard and annoyed at being bothered by some coroner.

“One other quick question, and then I won’t take up any more of your time,” Dr. Lanier says. “You have a long history with Dr. Kay Scarpetta . . . .”

“What’s she got to do with this?” Marino’s entire demeanor changes. Now he’s just plain hostile.

“I understand she’s doing private consulting.” Dr. Lanier had read a brief mention of it on the Internet.

Marino doesn’t respond.

“What do you think of her?” Dr. Lanier asks the question that he feels sure will trigger a volcanic temper.

“Tell you what, asshole. I think enough of her not to talk about her with some shitbag stranger!”

The call ends with a dial tone.

In Sam Lanier’s mind, he couldn’t have gotten a stronger validation of Dr. Kay Scarpetta’s character. She’s welcome down here.

SCARPETTA WAITS IN LINE at the Marriott’s front desk, her head throbbing, her central nervous system shorted out by wine so terrible it ought to have a skull and crossbones on the label.

Her malady, her malaise, is far more serious than she ever let on to Nic, and with each passing minute, her physical condition and mood worsen. She refuses to diagnose her illness as a hangover (after all, she barely had two glasses of that goddamn wine), and she refuses to forgive herself for even considering an alcoholic beverage sold in a cardboard box.

Painful experience has proven for years that when she suffers such merry misadventures, the more coffee she drinks, the more awful she’s going to feel, but this never stops her from ordering a large pot in her room and flying by the seat of her pants instead of trusting her instruments, as Lucy likes to say when her aunt ignores what she knows and does what she feels and crash-lands.

When she finally reaches the front desk, she asks for her bill and is handed an envelope.

“This just came in for you, ma’am,” the harried receptionist says as he tears off the printout of her room charges and hands it to her.

Inside the envelope is a fax. Scarpetta walks behind the bellman pushing her cart. It is loaded with bags and three very large hard cases containing carousels of slides that she has not bothered to convert to PowerPoint presentations because she can’t stand them. Showing a picture of a man who has blown off the top of his head with a shotgun or a child scalded to death does not require a computer and special effects. Slide presentations and handouts serve her purposes just as well now as they did when she started her career.

The fax is from her secretary, Rose, who must have called about the same time Scarpetta was miserably making her way from the elevator to the lobby. All Rose says is that Dr. Sam Lanier, the coroner of East Baton Rouge Parish, very much needs to speak to her. Rose includes his home, office and cell telephone numbers. Immediately, Scarpetta thinks of Nic Robillard, of their conversation not even an hour ago.

She waits until she is inside her taxi before calling Dr. Lanier’s office number. He answers himself.

“How did you know who my secretary is and where to reach her?” she asks right off.

“Your former office in Richmond was kind enough to give me your number in Florida. Rose is quite charming, by the way.”

“I see,” she replies as the taxi drives away from the hotel. “I’m in a taxi on the way to the airport. Can we make this quick?”

Her abruptness is more about her annoyance with her former office than with him. Giving out her unlisted phone number is blatant harassment—not that it hasn’t happened before. Some people who still work at the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office remain loyal to their boss. Others are traitors and bend in the direction that power pulls.

“Quick it will be,” Dr. Lanier says. “I’m wondering if you would review a case for me, Dr. Scarpetta—an eight-year-old case that was never successfully resolved. A woman died under suspicious circumstances, apparently from a drug overdose. You ever heard of Charlotte Dard?”

“No.”

“I’ve just gotten information—don’t know if it’s good or not—but I don’t want to discuss it while you’re on a cell phone.”

“This is a Baton Rouge case?” Scarpetta digs in her handbag for a notepad and pen.

“Another story for another day. But yes, it’s a Baton Rouge case.”

“Your case?”

“It was. I’d like to send you the reports, slides and all the rest. Looks like I’d better dig back into this thing.” He hesitates. “And as you might suspect, I don’t have much of a budget . . .”

“Nobody who calls me has consultants built into the budget,” she interrupts him. “I didn’t either when I was in Virginia.”

She tells him to FedEx her the case and gives him her address.

She adds, “Do you happen to know an investigator in Zachary named Nic Robillard?”

A pause, then, “Believe I talked to her on the phone a few months back. I’m sure you know what’s going on down here.”

“I can’t help but know. It’s all over the news,” Scarpetta cautiously replies over the noise of the taxi and rush-hour traffic.

Neither her tone nor her words betray that she has any personal information about the cases, and her trust of Nic slips several notches as she frets that perhaps Nic called Dr. Lanier and talked about her. Why she might have done that is hard to say, unless she simply volunteered that Scarpetta could be a very useful resource for him, should he ever need her. Maybe he really does need her for this cold case he’s just told her about. Maybe he’s trying to develop a relationship with her because he’s not equipped to handle these serial murders by himself.

“How many forensic pathologists work for you?” Scarpetta asks him.

“One.”

“Did Nic Robillard call you about me?” She doesn’t have time for subtlety.

“Why would she?”

“That’s no answer.”

“Hell no,” he says.

AN AIR-CONDITIONING UNIT rattles in a dusty window, the afternoon hotter than usual for April, as Jay Talley hacks meat into small pieces and drops them into a bloody plastic bucket below the scarred wooden table where he sits.

The table, like everything else inside his fishing shack, is old and ugly, the sort of household objects people leave at the edges of their driveways to be picked up by garbage collectors or spirited away by scavengers. His work space is his special place, and he is patient as he repeatedly adjusts torn bits of clothing that he jams under several of the table legs in his ongoing attempt to keep the table level. He prefers not to chop on a surface that moves, but balance is virtually impossible in his warped little world, and the graying wood floor slopes enough to roll an egg from the kitchenette right out to the dock, where some planks are rotted, others curled like dull dead hair flipped up at the ends.

Swatting at sea gnats, he finishes a Budweiser, crushes the can and hurls it out the open screen door, pleased that it sails twenty feet past his boat and plops into the water. Boredom gives pleasure to the most mundane activities, including checking on the crab pots suspended below floats in the murky freshwater. It doesn’t matter that crabs aren’t found in freshwater. Crawfish are, and they’re in season, and if they don’t pick the pots clean, something bigger usually comes along.

Last month, a large log turned into an alligator gar weighing at least a hundred pounds. It moved like a torpedo, speeding off with a trotline and its makeshift float of an empty Clorox bottle. Jay sat calmly in his boat and tipped his baseball cap to the carnivorous creature. Jay doesn’t eat what he catches in the pots, but out here in the middle of this hellish nowhere he now calls home, his only acceptable fresh choices are catfish, bass, turtles and as many frogs as he can gig at night. Otherwise, his food comes in bags and cans from various grocery stores on the mainland.

He brings down a meat cleaver, cutting through muscle and bone. More pieces of foul flesh land in the bucket. It doesn’t take long for meat to rot in this heat.

“Guess who I’m thinking about right now,” he says to Bev Kiffin, his woman.

“Shut up. You just say that to get to me.”

“No, ma chérie, I say it because I’m remembering fucking her in Paris.”

Jealousy flares. Bev can’t control herself when she is forced to think of Kay Scarpetta, who is fine-looking and smart—plenty fine-looking, and smart enough for Jay. Rarely does it occur to Bev that she has no good reason to compete with a woman Jay fantasizes about chopping up and feeding to the alligators and crawfish in the bayou outside their door. If Bev could cut Scarpetta’s throat, she sure as hell would, and her own dream is to one day get her chance. Then Jay wouldn’t talk about the bitch anymore. He wouldn’t stare out at the bayou half the night, thinking about her.

“How come you have to always talk about her?”

Bev moves closer to him and watches sweat trickle down his perfectly sculpted, smooth chest, soaking the waistband of his tight cutoff jeans. She stares at his muscular thighs, the hair on them fine and shiny as gold. Her fury heats to flashover and erupts.

“You got a damn hard-on. You chop away and get a stiff dick! Put down that meat ax!”

“It’s a cleaver, honey. If only you weren’t so stupid.” His handsome face and blond hair are wet with sweat, his cold blue eyes bright against his tan.

She bends over and cups her thick, stubby hand around the bulge between his thighs as he calmly spreads his legs wide and leans back in the chair long enough for her to get started on his zipper. She wears no bra, her cheap flower-printed blouse halfway unbuttoned, offering him a view of heavy, flaccid breasts that arouse nothing beyond his need to manipulate and control. He rips open her blouse, buttons lightly clattering against wood, and begins fondling her the way she craves.

“Oh,” she moans. “Don’t stop,” she begs, moving his head closer.

“Want more, baby?”

“Oh.”

He sucks her, disgusted by her salty, sour taste, and shoves her hard with his bare feet.

The thud of her body hitting the floor, her shocked gasp, are familiar sounds in the fishing shack.

BLOOD SEEPS FROM A SCRAPE on Bev’s dimpled left knee, and she stares at the wound.

“How come you don’t want me no more, baby?” she says. “You used to want me so bad I couldn’t keep you off me.”

Her nose runs. She shoves back her short, frizzy, graying brown hair and pulls her torn blouse together, suddenly humiliated by her ugly nakedness.

“Want is when I want.”

He resumes the blows with the meat cleaver. Tiny bits of flesh and bone fly out from the thick, shiny blade and stick to the stained wooden table and to Jay’s sweaty bare chest. The sweet, sour stench of rotting flesh is heavy in the stifling air, and flies drone in lazy zigzags, lumbering airborne like fat cargo planes. They hover over the gory mother lode inside the bucket, their black and green swarming bodies shimmering like spilled gasoline.

Bev collects herself off the floor. She watches Jay hacking and tossing flesh into the bucket, flies darting up and greedily dive-bombing back to their feast. They buzz loudly, bumping against the side of the bucket.

“And now we’re supposed to eat off that table.” Hers is an old line. They never eat off it. The table is Jay’s private space and she knows not to touch it.

He swats furiously at the sea gnats. “Goddamn, I hate these fucking things! When the fuck are you going shopping? And next time, don’t come back here with only two bottles of insect repellent and no pups.”

Bev disappears into the lavatory. It is no bigger than the head on a small boat, and there is no tank to chemically store and treat human waste, which slops through a hole into a washtub between pilings that support the shack. Once a day, she empties the tub into the bayou. Her persistent nightmare is that a water moccasin or alligator is going to get her while she sits on the wooden box toilet, and at especially uneasy times, she squats above it, peering down at the black hole, her fat thighs shaking from fear and the strain of supporting her weight.

She was fleshy when Jay first met her at a campsite near Williamsburg, Virginia, where his family business brought them together by accident, really. He needed a place, and hers was out of the way, an overgrown, garbage-strewn, densely wooded property with abandoned, rusting campers and a motel mostly patronized by prostitutes and drug dealers. When Jay appeared at Bev’s door, she was thrilled by his power and was instantly attracted to him. She came on to him the same way she did with all men, rough raw sex her only means of gratifying her lonely, angry needs.

The rain was driving down that night, reminding her of shiny nails, and she fixed Jay a bowl of Campbell’s vegetable beef soup and a grilled cheese sandwich while her young children hid and watched their mother involving herself with yet another stranger. Bev paid her little ones no mind at the time. She tries not to think about them now or wonder how big they’re getting. They are wards of the state and far better off without her. Ironically, Jay was nicer to them than she was. He was so different then, when he took her to bed that first night.

Three years ago she was more attractive and had not gained weight from eating snack foods and processed cheeses and meats that don’t spoil. She can’t do push-ups and squats all day long the way Jay does, and she gets no exercise. Behind the shack, grass flats thick with mussels and rich black muck stretch for miles. There is no dry ground to walk on except the pier. Maneuvering Jay’s boat through narrow waterways burns few calories.

A small outboard motor would do, but Jay will have nothing less than a 200-horsepower Evinrude with a stainless-steel prop to speed through channels, heading to his secret spots, and drift silently beneath cypress trees, waiting perfectly still like a possum if a helicopter or small plane flies low overhead. He helps Bev with nothing, his distinctive looks impossible to disguise because he is too vain to ruin his beauty. When he goes to shore, it is to get money at a family hideaway and not to run errands. Bev can venture out for provisions because she scarcely resembles her photograph on the FBI’s most-wanted list, her skin withered by the sun, her body overblown, her face puffy and hair cut short.

“Why can’t we close the door?” Bev asks as she walks out of the tiny, dirty bathroom.

He goes to the refrigerator, rounded and white with spots of rust, left over from the sixties. Swinging open the door, he grabs another beer.

“I like being hot,” he says, his footsteps heavy on the old planking.

“The air-conditioning’s going right out the door.” Hers is the usual complaint. “We only got so much gasoline for the generator.”

“Then you’ll just have to go out and get more. How many times do I have to tell you to get your fat ass out to get more?”

He stares at her, his eyes weird, the way they get when he is engrossed in his ritual. His arousal strains against his zipper, and soon he will relieve it—again, at a time of his choosing. Body odor and a rotten stench waft past her as he carries the bucket outside, flies storming after it in a loud buzzing blitzkrieg. He busies himself, pulling up crab pots by their yellow nylon ropes. He has dozens of pots. He simply tosses pieces too big to fit inside them into the water, where gators will drag them to the bottom and feed off them at their pleasure. Skulls pose the biggest problem, because they make identity certain. Another ritual of his is to pound skulls into dust, which he mixes with powdered white chalk that he stores in empty paint cans. Chalky, bony dust reminds him of the catacombs that wind twenty-five meters below the streets of Paris.

Now inside and flopping on the narrow bed against a wall, he puts his hands behind his head.

Bev slips out of her torn blouse, teasing him like a stripper. A master at the waiting game, he does not react as she brushes against his lips. She throbs unbearably. This might go on for a very long time, never mind her begging, and when he is ready, and only then, he bites, but not hard enough to leave a mark because he can’t abide the idea of being anything like Jean-Baptiste, his brother.

Jay used to smell and taste so good. Now that he is a fugitive, he rarely bathes, and when he does, he simply dumps buckets of bayou water over his body. Bev dares not complain or react in the slightest way to the strong stench of his breath and groin. The one and only time she gagged, he broke her nose and forced her to finish, her blood and small cries of pain giving him pleasure.

When she cleans the shack, she obsessively scrubs that spot below the bed, but the bloodstains are stubborn, like something out of a horror movie, she thinks. Bleach has left a mottled whitish-brown area the size of a doormat that Jay constantly complains about, as if he had nothing to do with how it got there.

JEAN-BAPTISTE CHANDONNE is Rodin’s The Thinker on the stainless-steel toilet, his white pants drooping around his furry knees.

Corrections officers make fun of him. It never stops. He can sense it as he perches on the toilet, staring at the locked steel door of his cell. The iron bars in its tiny window are drawn to the iron in Jean-Baptiste’s blood. Animal magnetism is a scientific fact scarcely heard of now and, for the most part, not accepted centuries ago, even though there are documented cases of magnetized materials having been applied to diseased and damaged parts of the body, causing all symptoms to cease, the patient’s health restored. Jean-Baptiste is well schooled in the doctrine of the famous Dr. Mesmer, whose system of treatment is eloquently laid out in his Mémoir sur la Découverte du Magnétisme Animal.

The original work, first published in French in 1779, is Jean-Baptiste’s Bible. Before his books and radio were confiscated, he memorized long sections of Mesmer, and he is devout in his belief that a universal magnetic fluid influences the tides and people.

“I possessed the usual knowledge about the magnet: its action on iron, the ability of our body fluids to receive that mineral . . .” Mesmer wrote, and Jean-Baptiste quotes under his breath as he thinks on the toilet. “I prepared the patient by the continuous use of chalybeates.”

A chalybeate is an iron tonic, and who but Jean-Baptiste knows this? If only he could find a chalybeate, just the right one, he would be healed. Before he was in prison, he tried soaking iron nails in drinking water, eating rust, sleeping with pieces of iron under his bed and pillow, and carrying nuts and bolts and magnets in the pockets of his pants. He came to believe that his chalybeate is the iron in human blood, but he could not get enough of it before he went to prison, and he can’t get it at all now. When, on rare occasion, he bites himself and sucks, it makes no difference but is the equivalent of one drinking his own blood to cure himself of anemia.

Franz Anton Mesmer was mocked by the religious and scientific community, just as Jean-Baptiste has always been mocked. True believers publicly feigned skepticism—or if they were believers, used pseudonyms to avoid being labeled as quacks. The Philosophy of Animal Magnetism, published in 1837, for example, was written by “A Gentleman in Philadelphia,” who some suspect was Edgar Allan Poe. Such books ended up in universities and were eventually discarded by their libraries, allowing Jean-Baptiste to acquire a small but amazing collection for a pittance.

He obsesses about what has happened to his books. His pulse pounds in his neck as he strains on the toilet. The books he brought here from France were taken from him as punishment when the prison’s classification team demoted him from a level-one status to a level-three, supposedly because he masturbates and commits food infractions. Jean-Baptiste spends much of the time on the toilet, and the officers call this masturbating.

Twice in one day—he forgets how long ago—he fumbled his meal trays as they were shoved through the slot at the bottom of his door. Food splattered everywhere, and the incidents were deemed deliberate. He has been deprived of all commissaries, including, of course, his books. He is allowed only one hour of recreation per week. It doesn’t matter. He can write letters. The guards are baffled.

“He can write fucking letters when he’s blind?” they say.

“Don’t know for sure he is. Seems like sometimes he is, and sometimes he ain’t.”

“Faking?”

“Fucking crazy, man.”

Jean-Baptiste can do push-ups, sit-ups and jumping jacks whenever he pleases inside his sixty-four-square-foot cell. His number of visits from the outside world has been limited. That doesn’t matter, either. Who asks to see him except reporters and those physicians, profilers and academic types who wish to study him as if he is a new strain of virus? Jean-Baptiste’s incarceration, abuse and imminent death have condensed his soul into a bright light scattered with white specks.

He’s perpetually magnetized and somnambulous, and his clairvoyance gives him clear-sightedness without eyes. He has ears but does not need them to hear. He can know without knowing and go anywhere without the body that has punished him since birth. Jean-Baptiste has never known anything but hate. Before he attempted to murder the lady forensic pathologist in Virginia and was finally captured by police, intense hatred flowed through others, through him, and returned to others, the circuit complete and infinite. His violent rampages were inevitable, and he does not hold his body responsible for them and suffers no remorse.

After two years on death row, Jean-Baptiste exists in a perpetual state of magnetism and no longer suffers from negativity toward any living being. This does not imply that he would no longer kill. Given the opportunity, he would rip women apart as he did in the past, but his electricity is not charged by hate and lust. He would destroy beautiful females to answer his higher calling, to complete a pure circuit that is necessary and godly. His delicious ecstasy would flow through his chosen ones. Their pain and deaths would be beautiful, and his chosen ones would be eternally grateful to him as their minds detached from their bodies.

“Who’s there?” he demands of the stale, foul air.

He pushes the roll of toilet paper toward his small bunk, watching the unfurling of a soft white highway that will take him beyond his cinder-block walls. Today, perhaps, he will go to Beaune and visit his favorite twelfth-century cave at the domain of Monsieur Cambrai and taste Burgundies from casks of his choosing and not bother pulling air into his mouth and spitting the wine into a stone bowl, as is proper when tasting the treasures of le terroire. He cannot waste a drop! Ha! Let’s see, which grand vins de Bourgogne this time? He touches an index finger to his deformed lips.

His father, Monsieur Chandonne, owns vineyards in Beaune. He owns wine makers and exporters. Jean-Baptiste is very knowledgeable about wines, even if they were denied him when he was confined to the basement and then banished from his family home. His intimacy with Beaune is a rich fantasy projected from his charming brother’s detailed stories of wines to remind Jean-Baptiste of his deprivation and nonexistence. Ha! Jean-Baptiste does not need a tongue to taste. He knows the confident Clos de Vougeot, and the soft, complex and elegant red Clos de Mouches.

Nineteen ninety-seven was a very good year for red Clos de Mouches, and the 1980 white wine hints of hazelnuts and is so special. And, oh, the harmony of the Echezeaux! But it is the king of Burgundies that he loves most, the muscular and bigger-built Chambertins. Of the 280 bottles produced in 1999, Monsieur Chandonne acquired 150 for his cave. Of those 150, Jean-Baptiste got not a sip. But after one of his murders in Paris, he robbed her and celebrated with a 1998 Chambertin that tasted of roses and minerals and reminded him of her blood. As for Bordeaux? A Premier Grand Cru Classé, perhaps the 1984 Château Haut-Brion.

“Who’s there?” he calls out.

“Shut up and quit fucking with the toilet paper! Pick it up.”

Jean-Baptiste does not have to look to see the angry eyes peering through the bars in the door.

“Roll it up nice and neat, and quit playing with your Mini-Me dick!”

The eyes disappear, leaving cool air. Jean-Baptiste must leave for Beaune, where there are no eyes. He must find his next chosen one and rip away her flawed sight and beat her brains into forgetfulness so she will not remember her revulsion when she saw him. Then her domain is his. Her hillsides and luscious clusters of grapes belong to him. Her cave is his to explore, to feel his way along dark, damp walls that become cooler the longer he takes. Her blood is fine red wine, whichever vintage he craves. Reds, reds, splashing and running down his arms, turning his hair red and sticky, making his teeth ache with joy!

“Who’s there?”

Rarely is he answered.

After two years, the corrections officers assigned to death row are weary of the mutant madman Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. They look forward to the end of him. The French wolfman with his deformed penis and hairy body is repulsive. His face is asymmetrical, as if the two sides were not lined up when they were put together in the womb, one eye lower than the other, his tiny baby teeth widely spaced and pointed. Until recently, he shaved daily. Jean-Baptiste doesn’t shave now. This is his right. The last four months before execution, the condemned inmate doesn’t have to shave. He can go to the death chamber with long hair and a beard.

Other inmates do not have baby-fine swirls of hair that cover every inch of their bodies except for the mucous membranes and the palms and the soles of their feet. Jean-Baptiste has not shaved himself in two months, and three-inch-long hair covers his lean, ropy body, his entire face and neck, even the back of his hands. Other death-row inmates joke that Jean-Baptiste’s victims died of fright before he had a chance to beat and bite them into hamburger.

“Hamburger! Help her!”

The taunts are meant for Jean-Baptiste to hear, and he receives written cruelties, too, in the form of notes—or kites, as they are called—that are passed through cracks beneath the doors, cell to cell, like chain letters, until he is the final recipient. He chews the notes to pulp and swallows them. Some days as many as ten. He can taste each word, they say.

“Too bad we won’t be strapping his hairy ass in a chair, then he’d be cooked well-done. Fried.” He has overheard officers say words to that effect.

“The whole joint would smell like burning hair.”

“It ain’t right that we don’t get to shave them bald as a cue ball before they get the needle.”

“It ain’t right they don’t get fried anymore. Now it’s too fuckin’ easy. A little needle prick and nighty-night.”

“We’ll chill the juice extra good for the Wolfman.”

JEAN-BAPTISTE STRAINS on the toilet, as if he is hearing these derisive comments now, although it is silent outside his door.

Chilling the juice is a dirty secret of tie-down and IV teams who want their little bit of sadistic fun at each execution. Whoever is in charge of the lethal drugs places them in an ice chest when transporting them from a locked refrigerator to the death chamber. Jean-Baptiste has overheard death-row inmates claim that the drugs are chilled beyond what’s necessary, almost to the freezing point. The teams think it only fair that the condemned inmate feel the frigid intravenous hit, as enough poison to kill four horses rushes through the needle and shocks the blood. If the inmate doesn’t exclaim, “Oh, God!” or, “Jesus!” or some utterance when he feels his icy, imminent death, the members of the execution teams are disappointed and a bit pissed off.

“That last ol’ boy sure as hell had an ice-cream headache,” voices yell and bounce off steel doors as inmates retell the stories.

“A screamin’ one. You hear how he puckered when the shit hit?”

“No way that was on the radio.”

“He begged for his mama.”

“A lot of the whores I done begged for their mama. Last one screamed, ‘Mama! Mama! Mama!’ ” The man the other inmates call Beast is bragging again.

He thinks his anecdotes are funny.

“You’re a fucker. Can’t believe the governor gave you another month, you fucker!”

Beast is the source of most of the execution stories circulating through the cells in the death-row pod. Beast was transported by van the forty-three miles to Huntsville and was already eating his last meal of fried shrimp, steak, fries and pecan pie in the barred cage next to the death chamber when the governor suddenly granted him a stay of execution so further DNA tests could be run. Beast knows damn well the tests are a waste of time, but he continues to milk what he can out of his last days on Earth now that he has been returned to the Polunsky Unit. He goes on and on about a process that is supposed to be secret. He even knows the names of the members of the tie-down and IV teams and the doctor who was scheduled to start the IV and pronounce Beast dead.

“If I ever get out, I’m going to do every one of the bitches and videotape it!” Beast brags some more.

“Wish I videotaped the ones I did. Hell, I’d pay all I got for even one videotape. Don’t know why I didn’t think of it at the time. Give those shrinks and FBI assholes an eyeful to worry about when they go home to their little wives and kiddies.”

Jean-Baptiste never filmed his murders. There wasn’t time, and stupidly, the idea never occurred to him. For that he continually rebukes himself. How rare it is for him to be so stupid . . .

Espèce de sale gorille . . .

Stupid monkey mutant.

Jean-Baptiste covers his ears with his hands.

“Who’s there?”

If only he had filmed his bloody art or at least had taken photographs. Oh, the longing, the longing, the anxiety he cannot relieve because he cannot relive, relive, relive their ecstasy as they died. The thought turns the key on an unbearable pressure in his groin. He can’t relieve the misery. He was born with an ignition that doesn’t work, sexual pistons that spark but will not fire. He breathes hard, straining on the toilet, sweat dripping from his face.

WHAT YOU DOING in there?”

An officer bangs on the door. Two mocking dark eyes are there again, between the bars in the window.

“Playing ring-around-the-ass again. Man, your guts are gonna come out one of these days.”

Jean-Baptiste hears footsteps on metal catwalks and other death-row inmates yelling their usual complaints and obscenities. Not including Jean-Baptiste, 245 men wait their turn while lawyers continue appeals and do what they can to persuade district supreme courts or the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a sentence or at least convince a judge to rule in their favor and allow DNA tests or some other trickery. Jean-Baptiste knows what he did and pled guilty, despite the histrionics of his attorney, Rocco Caggiano, also owned by the Chandonne family.

Rocco Caggiano’s feigned vigorous opposition to Jean-Baptiste’s pleading guilty before the judge was very poor acting. Caggiano abides by his instructions, just as Jean-Baptiste seems to do, only Jean-Baptiste is a very good actor. The Chandonne family believes it best for their shameful, disgusting son to die.

Why would you want to sit on death row for ten years? they reasoned with him. Why would you want to be released back into a society that will hunt you down like a monster?

At first Jean-Baptiste could not accept that his family would want him to die. He accepts it now. It makes sense. Why would his family care if he dies when they never cared that he lived? He has no choice. It is clear. If he didn’t plead guilty, his father would have seen to it that Jean-Baptiste was murdered while awaiting trial.

Prison is such a dangerous place, his father softly told him in French over the phone. Remember what happened to the cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer? He was beaten to death with a mop, or maybe it was a broom.

Jean-Baptiste was emotionally beaten to death, all hope gone, when his father said that. Jean-Baptiste relied on his mind and meticulously began to study his predicament as he was flown to Houston. He vividly remembers the Welcome to Humble sign and a Holiday Inn with a Hole in One Café, which made no sense, since he saw no golf courses in the area, only parched leaves and dead trees and what seemed to be an endless stretch of slack telephone lines, scrubby pines, feed stores, mobile homes, decapitated buildings and prefabricated houses on cinder blocks. His motorcade turned off North 59, all those federal and local agents treating Jean-Baptiste like Frankenstein.

He sat, perfectly well behaved, in the backseat of a white Ford LTD, manacled like Houdini. The motorcade turned onto a deserted road overgrown with brush that thickened into dense forests on either side, and when they reached the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Polunsky Unit, he felt the sun reclaim gray skies, and the day turned bright. Jean-Baptiste took it as a sign.

He waits patiently. He imagines meteor showers and great battalions marching because he wills it. How simple! People are fools! They set up such foolish rules! Prison officials can take away his radio and punish him by grinding up his meals and cooking them into food loaves, but no one can neutralize his magnetism and legal right to send and receive uncensored mail. If he marks an envelope or package Legal Mail or Media Mail, no prison employee can open it. Jean-Baptiste sends mail to Rocco Caggiano whenever he pleases. Now and then he receives mail the same way. That is the most special treat of all, especially when Madame Scarpetta wrote him recently because she cannot forget him. She was so close to ecstasy and by her own foolishness robbed herself, cheated herself, of Jean-Baptiste’s benevolence. His selfless intention was to make her lovely body let go of her soul. Her passing would have been perfect. Finally, she realizes her terrible mistake and now makes an excuse to see him.

I will see you again.

Jean-Baptiste has enough information to topple the entire Chandonne cartel.

If that is what she wants, why not? When she comes, he will find a way to finish her release, to bless her with what she wants. The ecstasy. The ecstasy!

He tore her letter into small pieces and ate each word, chewing so hard he cut his gums.

Jean-Baptiste lifts himself off the toilet and doesn’t bother flushing. He yanks up his pants.

“Who’s there?”

The white V-neck shirt has DR for Death Row in large letters stenciled in black on the back. It is the abbreviation for doctor. Another sign. He is hers for now, and she is his forever. His prison fatigues are soaking wet with sweat. They stink. He sweats constantly and smells like a dirty animal. He smiles as he thinks of the last inmate executed several weeks ago, an old man named Pitt who killed a policeman in Atlanta. Pitt murdered prostitutes for years without mishap, dumping his victims in parking lots or the middle of the road. He broke the code when he stabbed a policeman thirteen times.

The rumor in the pod is that when the doctor sent the fatal cocktail speeding through Pitt’s IV tube like a train through a tunnel, death occurred in exactly two minutes and fifty-six seconds. Three physicians take turns working the executions—again, more stories from the media and from inmates who have returned from Huntsville after stays of execution. There is a pediatrician, a heart surgeon, and a woman who set up a family practice in Lufkin a few years ago. She is the coldest executioner of all. She comes in with her black bag, does her job and leaves, indifferent and arrogant, speaking to no one.

It arouses Jean-Baptiste to fantasize about a woman doctor invisible in a small secret room, waiting for the signal to kill his strapped-down body. He does not fear the death of his body, for his mind is his soul and cannot be destroyed. He is electric. He is a fluid. He can detach his mind from his body. He is part of God. Jean-Baptiste sighs in his bunk, where he lies on his back, staring up at a ceiling that is incapable of preventing his clairvoyant journeys. Most of the time, he transports his spirit back to Paris and flies unnoticed, acutely aware of sounds in a way he never was before. He visited Paris just the other day, right after a light rain, and tires swished on wet pavement, and distant traffic was surprisingly guttural, reminding him of his stomach growling. Raindrops were diamonds scattered over the seats of parked motorcycles, and a woman carrying lilies walked past him, and he floated in perfume.

How observant he has become! Whenever his soul visits Paris, the most beautiful city on Earth, he discovers another old building wrapped in green netting, and men blasting limestone with air hoses to clean away centuries of pollution. It has taken years to restore Notre Dame’s creamy complexion. Monitoring the work is how Jean-Baptiste measures time. He never stays in Paris more than a few days, and each night he sets out toward the Gare de Lyon, then to the Quai de la Rapée to gaze at the Institut Médico-Légal, where some of his earlier chosen ones were autopsied. He can see the women’s faces and bodies, and he remembers their names. He waits until the last Bateau-Mouche thrums by, until the last ripple of wake laps over his shoes before he strips naked on the cold stones of the Quai de Bourbon.

All his life he has braved the murky cold currents of the Seine to wash away the curse of le Loup-Garou.

The werewolf.

His nocturnal bathing has not cured his hypertrichosis, the extremely rare birth defect that causes babylike hair to cover his body, and continues its cruelty by adding a deformed face, abnormal teeth and stunted genitalia. Jean-Baptiste immerses himself in the river. He drifts along the Quai d’Orléans and the Quai de Béthune to the eastern tip of the Ile St.-Louis. There on the Quai d’Anjou is the seventeenth-century four-story town house with its carved front doors and gilded drainpipes, the hôtel particulier where his prominent parents live in obscene luxury. When chandeliers are ablaze with crystal and silver, his parents are in, but often they socialize with friends or drink their nightcaps in a sitting room that cannot be seen from the street.

During Jean-Baptiste’s disembodied travels, he can go into any room of the hôtel particulier. He moves about as he pleases. The other night when he visited the Ile St.-Louis, his obese mother had several more folds of fat beneath her chin, and her eyes were as small as raisins in her bloated face. She had wrapped herself in a black silk robe and wore matching slippers on her stubby feet. She smoked strong French cigarettes nonstop as she complained and chattered to her husband while he watched the news, talked on the phone and went through paperwork.

Just as Jean-Baptiste can hear without ears, his father can become deaf at will. It is no wonder he seeks relief and pleasure in the arms of many beautiful young women and only remains married to Madame Chandonne because that is the way it must be. At a young age, Jean-Baptiste was told hypertrichosis is congenital, but he is certain it was caused by his mother’s alcoholism. She made no effort to curtail her drunkenness while she was pregnant with him and his twin brother, who calls himself Jay Talley and had the good fortune to emerge from their mother’s womb less than three minutes after Jean-Baptiste. His brother was born a perfect specimen of maleness, a golden sculpture with an exquisite body touched by blond hair that catches light, his face formed by a master. He dazzles everyone he meets, and the only satisfaction Jean-Baptiste finds in the injustice of their births is that Jay Talley, whose real name is Jean-Paul Chandonne, does not look like what he is. For that reason, he is worse than Jean-Baptiste.

It is not lost on Jean-Baptiste that the several minutes separating his birth from his brother’s is how long it is supposed to take for Jean-Baptiste to die on May 7. Several minutes is about how long his chosen ones lived, as blood spattered walls in peaks and valleys that looked very much like an abstract painting he once saw and wished badly he could buy, but had no money and no place to hang it.

“Who’s there!” he screams.

THE CHARLES RIVER reflects the fledgling green of spring along Boston’s embankment, and Benton Wesley watches young men row a racing shell in perfect rhythm.

Muscles ripple like the gentle current, paddles dip in whispered plashes. He could watch and say nothing all afternoon. The day is perfect, without a cloud, the temperature seventy-five degrees. Benton has become a close companion of isolation and silence, and craves them to the extreme that conversation fatigues him and is weighted by long pauses that intimidate some people and irritate others. He rarely has more to say than the homeless people who sleep in rag piles beneath the Arthur Fiedler footbridge. He even managed to offend the loud, gregarious Max, who works in the Café Esplanade, where Benton on occasion buys root-beer and Cracker Jacks or a soft pretzel. The first comment Benton ever made to Max was taken the wrong way.

“Change.” That was all Benton muttered with a shake of his head.

Max, who is German and often mistranslates English and takes umbrage easily, interpreted the cryptic remark to mean that that smart-ass in running clothes and dark sunglasses thinks all foreigners are inferior and dishonest and was demanding the change due him from the five-dollar bill Max tucked inside the till. In other words, the hardworking Max is a thief.

What Benton meant was that Cracker Jacks at the Café Esplanade are served in bags, not boxes, and cost a dollar instead of a quarter. The toy surprises inside are games printed on folded white paper, cheap as hell, and require the IQ of a pigeon. Gone are the days of Benton’s childhood, when his sticky fingers dug through caramel-glazed popcorn and peanuts for treasure, such as a plastic whistle or BB game or, best of all, the magic decoding ring that little Benton wore on his index finger, pretending it empowered him to know what people thought, what they would do and which monster he would defeat on his next secret mission.

The irony isn’t lost on him that he grew up to wear a special ring—this one gold and engraved with the FBI crest—and became the champion of decoding the thoughts, motivations and actions of people the public calls monsters. Benton was born with a special gift for channeling his intuition and intellect into the neurological and spiritual abysses of the worst of the worst. His quarry was the elusive offenders whose violent sexual acts were so heinous that panicking police from the United States and abroad used to wait in line to review their cases with him in the FBI Academy’s Profiling Unit in Quantico, Virginia. Benton Wesley was the legendary unit chief who wore conservative suits and a large gold ring.

It was believed that from reports and nightmarish photographs, he could divine some clue that investigators missed, as if there was a magic prize to be rooted out during sessions inside the dank, windowless space where the only sounds were grim voices, papers sliding across the conference room table, and distant muffled shots from the indoor firing range. Benton’s world for most of his FBI career was J. Edgar Hoover’s former bomb shelter, an airless bunker belowground where pipes from the Academy’s upper-level toilets sometimes leaked on worn carpet or ran in stinking trickles down cinder-block walls.

Benton is fifty and has reached the bitter belief that psychological profiling isn’t psychological in the least, but is nothing more than forms and assumptions based on decades-old data. Profiling is propaganda and marketing. It is hype. It is just one more sales pitch that helps rake in federal dollars as FBI lobbyists stalk Capitol Hill. The very word profiling makes Wesley grit his teeth, and he can’t abide the way what he used to do is misunderstood, abused, has become a hackneyed Hollywood device drawn from worn-out and faulty behavioral science, anecdotes and deductive assumptions. Modern profiling is not inductive. It is as specious and misleading as physiognomy and anthropometry—or the dangerous and ridiculous beliefs from centuries past that murderers looked like cavemen and could be unequivocally identified by the circumference of their heads or the length of their arms. Profiling is fool’s gold, and for Benton to come around to that conviction is akin to a priest deciding there is no God.

No matter what anybody says, no matter what statistics and epidemiological studies suggest and intellectual gurus pontificate, the only constant anymore is change. Human beings today commit more murders, rapes, pedophilia, kidnapings, hate crimes, acts of terrorism and just plain dishonest, dishonorable, self-serving sins against all forms of life than the free world has ever seen. Benton obsesses about it a lot. He has plenty of time to do so. Max thinks Benton, whose name he does not know, is a wacko intellectual snob, probably a professor at Harvard or MIT, and a humorless one at that. Max does not catch the occasional irony or dry-ice wit that Benton was known for when he was known, and he is known by virtually no one anymore.

Max no longer speaks a word to him, just takes his money and makes a big production of counting Benton’s change before shoving it and a slice of cheese pizza or a soda or a bag of Cracker Jacks to the “Scheiße Arsch.”

He talks about Benton every chance he gets.

“The other day he buy a pretzel,” Max told Nosmo King, the delivery man whose mystical-sounding name is the mundane result of his mother seeing No Smoking divided into No Smo king when double doors parted as she was being rolled into the delivery room to give birth to him.

“He eats his pretzel there”—Max stabbed his cigarette toward a canopy of old oaks—“and schtared up like some schzombie at that schtuck kite”—pointing the cigarette again and nodding at the tattered red kite high in the branches of an oak tree—“like it some schientific phenomenal or a schymbol from God. Maybe a UFO!”

Nosmo King was stacking cases of Fiji bottled water inside the Café Esplanade kiosk and paused, shielding his eyes from the sun as he followed the line of Max’s cigarette up to the wrecked kite.

“I remember how that used to piss me off as a kid,” Nosmo King recalled. “Get yourself a brand new kite and five minutes later it’s hung up in power lines or a fucking tree. That sure is life. One minute things are moving along good, the next, the wind blows your ass to ruination.”

Dark preoccupations and shadows from the past are what Benton feels and sees, no matter where he is or what he does. He lives inside a steel box of isolation that depresses and frustrates him so profoundly that there are moments, hours, days and weeks when he does not care about anything, has no appetite and sleeps too much. He needs sun and dreads winter. He is grateful that this early afternoon is polished so brightly that he cannot look across the Charles or up at the intense blue sky unless his eyes are blacked out, as they usually are, by sunglasses. He casually turns away from the young athletes who rule the river, pained that half a century has passed and he is no longer consumed by courage and conquest but by nonexistence, powerlessness and irrevocable loss.

I am dead, he says to himself every morning as he shaves. No matter what, I am dead.

My name is Tom. Tom Haviland. Tom Speck Haviland, born in Greenwich, Connecticut, on February 20, 1955, parents both from Salem, Massachusetts. A psychologist, retired, sick of listening to people’s problems, Social Security number yada yada yada, unmarried, homosexual, HIV-positive, like to eye gorgeous boys eying themselves in the mirrors at the gym but don’t pursue, don’t strike up conversations, don’t cruise gay bars or date. Ever, ever, ever.

It is all a lie.

Benton Wesley has lived with falsehoods and exile for six years.

He walks to a picnic table and sits on top of it, rests his arms on his knees, tightly laces his tapered fingers. His heart begins to beat rapidly with excitement and fear. Decades of a well-meant pursuit of justice have been rewarded by banishment, by a forced acceptance of the nonexistence of himself and all he has ever known. Some days, he can scarcely remember who he used to be, as he spends most of his time living in his mind, distracted by and even content with reading philosophical and spiritual books, history and poetry, and feeding the pigeons in the Public Garden, around the Frog Pond, or wherever he can blend with the locals and tourists.

He no longer owns a suit. He shaves his thick, silver hair to the scalp and wears a neatly trimmed mustache and beard, but his body and bearing belie his attempt to look sloppy and older than his years. His face is tan but smooth, his posture military-straight. He is fit and muscular, with so little body fat that his veins run under his flesh like slender tree roots pushing through soil. Boston has many health clubs and places to jog and run sprints, and he is relentless about fitness and staying light on his feet. Physical pain reminds him that he is alive. He does not allow himself patterns for when and where he runs or works out or shops or eats in restaurants.

He turns to his right as his keen peripheral vision catches the lumbering form of Pete Marino strolling in his direction. Benton’s breath catches. He is electrified by anxiety and joy but does not wave or smile. He has not communicated with his old friend and former colleague since he supposedly died and vanished into what is called a level-one protected-witness program designed uniquely for him and jointly controlled by London’s Metropolitan Police, Washington and Interpol.

Marino settles next to Benton on top of the picnic table, checking first for bird shit as he taps an unfiltered Lucky Strike from a soft pack and lights up after several sparked attempts with a disposable lighter low on fluid. Benton notes that Marino’s hands are shaking. The two men are hunched over, staring out at a sailboat gliding away from the boathouse.

“You ever go to the band shell here?” Marino asks, overcome by emotions he strangles in his throat with repeated coughs and loud sucks of smoke.

“I heard the Boston Pops on the Fourth of July,” Benton softly says. “You can’t help but hear them from where I live. How are you?”

“But you don’t come down in person.” Marino does his best to sound normal, just like the old days. “Yeah, I can understand that. Me, I probably wouldn’t, either, all those mobs of idiots, and I hate mobs of people. Like in the malls. It’s gotten to where I can’t take shopping malls no more.” He blows out a large volume of smoke, the unfiltered cigarette trembling in his thick fingers. “Least you ain’t so far away you can’t hear the music, pal. Could be worse. That’s what I always say, could be worse.”

Benton’s lean, handsome face does not register the volatile mix of thoughts and feelings inside his hidden places. His hands betray nothing. He controls his nerves and facial expressions. He is nobody’s pal and never has been, and acute grief and anger heat up powerfully. Marino called him pal because he doesn’t know what else to call him.

“I suppose I should ask you not to call me pal,” Benton comments in a bland voice.

“Sure. What the fuck.” Marino shrugs, stung.

For a big, tough cop, he is overly sensitive and takes the world personally. His capacity for interpreting an honest remark as an insult wearies those who know him and terrifies those who don’t. Marino has a temper from hell, and his fury knows no bounds when he is sufficiently pissed off. The only reason he hasn’t been killed during one of his outbursts is that his physical strength and survival skills are mixed with a strong dose of experience and luck. Even so, chance is never favorable forever. As Benton takes in every detail of Marino’s appearance, he entertains the same worries from the past. He’s going to be dropped by a bullet or a stroke one of these days.

“I sure as hell can’t call you Tom,” Marino counters. “Not to your face.”

“Be my guest. I’m used to it.”

Marino’s jaw muscles flex as he smokes.

“You taking care of yourself better or worse since I saw you last?” Benton stares down at his relaxed hands between his knees. His fingers slowly toy with a splinter he picks off the picnic table. “Although I think the answer is obvious,” he adds with a slight smile.

Sweat rolls down Marino’s balding head. He shifts his position, conscious of the 40-caliber Glock pistol strapped under his huge left arm and his desire to snatch off his bowling team windbreaker. Beneath it he is soaking wet, his heart beating hard, the dark-blue nylon absorbing sunlight like a sponge. He exhales a cloud of smoke, hopes it doesn’t drift in Benton’s direction. It does. Right in his face.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. I can’t call you Tom.”

Marino ogles a young woman in spandex shorts and sports bra trotting by, breasts bobbing. He can’t get used to females running around in bras, and for a veteran homicide detective who has seen hundreds of naked women in his day—most of them in strip joints or on top of autopsy tables—he is surprisingly awed when he sees a female so scantily clad in public that he knows exactly what she looks like naked, right down to the size of her nipples.

“My daughter ran around like that, I’d kill her,” he mutters, staring at the retreating pumping buttocks.

“The world is grateful you don’t have a daughter, Pete,” Benton remarks.

“No shit. Especially if she got my looks. Probably would’ve ended up some dyke professional wrestler.”

“I don’t know about that. Rumor has it, you used to be quite the hunk.”

Benton has seen photographs of Marino when he was a uniformed cop for NYPD in the long-ago days of his fledgling career. He was broad-shouldered and fine-looking, a real stud, before he let himself go to hell, unrelenting in his self-abuse, as if he hates his own flesh, as if he wants to kill it off and get it out of his way.

Benton climbs down from the picnic table. He and Marino start walking toward the footbridge.

“Oops.” Marino smiles slyly. “Forgot you was gay. Guess I should be more sensitive about queers and dyke wrestlers, huh? But you try to hold my hand, I’ll tear your head off.”

Marino has always been homophobic, but never as uncomfortable and confused as he is at this stage in his life. His conviction that gay men are perverts and that lesbians can be cured by sex with men has evolved from clear as air to dark as ink. He can see neither in nor out of what he believes about people who lust for their own gender, and his cynical, ugly comments have the flat ring of a bell cast in lead. Not much is plain to him anymore. Not much seems unquestionably true. At least when he was devoutly bigoted, he didn’t have to question. In the beginning, he lived by the gospel according to Marino. Over recent years, he has become an agnostic, a compass with no magnetic north. His convictions wobble all over the place.

“So what’s it feel like to have people think you’re . . . you know?” Marino asks. “Hope nobody’s tried to beat you up or nothing.”

“I feel nothing about what people think of me,” Benton says under his breath, conscious of people passing them on the footbridge, of cars speeding below them on Storrow Drive, as if any person within a hundred feet of them might be watching and listening. “When’s the last time you went fishing?”

MARINO’S DEMEANOR SOURS as they follow a cobblestone walk in the shade of double rows of Japanese cherry trees, maples and blue spruce.

During his most venomous moods, usually late at night when he is alone and throwing back beers or shots of bourbon, he resents Benton Wesley, almost despises him for how much he has damaged the lives of everyone who matters. If Benton really were dead, it would be easier. Marino tells himself he would have gotten over it by now. But how does he recover from a loss that didn’t happen and live with its secrets?

So when Marino is alone and drunk and has worked himself into a rabid state, he swears out loud at Benton while crushing one beer can after another and hurling them across his small, slovenly living room.

“Look what you’ve done to her!” he rails to the walls. “Look what you’ve done to her, you fucking son of a bitch!”

Dr. Kay Scarpetta is an apparition between Marino and Benton as they walk. She is one of the most brilliant and remarkable women Marino has ever met, and Benton’s torture and murder ripped off her skin. She stumbles over Benton’s dead body everywhere she goes, and all along—from day one—Marino has known that Benton’s gruesome homicide was faked right down to the autopsy and lab reports, death certificate and the ashes Scarpetta scattered into the wind at Hilton Head Island, a seaside resort she and Benton loved.

The ashes and bits of bone were scraped from the bottom of a crematorium oven in Philadelphia. Leftovers. God knows whose. Marino presented them to Scarpetta in a cheap little urn given to him at the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office, and all he could think to say was, “Sorry, Doc. I sure am sorry, Doc.” Sweating in a suit and tie and standing on wet sand, he watched her fling those ashes into the wind of a hovering helicopter piloted by Lucy. In a hurricane of churning water and flying blades, the supposed remains of Scarpetta’s lover were hurled as far out of reach as her pain. Marino stared at Lucy’s hard face staring back at him through Plexiglas as she did exactly what her aunt had asked her to do, and all the while, Lucy knew, too.

Scarpetta trusts Lucy and Marino more than anyone else in her life. They helped plan Benton’s staged murder and disappearance, and that truth is a brain infection, a sickness they battle daily, while Benton lives his life as a nobody named Tom.

“I guess no fishing,” Benton goes on in the same light tone.

“They ain’t biting.” But Marino’s anger is. His fury bares its fangs.

“I see. Not a single fish. And bowling? Last I remember, you were second in your league. The Firing Pins. I believe that was the name of your team.”

“Last century, yeah. I don’t spend time in Virginia. Only when I get dragged back down to Richmond for court. I’m not with their PD anymore. In the process of moving to Florida and signing on with the Hollywood PD, south of Lauderdale.”

“If you’re in Florida,” Benton points out, “when you go to Richmond, it’s up to Richmond, not down to Richmond. One thing you’ve always had is an amazing sense of direction, Pete.”

Marino’s caught in a lie, and he knows it. He constantly thinks of moving from Richmond. It shames him that he doesn’t have the nerve. It is all he knows, even if there is nothing left for him in that city of old battles that continue to rage.

“I didn’t come here to bother you with long stories,” Marino says.

Benton’s dark glasses glance in his direction as the two of them continue their leisurely pace.

“Well, I can tell you’ve missed me,” Benton comments, a splinter of ice in his tone.

“It ain’t fucking fair,” Marino hisses, his fists clenched by his sides. “And I can’t take it no more, pal. Lucy can’t take it no more, pal. I wish you could be a fucking fly on the wall and see what you done to her. The Doc. Scarpetta. Or maybe you don’t remember her, either.”

“Did you come here to project your own anger onto me?”

“I just thought while I was in the neighborhood I’d point out, now that I got your attention, that I don’t see how dying can be worse than the way you live.”

“Be quiet,” Benton quietly says with flinty self-control. “We’ll talk inside.”

IN AN AREA OF BEACON HILL lined with proud old brick homes and graceful trees, Benton Wesley managed to find an address to suit his present, peculiar needs.

His apartment building is ugly beige precast with plastic lawn chairs on balconies and a rusting wrought-iron fence that encloses a front yard, overgrown and depressingly dark. He and Marino take dimly lit stairs that smell of urine and stale cigarette smoke.

“Shit!” Marino gasps for breath. “Couldn’tcha at least find a joint with an elevator? I didn’t mean nothing by what I said. About dying. Nobody wants you to die.”

On the fifth landing, Benton unlocks the scratched gray metal door to apartment 56.

“Most people already think I did.”

“Shit. I can’t say anything right.” Marino wipes sweat off his face.

“I’ve got Dos Equis and limes.” Benton’s voice seems to mimic the flip of the dead-bolt lock. “And, of course, fresh juice.”

“No Budweiser?”

“Please make yourself comfortable.”

“You got Budweiser, don’t you?” Pain sounds in Marino’s voice. Benton doesn’t remember anything about him.

“Since I knew you were coming, of course I have Budweiser,” Benton says from the kitchen. “An entire refrigerator full of it.”

Marino looks around and decides on a floral printed couch, not a nice one. The apartment is furnished and bears the dingy patina of many threadbare and careless lives that have come and gone. Benton probably hasn’t lived in a decent place since he died and became Tom, and Marino sometimes wonders how the meticulous, refined man stands it. Benton is from a wealthy New England family and has always enjoyed a privileged life, although no amount of money would be enough ransom to free him from the horrors of his career. To see Benton living in an apartment typically occupied by partying college students or the lower middle class—to see him with a shaved head, facial hair, baggy jeans and sweatshirt, and to know he doesn’t even own a car—is unimaginable to Marino.

“At least you’re in good shape,” Marino remarks with a yawn.

“At least, meaning that’s the best you can say about me.” Benton ducks inside the old white refrigerator and emerges with two beers.

The cold bottles clank together in one hand as he opens a drawer, rooting around for a church key, as Marino calls any gadget that flips the cap off a beer.

“Mind if I smoke?” Marino asks.

“Yes.” Benton opens and shuts a cabinet door.

“Okay, so I’ll go into fits and swallow my tongue.”

“I didn’t say you couldn’t smoke.” Benton walks across the dim, shabby living room and hands Marino a Budweiser. “I said I minded.”

He hands him a water glass that will have to do for an ashtray.

“Yeah, so maybe you’re in shape and don’t smoke and all the rest”—Marino gets back to that as he takes a slug of beer and sighs contentedly—“but your life sucks.”

Benton takes a seat across from Marino, the space between them occupied by a scratched Formica-topped coffee table neatly lined with news magazines and the television remote control.

“I don’t need you to drop out of the sky to tell me my life sucks,” he says. “If that’s why you’re here, I wish to hell you’d never come. You’ve violated the program, put me at risk . . .”

“And put myself at risk,” Marino snaps.

“I was about to point that out.” Benton’s voice heats up, his eyes burning. “We know damn well my being Tom isn’t just about me. If it was just about me, I would let them take their best shot.”

Marino begins picking at his beer bottle label. “No-Nuts Wolfman has agreed to spill the beans on his family, the great Chandonnes.”

Benton reads the papers several times a day, excavating the Internet, sending out queries on search engines to recover pieces of his past life. He knows all about Jean-Baptiste, the deformed, murderous son of Chandonne—the great Monsieur Chandonne, intimate friend of the noblesse in Paris, the head of the largest, most dangerous organized crime cartel in the world. Jean-Baptiste knows enough about his family business and those who carry out its terrible tasks to put everyone who matters behind bars or on a death-chamber gurney.

So far, Jean-Baptiste has bided his time in a maximum-security Texas prison, saying nothing to anyone. It was the Chandonne family and its massive web that Benton tangled with, and now, from thousands of miles away, Monsieur Chandonne sips his fine wines and never doubts that Benton has paid the ultimate price, a terrible price. Monsieur Chandonne was foiled, but in a way, he wasn’t. Benton died a fake death to save himself and others from dying real ones. But the price he pays is Promethean. He may as well be chained to rocks. He cannot heal because his guts are torn out daily.

“Wolfman,” as Marino usually refers to Jean-Baptiste, “says he’ll finger everyone from his daddy on down to the butlers, but only under certain conditions.” He hesitates. “He ain’t fucking with us, either, Benton. He means it.”

“You know that for a fact,” Benton blandly says.

“Yeah. A fact.”

“How has he communicated this to you?” Benton’s eyes take on a familiar intensity as he goes into his mode.

“Letters.”

“Do we know who he’s been writing, besides you?”

“The Doc. Her letter was sent to me. I haven’t given it to her, see no point.”

“Who else?”

“Lucy.”

“Hers also sent to you?”

“No. Directly to her office. I got no idea how he got the address or knew the name The Last Precinct, when she doesn’t list it. Everybody thinks her business is called Infosearch Solutions.”

“Why would he know that people like Lucy and you refer to her business as The Last Precinct? If I logged on to the Internet right now, would I find any mention of The Last Precinct?”

“Not the one we’re talking about, you wouldn’t.”

“Would I find Infosearch Solutions?”

“Sure.”

“Is her office phone number listed?” Benton asks.

“Infosearch Solutions is.”

“So maybe he also knows the listed name of her business. Called directory assistance and got the address that way. Actually, you can find just about anything on the Internet these days and for less than fifty bucks, even buy unlisted and cell phone numbers.”

“I don’t think Wolfman has a computer in his death-row cell,” Marino says in annoyance.

“Rocco Caggiano could have fed him all kinds of information,” Benton reminds him. “At one time he had to have Lucy’s business number, since he planned to depose her. Then, of course, Jean-Baptiste pled.”

“Sounds like you keep up with the news.” Marino tries to divert the conversation away from the subject of Rocco Caggiano.

“Did you read the letter he wrote to Lucy?”

“She told me about it. Didn’t want to fax or e-mail it.” This bothers Marino, too. Lucy didn’t want him to see the letter.

“Any letters to anybody else?”

Marino shrugs, sips his beer. “Not a clue. Obviously, he ain’t writing to you.” He thinks this is funny.

Benton doesn’t smile.

“Because you’re dead, right?” Marino assumes Benton doesn’t catch the joke. “Well, in prison, if an inmate marks his outgoing letters Legal Mail or Media Mail, it’s illegal for officials to open them. So if Wolfman’s got any legal and media pen pals, the information’s privileged.”

He begins picking at the label on his beer bottle, talking on as if Benton knows nothing about the inner workings of penitentiaries, where he has interviewed hundreds of violent criminals during his career.

“The only place to look is his visitors list, since a lot of the people these squirrels write also come visit. Wolfman’s got a list. Let’s see, the governor of Texas, the president . . .”

“As in president of the United States?” Benton’s trademark is to take all information seriously.

Marino says, “Yup.”

It unnerves him to see gestures and reactions that are the Benton of the past, the Benton he worked with, the Benton who was his friend.

“Who else?” Benton gets up and collects a legal pad and pen from tidy stacks of paperwork and magazines next to the computer on the kitchen table.

He slips on a pair of wire-rim glasses, very small, John Lennon–style, nothing he would have worn in his former life. Sitting back down, he writes the time, date and location on a clean sheet of paper. From where Marino sits, he makes out the word “offender,” but beyond that, he can’t read Benton’s small scrawl, especially upside down.

Marino answers, “His father and mother are on the list. Now that’s a real joke, right?”

Benton’s pen pauses. He glances up. “What about his lawyer? Rocco Caggiano?”

Marino swills beer in the bottom of the bottle.

“Rocco?” Benton says with more emphasis. “You going to tell me?”

Fury and shame dart across Marino’s face. “Just remember, he ain’t mine, didn’t grow up with me, don’t know him, don’t want to know him, would blow his fuckin’ brains out just as easy as any other dirtbag’s.”

“Genetically, he’s your son, whether you like it or not,” Benton replies matter-of-factly.

“I don’t even remember when his birthday is.” Marino dismisses his only child with a wave of a hand and a last slug of Budweiser.

Rocco Marino, who changed his surname to Caggiano, was born bad. He was Marino’s shameful, dirty secret, an abscess he showed to no one until Jean-Baptiste Chandonne loped onto the scene. For most of Marino’s life, he believed that Rocco’s curdled choices were personal—the harshest punishment he could levy on the father he despises. Oddly, Marino found some comfort in that. A personal vendetta was better than the humiliating and painful truth that Rocco is indifferent to Marino. Rocco’s choices have nothing to do with Marino. If anything, Rocco laughs at Marino, his father, and thinks he is a Keystone-Kop loser who dresses like a pig, lives like a pig and is a pig.

Rocco’s reappearance in Marino’s world was a coincidence—“a funny as hell coincidence,” in Rocco’s own words—when he stopped long enough to speak to his father outside the courtroom door after Jean-Baptiste Chandonne’s arraignment. Rocco has been in deep with organized crime since he was old enough to shave. He was a toady, scumbag lawyer for the Chandonnes long before Marino had ever heard of them.

“We know where Rocco’s spending his time these days?” Benton asks.

Marino’s eyes turn as dark and flat as old pennies. “Possibly—very possibly—we will soon enough.”

“Meaning?”

Marino leans back against the couch, as if the conversation pleases him and pumps up his ego. “Meaning he’s got tin cans tied to his ass this time and don’t know it.”

“Meaning?” Benton asks again.

“Interpol’s flagged him as a fugitive, and he ain’t aware of it. Lucy told me. I’m confident we’re going to find him and a lot of other assholes.”

“We?”

Marino shrugs again, tries to take another swallow of beer and gulps air. He belches, thinks about getting up for a refill.

“We is collectively speaking,” he explains. “We as in us good guys. Rocco’s going down because he’s gonna traipse through an airport and his little Red Notice is gonna pop up on a computer and next thing, he’s got a nice pair of shiny handcuffs on and maybe an AR-fifteen pointed at his head.”

“For what crimes? He’s always gotten away with his dirty work. That’s part of his charm.”

“All I know is there are warrants on him in Italy.”

“Says who?”

“Lucy. I’d give anything to be the one who points that AR-fifteen at his head, only I’d pull the trigger for sure,” Marino says, believing he means it, but unable to envision it. The images won’t come.

“He’s your son,” Benton quietly reminds him. “I suggest you get yourself ready for how it will feel if you have anything at all to do with whatever might happen to him. I’m not aware that your pursuit of him or any other Chandonne operatives is your legal jurisdictional right. Or are you now working undercover for the feds?”

A pause. Marino hates the feds. “I won’t feel nothing.” He tries to keep his demeanor flat, but his nerves have begun to fizz with fury and fear. “Besides, I don’t even know where the hell he is. Someone else out there will catch him, and he’ll be extradited to Italy if he lives that long. I got no doubt the Chandonnes will take him out before he has a chance to open his mouth.”

“Who else?” Benton moves on. “Who else is on the list?”

“A couple reporters. Never heard of ’em, and for all I know, they don’t exist. Oh yeah, and here’s a good one. Wolfman’s pretty-boy brother, Jean-Paul Chandonne, aka Jay Talley. Wish the bastard would drop by the prison for a visit so we could arrest his ass and he could join his ugly-ass twin on death row.”

Benton stops writing, a fleeting emotion passing through his eyes at the mention of Jay Talley’s name. “You’re assuming he’s still alive. Do you know that?”

“Got no reason to think otherwise. My guess is his family’s protecting him and he’s living the good life somewhere while he carries on with the family business.”

It occurs to Marino as he says all this that Benton probably knows Talley is a Chandonne who passed himself off as an American, became an ATF agent and managed to get himself assigned as a liaison to Interpol’s headquarters in France. Marino mentally scans everything that has been made public about the Jean-Baptiste case. He’s not sure if there was any mention of Scarpetta’s relationship with Talley when she and half the world believed he was the handsome big-shot agent who spoke dozens of languages and had gone to Harvard. Benton doesn’t need to know what went on between Scarpetta and Talley. Marino hopes like hell Benton never finds out.

“I’ve read about Jay Talley,” Benton says. “He’s very smart, very smooth, extremely sadistic and dangerous. I seriously doubt he’s dead.”

“Uhhhh . . .” Marino’s thoughts scatter like startled birds. “Like what have you read?”

“It’s no secret that he’s Jean-Baptiste’s twin brother. Fraternal twin.” Benton’s face is impassive.

“Weirdest thing I ever heard of.” Marino shakes his head. “Imagine. He and Wolfman born a few minutes apart. Talk about one brother getting the bad luck of the draw, while the other, Talley, gets dealt all aces.”

“He is a violent psychopath,” Benton replies. “I wouldn’t exactly call that aces.”

“Their DNA’s so much alike,” Marino goes on, “you’ve got to use a lot of probes to figure out you’re looking at the DNA of two different people.” Marino pauses, slightly exasperated, as he continues picking at his beer label. “Don’t ask me to explain probes and DNA shit. The Doc figured it all . . .”

“Who else is on the list?” Benton interrupts him.

Marino’s face goes blank.

“The visitors list.”

“The list is garbage. I’m sure no one on it has ever come to see John the Baptist except his lawyer.”

“Your son, Rocco Caggiano.” He won’t let Marino evade that fact. “Anyone else?” Benton persists, taking notes.

“Turns out I am. Isn’t that sweet? And then my new pen pal Wolfman sends me mail. A letter for me, and the one for the Doc that I didn’t give to her.”

Marino gets up to help himself to another beer.

“Need one?”

Benton tells him, “No.”

Retrieving his jacket, Marino digs in one pocket, then another, finding folded pieces of paper.

“I just happen to have them with me. Photocopies, including the envelopes.”

“The list.” Benton won’t stray from that subject. “Certainly you brought a copy of the list with you.”

“I don’t need a copy of that goddamn list.” Marino’s annoyance shows. “What is it about you and that fucking list? I can tell you exactly who’s on it. The people I’ve already mentioned, plus two reporters. Carlos Guarino and Emmanuelle La Fleur.”

His pronunciation is unintelligible and Benton asks him to spell the names.

“Supposedly, they live in Sicily and Paris.”

“Real people?”

“No sign of their bylines on the Internet, and Lucy’s looked.”

“If Lucy can’t find them, they don’t exist,” Benton decides.

“Also on Wolfman’s guest list,” Marino adds, “is none other than Jaime Berger, who would have prosecuted his ass had he gone to trial in New York for the newslady he mauled up there. Berger’s a piece of work, has a history with the Doc. They’re friends.”

Benton knows all this and doesn’t react. He takes notes.

“And last and probably least, some guy named Robert Lee.”

“His name sounds real enough. By chance is his middle initial E?” Benton wryly comments. “Any correspondence between Jean-Baptiste and this Robert Lee, on the outside chance Mr. Lee didn’t die a hundred-some years ago?”

“All I can tell you is he’s on the visitors list. Any mail that’s privileged, the prison won’t talk about, so I got no idea who else Wolfman writes to or gets love notes from.”

MARINO SMOOTHS OPEN his letter from Jean-Baptiste and begins to read: “ ‘Bonjour, mon cher ami, Pete . . .’ ”

He interrupts himself and looks up, scowling. “Can you believe he calls me Pete? Now that really pisses me off.”

“More than being called mon cher ami?” Benton asks dryly.

“I don’t like dirtbags calling me by my first name. It’s just one of my things.”

“Please read,” Benton says with a touch of impatience, “and I hope there is nothing more in French for you to mangle. What’s the date of this letter?”

“Not even a week ago. I arranged things to get here as quick as I could. To see you . . . oh, for shit’s sake, I’m gonna call you Benton.”

“Actually, you’re not. Please read.”

Marino lights another cigarette, inhales deeply and continues:

Just a note to tell you I am growing my hair. Why? But of course it is because they have given me my date to die. It is May seventh at ten p.m. Not a minute later, so I hope you will be there as my special guest. Before then, mon ami, I have business to conclude, so I make you an offer you can’t refuse (as they say in the movies).

You will never catch them without me, Jean-Baptiste. It would be like catching a thousand fish without a very big net. I am the net. There are two conditions. They are simple.

I will admit nothing except to Madame Scarpetta, who has asked my permission to see her and tell her what I know.

No one else can be present.

I have yet another condition that she does not know. She must be the doctor who administers my lethal cocktail, as they say. Madame Scarpetta must kill me. I fully trust if she agrees, she will not break her promise to me. You see how well I know her.

Á bientôt,
Jean-Baptiste Chandonne

“And the letter to her?” Benton abruptly asks, unwilling to say Scarpetta’s name.

“The same thing. More or less.” Marino does not want to read it to him.

“You have it in your hand. Read it.”

Marino taps an ash into the water glass, squinting an eye as he blows out smoke. “I’ll give you the upshot.”

“Don’t protect me, Pete,” Benton softly says.

“Sure. If you want to hear it, I’ll read it. But I don’t think it’s necessary, and maybe you ought . . .”

“Please read it.” Now Benton sounds weary. His eyes are not as intense, and he leans back in the chair.

Marino clears his throat as he unfolds another plain white sheet of paper. He begins:

Mon chéri amour, Kay . . .

He glances up at Benton’s expressionless face. The color has drained from it, his complexion sallow beneath his tan.

My heart is in great pain because you have not made an appointment to come to see me yet. I do not understand. Of course, you feel as I do. I am your thief in the night, the great lover who came to steal you away, yet you refused. You shunned me and wounded me. Now you must be empty, so bored, languishing for me, Madame Scarpetta.

As for me? I am not bored. You are here with me in my cell, without a will, completely under my spell. You must know it. You must feel it. Let me see, can I count? Is it four, five or fifteen times a day I rip open those very nice suits you wear—the haute couture of Madame Scarpetta, the doctor, the lawyer, the Chief. I tear off everything with my bare hands and bite into those big tits while you shiver and die with delight . . .

“Is there a point to this?” Benton’s voice snaps like a pistol slide racking back. “I’m not interested in his pornographic drivel. What does he want?”

Marino looks hard at him, pauses, then turns over the letter. Sweat beads on his balding head and rolls down his temples. He reads what is on the back of the plain white sheet of paper:

I must see you! You cannot escape unless you do not care if more innocent people die. Not that anyone is innocent. I will tell you all that is necessary. But I must look at you in the flesh as I speak the truth. And then you will kill me.

Marino stops reading. “More shit you don’t need to hear . . .”

“And she knows nothing about this?”

“Well,” Marino equivocates, “not really. Like I said, I didn’t show it to her. All I told her is I got a letter and Wolfman wants to see her and will exchange information for her visit. And he wants her to be the one who gives him the needle.”

“Typically, penitentiaries use free-world doctors, regular physicians from the outside to administer the lethal cocktail,” Benton oddly comments, as if what Marino just said has no impact on him. “Did you use ninhydrin on the letters?” Now he changes the subject. “Obviously I can’t tell, since these are photocopies.”

The chemical ninhydrin would have reacted to the amino acid in fingerprints, turning portions of the original letters a deep violet.

“Didn’t want to damage them,” Marino replies.

“What about an alternate light source? Something nondestructive, such as a crime scope?”

When Marino doesn’t respond, Benton pierces him with the obvious point.

“You did nothing to prove these letters are from Jean-Baptiste Chandonne? You just assume? Jesus.” Benton rubs his face with his hands. “Jesus Christ. You come here—here—take a risk like that and don’t even know for a fact that these letters came from him? And let me guess. You didn’t have the backs of the stamps and envelope flaps swabbed for DNA, either. What about postmarks? What about return addresses?”

“There’s no return address—not for him, I mean—and no postmark that might tell us where he sent it from,” Marino admits, and he is sweating profusely now.

Benton leans forward. “What? He hand-delivered the letters? The return address isn’t his? What the hell are you talking about? How could he mail something to you and there’s no postmark?”

Marino unfolds another piece of paper and hands it to him. The photocopy is of an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch white envelope, preprinted, U.S. postage paid for the nonprofit organization the National Academy of Justice.

“Well, I guess we’ve both seen this before,” Benton says, looking at the photocopy, “since we’ve been members of the NAJ for most of our lives. Or at least I used to be. Sorry to say, but I’m not on their mailing list anymore.” He pauses, noting that First-class mail has been x-ed through just below the preprinted postage-paid stamp.

“For once, I’m blanking out on any possible explanation,” he says.

“This is what came in the mail to me,” Marino explains. “The NAJ envelope, and when I opened it, the two letters were inside. One to me, one to the Doc. Sealed, marked Legal Mail, I guess in case someone at the prison was curious about the NAJ envelope and decided to tear into it. Only other thing written on the envelopes was our names.”

Both men are silent for a moment. Marino smokes and drinks beer.

“Well, I do have a possibility, the only thing I can think of,” Marino then says. “I checked with the NAJ, and from the warden on down, there are fifty-six officers who are members. It wouldn’t be unusual to see one of these envelopes lying around somewhere.”

Benton is shaking his head. “But your address is printed, machine-printed. How could Chandonne manage to do that?”

“How the hell do you stand this joint? Don’t you even got air-conditioning? And we did swab the envelopes the letters came in, but it’s that self-stick adhesive. So he didn’t have to lick nothing.”

This is evasion and Marino knows it. Sloughed-off skin cells can adhere to self-sticking adhesives. He doesn’t want to answer Benton’s question.

“How did Chandonne pull off sending you letters inside an envelope like this?” Benton shakes the photocopy at Marino. “And don’t you find it just a little odd that first-class mail is x-ed out? Why might that be?”

“I guess we’ll just have to get Wolfman to explain,” Marino rudely replies. “I got no fucking idea.”

“Yet you seem to know for a fact that the letters are from Jean-Baptiste.” Benton measures each word. “Pete. You’re better than this.”

Marino wipes his forehead on his sleeve. “Look, so the fact is, we don’t got scientific evidence to prove nothing. But it’s not because we didn’t take a shot at it. We did use the Luma-Lite, and we did try for DNA, and everything’s whistle-clean as of this moment.”

“Mitochondrial DNA? You trying for that?”

“Why bother? It would take months, and by then he’ll be dead. And there’s no way in hell we’re going to get a goddamn thing anyway. For crying out loud, don’t you think the asshole gets off on somehow using a National Academy of Justice envelope? How’s that for a fuck-you? Don’t you think he gets off on making us do all these tests when he knows we’ll come up with zip? All he had to do was cover his hands with toilet paper or whatever when he touched anything.”

“Maybe,” Benton says.

Marino is about to erupt. He is exasperated beyond his limit.

“Easy, Pete,” Benton says. “You would think less of me if I didn’t ask.”

Marino stares off without blinking.

“My opinion?” Benton goes on. “He wrote the letters and was deliberate about not leaving evidence. I don’t know how he managed to use a National Academy of Justice envelope, and yes, that is a huge fuck-you. Frankly, I’m surprised you haven’t heard from him before now. The letters sound authentic. They do not have the off-key ring of a crank. We know Jean-Baptiste has a breast fetish.” He says this clinically. “We know it is very likely he has information that could destroy his criminal family and the cartel. It fits with his insatiable need to dominate and control that he presents the conditions he has.”

“And what about him saying the Doc wants to see him?”

“You tell me.”

“She never wrote him. I asked her point-blank. Why the hell would she write that piece of shit? I told her about the National Academy of Justice envelopes, that the letter to her and me came in one. I showed her a photocopy . . .”

“Of what?” Benton interrupts.

“A photocopy of the National Academy of Justice envelope.” Marino is getting exasperated. “The one her and my letters from Wolfman came in. I told her if she gets one of these goddamn National Academy of Justice letters herself, not to open it, not to even touch it. Do you really believe he wants her to be his executioner?”

“If he intends to die . . .”

“Intends?” Marino interrupts him. “I don’t believe ol’ Wolfie Boy’s got much to say about that.”

“A lot can happen between now and then, Pete. Remember who his connections are. I wouldn’t be too sure of anything. And by the way, when Lucy got her letter, was it also sent in a postage-paid National Academy of Justice envelope?”

“Yup.”

“The fantasy of a woman doctor administering the lethal injection and watching him die would be erotic to him,” Benton muses.

“Not just any doctor. We’re talking about Scarpetta!”

“He victimizes to the end, dominates and controls another human being to the end, forces a person to commit an act that will scar forever.” Benton pauses before he adds, “You kill someone, you never forget him, now do you? We have to take the letters seriously. I do believe they are from him—fingerprints, DNA or not.”

“Yeah, well I believe they’re from him, too, and that he means what he says, and that’s why I’m here, if you ain’t figured it out yet. If we can get Wolfman to sing, we move in on all his daddy’s lieutenants and put the Chandonne cartel out of business. And you got nothing to worry about anymore.”

“Who is we?”

“I wish you’d quit saying that!” Marino gets up to help himself to another beer. Anger and frustration flare again. “Don’t you get it?” he calls out, rummaging inside the refrigerator. “After May seventh, after we got the goods and Wolfman’s dead, there ain’t no reason for you to be Tom what’s-his-name anymore!”

“Who is we?”

Marino snorts like a bull as he pops open a bottle of Dos Equis this time. “We is me. We is Lucy.”

“Does Lucy know you came to see me today?”

“No. I didn’t tell no one and won’t.”

“Good.” Benton doesn’t move in his chair.

“Wolfman gives us pawns to knock off the board,” Marino plans on without him. “Maybe he’s already given us our first pawn by ratting out Rocco. I can only figure that somebody must have ratted him out if he’s suddenly a fugitive.”

“I see. How honorable of Chandonne, if your son is his first pawn. Will you visit Rocco in prison, Pete?”

Marino suddenly smashes the beer bottle in the sink. Glass shatters. He strides over to Benton and gets in his face.

“Shut up about him, you hear me? I hope he gets fucking AIDS in prison and dies! All the suffering he’s caused! Now it should be his goddamn turn!”

“Whose suffering?” Benton doesn’t flinch at Marino’s hot, beery breath. “Your suffering?”

“Start with his mother’s suffering. And keep on going.” Marino still has a hard time thinking about Doris, his ex-wife and Rocco’s mother.

She was Marino’s sweetheart when he was in his prime. He still thought of her as his sweetheart long after he stopped paying attention to her. He was stunned when she left him for another man.

While this is crossing Marino’s mind, he is yelling at Benton, “You can come home, you fucking idiot! You can live your life again!”

Marino sits down on the couch, breathing hard, his face a deep red that reminds Benton of the 575M Maranello Ferrari he has seen around Cambridge. Its color is a deep burgundy called Barcetta, and thinking of that car reminds him of Lucy, who has always been in love with fast, powerful machines.

“You can see the Doc, and Lucy, and . . .”

“Untrue,” Benton whispers. “Jean-Baptiste Chandonne has manipulated himself into this position. He is exactly where he wants to be. Connect the dots, Pete. Go back to how it started after he was arrested. He shocked everyone by offering an unsolicited confession to yet another murder, this one in Texas, and then, of all things, pled guilty. Why? Because he wanted to be extradited to Texas. It was his choice, not the governor of Virginia’s.”

“No way,” Marino challenges. “Our ambitious Virginia governor didn’t want to piss off Washington by pissing off France—the anti–death penalty capital of the world. So we gave Chandonne to Texas.”

Benton shakes his head. “Not so. Jean-Baptiste gave Jean-Baptiste to Texas.”

“And how the hell would you know, anyway? You talking to people? I thought you didn’t talk to no one.”

Benton doesn’t reply.

“I don’t get it,” Marino goes on. “Why would Wolfman give a shit about Texas?”

“He knew he would die quickly there, and he wanted to die quickly. It was part of his master plan. He had no intention of rotting on death row for ten or fifteen years. And his chances of gamesmanship are much greater in Texas. Virginia might very well fold to political pressure and stay his execution.

“Virginia is also claustrophobic. His every move would be watched. He would get away with much less, because law-enforcement and corrections officers would make it their mission to ensure his safety and good behavior. He would be monitored to the extreme. Don’t tell me that if he were in Virginia, his mail wouldn’t be secretly checked. The hell with his legal rights.”

“Virginia would want to fry his ass,” Marino argues. “After what he done.”

“He killed a store clerk. He killed a cop. He almost killed the chief medical examiner. The governor at that time is now a senator and chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He didn’t piss off Washington because he wasn’t about to piss off the French. The governor of Texas, now in his second term and a trigger-happy Republican, by the way, doesn’t give a damn who he pisses off.”

“The chief medical examiner? You just can’t bring yourself to say her name, can you?” Marino exclaims, incredulous.

A
FEW YEARS BACK, Lucy Farinelli’s Aunt Kay recalled an anecdote about the decapitated head of a German soldier who died in World War II.

His body was discovered buried in sand somewhere in Poland, she recounted to Lucy, and arid conditions remarkably preserved his Aryan short blond hair, attractive features and even the stubble on his chin. When Scarpetta saw the head in a Polish forensic medical institute showcase while visiting as a forensic lecturer, she thought of Madame Tussaud’s, she said.

“His front teeth are broken,” Scarpetta went on with the story, explaining that she didn’t think the damaged teeth were a postmortem artifact or due to an antemortem injury that had occurred at or around the boyish Nazi’s death. He simply had poor dental care. “Loose-contact gunshot wound to the right temple,” she cited the Nazi’s cause of death. “The angle of the wound points the way the gun was directed—in this case, downward. Often in a suicide, the muzzle will be straight on or directed upward. There’s no soot in this case, because the wound was cleaned, the hair around it shaved at the morgue, where the mummified remains were sent to make certain the death wasn’t recent, or so I was told when I was lecturing at the Pomorska Akademia Medyczna.”

The only reason Lucy is reminded of the decapitated Nazi as her car is being searched at Germany’s northeast border is that the German guard is a handsome, blue-eyed blond and seems much too young to be infected with ennui as he leans inside her black rental Mercedes and sweeps the leather seats with a flashlight. Next he sweeps the black carpeted floor, the strong beam illuminating Lucy’s scuffed leather briefcase and red Nike duffel bags in back. He makes several bright stabs at the front passenger seat, then moves around to the trunk, popping it open. He shuts it with scarcely a glance.

Had he bothered to unzip those two duffelbags and dig through clothing, he would have discovered a tactical baton. It looks rather much like a black rubber fishing pole handle, but with a quick flip of the wrist extends into a two-foot-long thin rod of carbonized steel capable of shattering bone and shearing soft tissue, including the internal organs of the belly.

Lucy is prepared to explain the weapon, which is relatively unknown and unused except by law enforcement. She would claim that her overly protective boyfriend gave her the baton for self-defense because she is a businesswoman and often travels alone. She really isn’t quite sure how to use the thing, she would sheepishly explain, but he insisted and promised it was perfectly all right to pack it. If police confiscated the baton, so what? But Lucy is relieved that it is not discovered and that the officer in his pale green uniform checking her passport from inside his booth does not seem curious about this young American woman driving alone late at night in a Mercedes.

“What is the purpose of your visit?” he asks in awkward English.

“Geschäft.” She doesn’t tell him what kind of business, but has an answer prepared, if necessary.

He picks up the phone and says something Lucy is unable to decipher, but she senses he isn’t talking about her or, if he is, it is nothing. She expected her belongings to be riffled through and was ready for it. She expected to be quizzed. But the guard who reminds her of the decapitated head returns her passport.

“Danke,” she politely says as she silently labels him a trag Narr.

The world is full of lazy fools like him.

He waves her on.

She creeps forward, crossing the border into Poland, and now another guard, this one Polish, puts her through the same routine. There is no ordeal, no thorough search, not a hint of anything but sleepiness and boredom. This is too easy. Paranoia sets in. She remembers she should never trust anything that is too easy, and she imagines the Gestapo and SS soldiers, cruel specters from the past. Fear rises like body odor, a fear that is baseless and irrational. Sweat rolls down her sides, beneath her windbreaker, as she thinks of Poles overpowered and disenfranchised from their own names and lives during a war she knows about only from history books.

It is not so different from the way Benton Wesley exists, and Lucy wonders what he would think and feel if he knew she was in Poland and why. Not a day goes by when he doesn’t shadow her life.

HER CAREER EXPERIENCE does not show unless she intentionally displays it like a weapon.

She was still in high school when she began interning for the FBI and designed their Criminal Artificial Intelligence Network, known as CAIN. When she graduated from the University of Virginia, she became an FBI special agent and was given free rein as a computer and technical expert. She learned to fly helicopters and became the first female member of the FBI Special Forces Hostage Rescue Team. Hostility, harassment and crude innuendos followed her on every deployment, raid and punishing training session. Rarely was she invited to join the men for a beer in the Academy bar called the Boardroom. They did not confide in her about raids gone wrong or their wives and children or girlfriends. But they watched her. There was talk about her in the showers.

Her career with the FBI was aborted on a dewy October morning when she and her HRT partner, Rudy Musil, were shooting live nine-millimeter rounds inside the FBI Academy’s Tire House. As its name implies, the highly dangerous indoor range was filled with old tires that tactical agents could dive over, duck under, dart around and hide behind as they practiced maniacal maneuvers. Rudy was breathing hard and sweating as he crouched behind a mound of tires and smacked another magazine into his Glock, peeking around a threadbare Michelin as he looked for Lucy, his partner.

“All right. Come clean,” he yelled at her through gun smoke. “What’s your sexual preference?”

“To have it as often as possible!” She reloaded and snapped back the slide while rolling between stacks of tires before firing five rounds at a pop-up target thirty feet away. The cluster of head shots was so tight, it looked like a small flower.

“Oh yeah?” Two bullets loudly clinked a pop-up thug holding a machine gun. “Me and the guys got bets on it.” Rudy’s voice came closer as he crawled on his belly across the filthy concrete floor.

He pounced through towers of sooty tires and grabbed an unsuspecting Lucy by her steel-reinforced Red Wing boots.

“Gotcha!” He laughed, setting his pistol on top of a tire.

“Are you fucking crazy?” Lucy cleared a round from the chamber of her pistol, the ejected cartridge bouncing off the floor. “We’re using live ammo, you fucking idiot!”

“Let me see that thing.” Rudy got serious. “It doesn’t sound right.”

He took the pistol from her, dropped out the magazine. “Loose spring.” He shook the pistol before setting it next to his gun on the tire. “Aha. Rule number one: Never lose your weapon.”

He got on top of her, laughing as he wrestled with her, somehow believing this was what she had been waiting for, and that she was excited and didn’t mean it when she continued screaming, “Get off of me, asshole!”

Finally, he restrained both her wrists in one of his powerful hands. He plunged the other inside her shirt and shoved his tongue inside her mouth as he pushed up her bra. “The guys only say,” he panted, “you’re a dyke ’cause”—he fumbled with her belt buckle—“they can’t have you . . .”

Lucy bit through Rudy’s bottom lip and knocked her forehead hard against the bridge of his nose. He spent the rest of the day in the emergency room.

FBI attorneys reminded her that litigation benefitted no one, especially since Rudy believed that she “wanted it” and had probable cause to believe it. Lucy told Rudy she wanted it “as often as possible,” he reluctantly stated in the forms he was forced to complete for Internal Affairs.

“It’s true,” Lucy calmly agreed during a sworn statement before a panel of five lawyers, not one of whom represented her. “I said that, but I didn’t say I wanted it with him or with anyone right then in the middle of live fire in the middle of the Tire House in the middle of a maneuver in the middle of my period.”

“But you’d led him on in the past. You’d given Agent Musil reason to think you were attracted to him.”

“What reason?” Lucy was baffled under oath. “Offering him a stick of gum now and then, helping him clean his guns, hanging with him to run the Yellow Brick Road and other obstacle courses, the worst one at the Marine Corps base, joking around, that sort of thing?”

“Quite a bit of togetherness,” the lawyers agreed with one another.

“He’s my partner. Partners have quite a bit of togetherness.”

“Nonetheless, you seemed to devote quite a lot of your time and attention to Agent Musil, including personal attention, such as asking him about his weekends and holidays, and calling him at home when he was out sick.”

“Perhaps joking around, as you put it, might have been interpreted as flirting. Some people joke around when they flirt.”

The lawyers agreed once again, and what was worse, two of them were women—women in masculine skirt suits and high-heel shoes, women whose eyes reflected an identification with the aggressor, as if their irises were glued on to their eyeballs backward and were dull instead of bright, and blind to what was in front of them. The women lawyers had the dead eyes of people who kill themselves off to get what they want or to become what they fear.

“I’m sorry,” Lucy said as her attention sharpened and she avoided the dead eyes. “You stepped on me. Please repeat,” she muttered aviation jargon.

“I’m sorry? Who stepped on you?” Frowns.

“You interfered with my transmission to the tower. Oops, there is no tower. This is uncontrolled air space and you get to do whatever you want. Right?”

More frowns. The lawyers glanced at one another as if Lucy was very weird.

“Never mind,” she added.

“You’re an attractive single woman. Can you see how Agent Musil might have misinterpreted joking around, phone calls at home, et cetera, as your being sexually interested in him, Agent Farinelli?”

“It has also been stated that you often referred to Agent Musil and yourself as ‘yin and ylang.’ ”

“I’ve told Rudy a hundred times that ylang is a Malayan tree. Ylang-ylang, to be more precise. A tree with yellow flowers that perfume is distilled from . . . but he doesn’t always tune his ears to the right frequency.” Lucy fought a smile.

The lawyers were taking notes.

“I never called Rudy ‘ylang.’ Now and then I did call him ‘yang’ and he called me ‘ying,’ no matter how many times I told him the word was yin,” Lucy explained further.

Silence, pens poised.

“It has to do with Chinese philosophy.” Lucy might as well have been talking to a chalkboard. “Balance, counterparts.”

“Why did you call each other . . . whatever?”

“Because we’re two peas in a pod. Do you know that expression?”

“I think we’re familiar with the term two peas in a pod. Again, such nicknames suggest a relationship . . .”

“Not the kind you’re talking about,” Lucy replied without rancor, because she did not hate Rudy in the least. “He and I are two peas in a pod because neither of us fit in. He’s Austrian and the other guys call him Musili because he’s, quote, full of shit, which he doesn’t think is the least bit funny. And I’m a lesbian, a man-hater, because no normal woman who likes men would want to be HRT and make the cut. According to the laws of machismo.”

Lucy scanned the women’s dead eyes and decided the male attorneys’ eyes were dead, too. The only sign of life in them was the glint of small, miserable creatures who hated someone like Lucy because she dared to resist being overpowered and frightened by them.

“This interview, deposition, inquisition, whatever the hell it is, is bullshit,” Lucy told them. “I have no interest in suing the Fucking Bureau of Investigation. I took care of myself in the Tire House. I didn’t report the incident. Rudy did. He had to explain his injuries. He claimed responsibility. He could have lied. But he didn’t, and the two of us are eye to eye.” She used the word eye to remind the lawyers of their dead eyes, as if somehow the lawyers knew their eyes were dead and incapable of seeing a reality that flexed with truth and possibilities and begged humans to partake of it and war against the dead-eyed people who were ruining the world.

“Rudy and I have acted as our own mediator,” Lucy went on, calmly. “We have reestablished that we are partners, and one partner doesn’t do what the other doesn’t want or commit any act that might betray the other partner or place him or her in harm’s way. And he told me he was sorry. And he meant it. He was crying.”

“Spies say they are sorry. They also cry.” A flush was climbing up the throat of a hostile woman attorney in pinstripes and skinny high heels that reminded Lucy of bound feet. “And your accepting his apology isn’t an option, Agent Farinelli. He attempted to rape you.” She emphasized the point, assuming it would humiliate and victimize Lucy again by inviting the male attorneys to envision her naked and sexually assaulted on the sooty concrete floor of the Tire House.

“I didn’t know Rudy was accused of being a spy,” Lucy replied.

She resigned from the FBI and was hired by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which the FBI unfairly considers a collection of backwoods boys who bust up moonshine stills and wear tool belts and guns.

She became an expert fire investigator in Philadelphia, where she helped stage Benton Wesley’s murder, which included procuring the body of an anatomical donation bound for dissection at a medical school. The dead man was elderly, with thick silver hair, and after he was incinerated inside a torched building, a visual identification was unreliable if not impossible. All a shocked Scarpetta saw at the filthy, water-soaked, smoking scene was a charred body and a faceless skull with silver hair and a titanium wristwatch that had belonged to Benton Wesley. Under secret orders from Washington, the chief medical examiner in Philadelphia was ordered to falsify all reports. On paper, Benton was dead, just one more homicide added to the FBI’s crime statistics for 1997.

After he vanished into the black hole of the witness protection program, ATF immediately transferred Lucy to the Miami Field Office where she volunteered for dangerous undercover work and talked her way into it, despite reservations on the part of the Special Agent in Charge. Lucy had an attitude. She was volatile. No one close to her except Pete Marino understood why. Scarpetta didn’t know or remotely suspect the truth. She assumed Lucy was going through a terrible phase because she couldn’t cope with Benton being dead, when the truth was that Lucy couldn’t cope with Benton being alive. Within a year of her new post in Miami, she shot and killed two drug dealers in a takedown that went bad.

Despite video surveillance tapes that clearly showed she had saved herself and the life of her undercover partner, there was talk. There was ugly gossip and disinformation, and one administrative investigation after another. Lucy quit ATF. She quit the feds. She cashed in her dot-com stocks before the economy destabilized and crashed after 9-11. She invested a portion of her wealth, along with her law enforcement experience and talent, into creating a private investigative agency she calls The Last Precinct. It’s where you go when there’s no place left. It isn’t advertised or listed in any directory.

BENTON GETS UP from the chair and slips his hands into his pockets.

“People from the past,” he says. “We live many lives, Pete, and the past is a death. Something over. Something that can’t come back. We move on and reinvent ourselves.”

“What a load of crap. You’ve been spending too much time alone,” Marino says in disgust as fear chills his heart. “You’re making me sick. I’m glad as hell Scarpetta ain’t here to see this. Or maybe she ought to, so she’d finally get over you like you’ve obviously gotten over her. Goddamn it, can’t you turn up the air conditioner in this joint?”

Marino strides over to the window unit and turns it on high.

“You know what she’s doing these days, or don’t you give a flying fuck? Nothing. She’s a goddamn consultant. Got fired as the Chief. Can you believe it? The fucking governor of Virginia got rid of her because of political shit.

“And getting fired in the middle of a scandal don’t help you get much business,” he rants on. “When it comes to her, no one’s hiring, unless it’s some pissant case in some place that can’t afford anyone, so she does it for nothing. Like some stupid drug overdose in Baton Rouge. A stupid-ass drug OD . . .”

“Louisiana?” Benton wanders toward a window and looks out.

“Yeah, the coroner from there called me this morning before I left Richmond. Some guy named Lanier. An old drug OD. I knew nothing about it, so then he wanted to know if the Doc’s doing private work and basically wanted me to vouch for her character. I was pretty fucking pissed. But that’s what it’s come down to. She needs fucking references.”

“Louisiana?” Benton says again, as if there must be some mistake.

“You know any other state with a city named Baton Rouge?” Marino snidely asks above the noise of the air conditioner.

“Not a good place for her,” Benton says oddly.

“Yeah, well, New York, D.C., L.A. ain’t calling. It’s just a damn good thing the Doc’s got her own money, otherwise she’d be . . .”

“There are serial murders going on down there . . .” Benton starts to say.

“Well, the task force working them ain’t the one calling her. This hasn’t got nothing to do with those ladies disappearing. This is chicken shit. A cold case. And I’m just guessing the coroner will call her. And knowing her, she’ll help him out.”

“An area where ten women have vanished, and the coroner calls about a cold case? Why now?”

“I don’t know. A tip.”

“What tip?”

“I don’t know!”

“I want to know why that drug OD’s so important all of a sudden,” Benton persists.

“Are your antennas in a knot?” Marino exclaims. “You’re missing the fucking point. The Doc’s life has turned to shit. She’s gone from being Babe Ruth to playing Little League.”

“Louisiana’s not a good place for her.” Benton says it again. “Why did the coroner call you? Just for a reference?”

Marino shakes his head, as if trying to wake up. He rubs his face. Benton’s losing his grip.

“The coroner called wanting my help with the case,” he says.

“Your help?”

“Now what the hell is that supposed to mean? You don’t think I could help somebody with a case? I could help any goddamn . . .”

“Of course you could. So why aren’t you helping the Baton Rouge coroner?”

“Because I don’t know anything about that case! Jesus, you’re making me crazy!”

“The Last Precinct could help down there.”

“Would you fucking give it a rest? The coroner didn’t seem all that hot and bothered by it, just indicated he might want the Doc’s medical opinion . . .”

“Their legal system is based on the Napoleonic Code.”

Marino has no idea what he’s talking about. “What’s Napoleon got to do with anything!”

“The French legal system,” Benton says. “The only state in America that has a legal system based on the French legal system instead of the English. Baton Rouge has more unsolved homicides of women per capita than any other city in America.”

“All right, already. So it ain’t a nice place.”

“She should not go down there. Especially alone. Not under any circumstances. Make sure of it, Pete.” Benton is still looking out the window. “Trust me on this one.”

“Trust you. What a joke.”

“The least you can do is take care of her.”

Marino is incensed, staring at Benton’s back.

“She can’t go anywhere near him.”

“Who the hell are you talking about?” Marino asks, his frustration intensifying.

Benton is a stranger. Marino doesn’t know this man.

“Wolfieboy? Jesus. I thought we were talking about a drug overdose case in Cajun country,” Marino complains.

“Keep her out of there.”

“You got no right asking me anything, especially about her.”

“He’s fixated on her.”

“What the hell does he have to do with Louisiana?” Marino steps closer to him and scrutinizes his face, as if straining to read something he can’t quite see.

“This is a continuation of a power struggle he lost with her in the past. And he intends to win it now if it’s the last thing he does.”

“Don’t sound to me like he’s gonna win a goddamn thing when he gets pumped full of enough juice to kill a herd of horses.”

“I’m not talking about Jean-Baptiste. Have you forgotten the other Chandonne, his brother? The Last Precinct should help the coroner. She shouldn’t.”

Marino doesn’t listen. He feels as if he’s sitting in the backseat of a moving car that has no one at the wheel.

“The Doc knows what Wolfman wants of her.” Marino sticks with one subject—the one that interests him and makes sense. “She won’t mind giving him the needle, and I’ll be right there behind the smoky glass, smiling.”

“Have you asked her if she minds?” Benton looks out at another spring day dying gently. Tender, vivid greens are dipped in golden sunlight, and shadows deepen closer to the ground.

“I don’t need to ask.”

“I see. So you haven’t discussed it with her. I’m not surprised. It wouldn’t be like her to discuss it with you.”

The insult is subtle but stings Marino like a sea nettle. He has never been intimate with Kay Scarpetta. No one has ever been as intimate with her, not the way Benton was. She hasn’t told Marino how she feels about being an executioner. She doesn’t discuss her feelings with him.

“I’ve depended on you to take care of her,” Benton says.

The air seems to heat up, both of them sweating and silent.

“I know how you feel, Pete,” Benton softly says. “I’ve always known.”

“You don’t know nothing.”

“Take care of her.”

“I came here so you could start doing that,” Marino says.

CARTHAGE BLUFF LANDING is a good popular stop for groceries and gas, but Bev Kiffin never docks there.

She doesn’t slow down as she motors past and approaches Tin Lizzy’s Landing, a restaurant that cost a million dollars to build from torn-down shacks and what Bev calls salvage shit. Rich people from the mainland can access Lizzy’s from the Springfield Bridge and eat all the Cajun steaks and seafood and drink all they want without having to go home after dark in a boat. Six months ago, Bev asked Jay to take her there for her birthday, and he just laughed, and then his face twisted in a snarl as he called her stupid and ugly and out of her mind to think he’d take her to a restaurant at all, much less an upper-class one accessible by a highway.

Jealousy smolders as Bev picks up speed, heading due west to Jack’s Boat Landing. She imagines Jay touching other women.

She remembers her father lifting other little girls on his lap, demanding that Bev bring home playmates just so he could cuddle with them and make her watch. He was a handsome, successful businessman and, during her teenage years, the object of her friends’ crushes. He touched them in ways that weren’t obvious or reportable, just what he considered innocent contact between his hard penis and their buttocks as they sat on his lap. He never exposed himself or talked in a vulgar manner, never even swore. Worst of all, when he accidentally brushed against their breasts, her friends liked it, and sometimes they brushed against him first.

Bev walked out on him one day and never went back, the same way her mother had when Bev was three, leaving her with him and his needs. Bev grew up addicted to men, going from one to the next. Leaving Jay is another matter entirely, and she isn’t sure why she hasn’t done it yet. She isn’t sure why she’ll do whatever he demands, despite her fears for her own safety. The thought of him going off in the boat one day and never returning sears her with terror. It would serve her right, since that’s what she did to her father, who was dropped by a heart attack in 1997. Bev didn’t go to his funeral.

Now and then when she’s headed to shore, she thinks of the Mississippi River. On a good day, she could make it there in less than six hours, and she senses Jay is onto her occasional impulse to escape to the Gulf Coast. He’s told her more than once that the Mississippi is the biggest river in the United States, more than a million miles of rough, muddy water and tributaries that fan out into thousands of creeks, marshes and swamps, where a person could get so lost “she would end up a skeleton in her boat,” as Jay puts it. Those are his words exactly, saying she and her instead of he and his, his choice of words no accident. Jay doesn’t have accidents of the tongue or anything else.

All the same, when Bev is out in the boat, she fantasizes about the Mississippi, about riverboat cruises and casinos, about fruity cocktails and beer in frozen glasses and maybe watching Mardi Gras from the window of a nice air-conditioned hotel. She wonders if good food would make her sick now that she’s gone so long without it. A comfortable bed would probably stiffen her up and make her sore because she’s so accustomed to a stinking, broken-down mattress that not even Jay will sleep on anymore.

She motors around a semi-submerged log, worried at first that it might move and prove to have teeth, and she begins to itch, especially beneath the tight waistband of her jeans.

“Shit!” She steers with one hand and digs the other under her clothes, clawing at her flesh as her welts get bigger. “Goddamnit! Oh, shit, what the fuck’s bit me now?”

Breathing hard and beginning to panic, she shoves the throttle lever into neutral, opens the hatch and rummages in her beach bag for the insect repellent, spraying herself all over, including under her clothes.

It’s all in her head, Jay always says. The welts aren’t bites, they’re hives, because she has a nervous condition, because she’s half-crazy. Well, I wasn’t half-crazy until I met you, she answers him in her head. I never got hives in my life, nothing like that, not even poison ivy. Bev drifts in the creek for a minute or two, contemplating what she’s about to do and imagining Jay’s face when she brings him what he wants, then imagining his face if she doesn’t.

She advances the throttle and trims out, speeding up to forty miles an hour, which is much too fast for this part of the Tickfaw and reckless in light of her fears of the dark water and what’s beneath it. Sweeping left, she abruptly cuts back her speed and trims down, heeling into a turn that takes her into a narrow creek, where she runs slowly and quietly into marshland that smells like death. Reaching under the tarp, she slides out the shotgun and lays it across her lap.

SUNLIGHT ILLUMINATES A SLIVER of Benton’s face as he stares out the window.

Silence reigns for a long, tense moment. The air seems to shimmer ominously, and Marino rubs his eyes.

“I don’t get it.” His mouth quivers. “You could be free, go home, be alive again.” His voice cracks. “I thought you’d at least thank my ass for going to all the trouble to come here and tell you that maybe Lucy and me ain’t ever given up on getting you back . . . .”

“By offering her?” Benton turns around and looks at him. “By offering Kay as bait?”

At last he says her name, but he is so calm, it is as if he has no feelings, and Marino is shocked. He wipes his eyes.

“Bait? What . . . ?”

“Isn’t it enough what the bastard has already done to her?” Benton goes on. “He tried to kill her once.” He’s not talking about Jean-Baptiste. He’s talking about Jay Talley.

“He ain’t gonna kill her when he’s sitting behind bulletproof glass, chatting away on a phone inside a maximum-security prison,” Marino says as they continue to talk about two different people.

“You’re not listening to me,” Benton tells him.

“That’s because you’re not listening to me,” Marino childishly retorts.

Benton turns off the air conditioner and slides up the window. He closes his eyes as a breeze touches his hot cheeks like cool fingers. He smells the burgeoning Earth. For an instant, he remembers being alive with her, and he begins to bleed inside like a hemophiliac.

“Does she know?” he asks.

Marino rubs his face. “Jesus. I’m so sick and tired of my blood pressure shooting up like I’m a damn thermometer.”

“Tell me.” Benton presses his palms against the window frame, leaning into the fresh air. He turns around and meets Marino’s eyes. “Does she know?”

Marino gets his meaning and sighs. “No, hell no. She don’t know. She’ll never know unless you’re the one who tells her. I wouldn’t do that to her. Lucy wouldn’t do that to her. See”—he angrily pulls himself to his feet—“some of us care too much about her to hurt her like that. Imagine how she’d feel if she knew you’re alive and don’t care a shit about her anymore.”

He walks to the door, shaking with rage and grief. “I thought you might thank me.”

“I do thank you. I know you mean well.” Benton walks over to him, his calm demeanor uncanny. “I know you don’t understand, but maybe someday you will. Good-bye, Pete. I don’t ever want to see or hear from you again. Please don’t take it personally.”

Marino grabs the doorknob and almost yanks it out of the wood. “Good riddance and go fuck yourself. Don’t take it personally.”

They face each other like two men squaring off in a gun fight, neither wanting to be the first to move, neither really wanting the other to be gone from his life. Benton’s hazel eyes are vacant, as if whoever lives behind them has vanished. Marino’s pulse measures panic as he realizes that the Benton he knew is gone and nothing will ever bring him back.

And somehow Marino is going to have to tell Lucy. And somehow Marino will have to accept the fact that his dream of rescuing Benton and returning him to Scarpetta will always be a dream, only a dream.

“It don’t make sense!” Marino shouts.

Benton touches an index finger to his lips. “Please go, Pete,” he quietly says. “It doesn’t have to make sense.”

Marino hesitates in the dimly lit, stinking landing just beyond apartment 56. “Okay.” He fumbles for his cigarettes and spills several on the filthy concrete. “Okay . . .” He starts to say Benton but catches himself as he squats to pick up the cigarettes, his thick fingers clumsily breaking two of them.

He wipes his eyes with the back of a big hand as Benton looks down at him from the apartment doorway, watching, not offering to help pick up the cigarettes, unable to move.

“Take care, Pete,” Benton, the master of masks and self-control, says in a steady, reasonable voice.

Marino looks up with bloodshot eyes from his squatting position on the landing. The seam in the crotch of his wrinkled khakis is slightly ripped, his white briefs peeking through.

He blurts out, “Don’t you get it, you can come back!”

“What you don’t get is there is no back to go back to,” Benton says in a voice so low it is almost inaudible. “I don’t want to come back. Now please get the hell out of my life and leave me alone.”

He pulls his apartment door shut and flips the dead bolt. Inside, he collapses on the couch and covers his face with his hands while Marino’s insistent knocking turns to violent thuds and kicks.

“Yeah, well, enjoy your great life, asshole!” his muffled voice sounds through the door. “I always knew you was cold and don’t give a fuck about anybody, including her, you fucking psycho!” The banging and kicking suddenly stop.

Benton holds his breath, straining to hear. The sudden silence is worse than any tantrum. Pete Marino’s silence is damning. It is final. His friend’s heavy feet scuff down the stairs.

“I am dead,” Benton mutters into his hands as he doubles over on the couch.

“No matter what, I am dead. I am Tom. Tom Haviland. Tom Speck Haviland . . .” His chest heaves and his heart seems to beat out of rhythm. “Born in Greenwich, Connecticut . . .”

He gets up, crushed by a depression that turns the room dark and the air as thick as oil. He smells Marino’s lingering cigarette smoke, and it runs through him like a blade. Moving to the window, he stands to one side of it so he isn’t visible from below, and he watches Pete Marino walking slowly away through intermittent shadows and dappled sunlight along uneven cobblestones.

Marino stops to light a Lucky Strike and turns around to stare up at Benton’s depressing building until he finds apartment 56. Cheap sheer curtains are caught by a breeze and flutter out the open window like spirits leaving.

IN POLAND, it is a few minutes past midnight.

Lucy drives past caravans of World War II Russian Army trucks and speeds through miles of tiled tunnels and along the tree-lined E28. She can’t stop thinking about the Red Notice, how easy it was for her to send computerized information that has law enforcement agencies around the world on guard. Of course, her information is legitimate. Rocco Caggiano is a criminal. She has known that for years. But until she recently received information that ties him to at least a few of his crimes, neither she nor other interested parties had probable cause to do anything more than hate him.

One simple phone call.

Lucy called Interpol’s Central Bureau in Washington, D.C. She identified herself—her real identity, of course—and had a brief conversation with a U.S. Marshal liaison named McCord. The next step was a search of the Interpol database to see if Caggiano is known, and he wasn’t, not even as a Green Notice, which simply means a person is of interest to Interpol and should be watched and subjected to extra scans and pat-downs when he or she crosses borders and passes through international airports.

Rocco Caggiano is in his mid-thirties. He has never been arrested and has made a fortune, ostensibly as a scumbag, ambulance-chasing lawyer, but his formidable wealth and power come from his real clients, the Chandonnes, although it isn’t accurate to call them clients. They own him. They shield him. He is kept in high style and alive at their pleasure.

“Check out a murder in 1997,” Lucy told McCord. “New Year’s Day in Sicily. A journalist named Carlos Guarino. Shot in the head, his body dumped in a drainage ditch. He was working on an investigative story about the Chandonnes—a very risky thing to do, by the way. He had just interviewed a lawyer who represents Jean-Baptiste Chandonne . . .”

“Right, right. I know about that case. The Wolfman, or whatever they call him.”

“The cover of People magazine, Time magazine, whatever. Who doesn’t know about the Wolfman serial killer, I guess,” Lucy replied. “Guarino was murdered hours after talking to Caggiano.

“Next, a journalist named Emmanuelle La Fleur. Barbizon, France, February eleventh, 1997. Worked for Le Monde. He also was unwisely doing a story on the Chandonne family.”

“Why all this interest in the Chandonnes, beyond their being Jean-Baptiste’s unlucky parents?”

“Organized crime. A huge cartel. Never been proven that the father heads it, but he does. There are rumors. Investigative reporters are sometimes blinded by scoops and prizes. La Fleur had drinks with Caggiano hours before the journalist’s body was found in a garden near the former château of the painter Jean François Millet—don’t bother looking for him. He’s been dead more than a hundred years.”

She wasn’t being sarcastic. She would never assume that Millet was a household name and didn’t want to find the artist was suddenly a person of interest.

“La Fleur was shot in the head, and the ten-millimeter bullet was fired from the same gun used to murder Guarino,” she explained.

There was more. The information came from a letter written by Jean-Baptiste Chandonne.

“I’ll e-mail you his letter immediately,” Lucy said, a transmission that would have been unthinkable before Interpol began using the Internet.

But the International Police Agency’s computerized communication network has more than enough firewalls, hieroglyphical encryptions and hacker-tracking systems to render any transmission secure. Lucy knows. When Interpol began to use the Internet, the secretary general personally invited her to hack her way in. She couldn’t. She never made it past the first firewall and secretly was furious at being foiled, even though the last thing she should have wanted was success.

The secretary general called her, quite amused. He read to her a list of her usernames, passwords and the location of her computer.

“Don’t worry, Lucy. I won’t send the police,” he said.

“Merci beaucoup, Monsieur Hartman,” she replied to the secretary general, who is American.

From New York to London to Berlin and now crossing the border into Poland, police have been alert, she sensed that. But they didn’t take her seriously, could have cared less about this young American woman driving her rented Mercedes at a late hour on a cool spring night. To them she clearly doesn’t look like a terrorist, and she isn’t. But she could be—easily—and it is foolish not to take her seriously, for no reason beyond her nationality, youthfulness, appearance and a smile that can be warm and captivating when she chooses.

She is far too smart to carry a firearm. Her tactical baton will do if she runs into a problem, not from the police, but from some asshole along the way who might have singled her out for robbery or some other type of assault. The baton was easy for her to smuggle into Germany. She used her shopworn routine because it has never failed: overnighted it in a cosmetic bag filled with a jumble of accessories (curling iron, curling brush, blow-dryer, et cetera). The package arrived at a cheap hotel near the airport, addressed to one of Lucy’s aliases; she also had a room reserved and paid for in that name. Lucy drove her rental car to the hotel, parked on a side street, picked up the package at check-in, messed up her room a bit and hung a Do Not Disturb sign on the door. She was back in her car in half an hour.

If a more serious weapon is imperative on a mission, a handgun and extra magazines of ammunition are tucked inside alleged lost baggage sloppily bound in airline tape and dumped at the hotel desk by one of Lucy’s associates, dressed for the part. She has many associates. Most of them have never met her and don’t know who she is. Only her core team knows her. She has them and they have her. It is enough.

She plucks her international cell phone from between her legs and presses redial.

“I’m on the go,” she says when Rudy Musil answers. “An hour-fifteen out if I don’t speed too much.”

“Don’t.” A television plays loudly in the background.

Lucy eyes the speedometer as it eases past 120 kilometers per hour. She might be brazen, but never intentionally foolish. She has no intention of getting entangled with police as she heads toward the most prominent but beleaguered port city in Poland. Americans aren’t often seen in Szczecin. Why would Americans go there? Certainly not for tourism, unless it is to look at nearby concentration camps. For years now, the Germans have been intercepting foreign vessels en route to the Szczecin port. Daily, the Germans steal business from a city where unemployment and economic depression continue to corrode what once was a jewel of architecture, culture and art.

Very little glory has been restored to Szczecin since World War II, when Hitler set out to bomb Poland off the map and exterminate its people. It is impossible to earn a decent living. Few people know what it is like to live in a nice house, drive a nice car, wear nice clothes, buy books or go on vacation. It is said that no one but members of the Russian Mafia and criminal cartels have money in Poland, and with rare exception, this is true.

Lucy constantly scans the highway and her smile fades, her eyes narrow.

“Taillights ahead. I don’t like it,” she says into the cell phone. “Someone slowing.” She eases up on the accelerator. “Stopping in the middle of the fucking highway. No place to pull over.”

“Don’t stop. Go around it,” Rudy tells her.

“Disabled limousine. Weird to see an American limo in these parts.”

Lucy swerves around a white stretch Lincoln. The driver and a passenger are climbing out, and she resists the urge to stop and help.

“Shit,” she mutters in frustration.

“Don’t even think about it,” Rudy warns, well aware of Lucy’s high-risk personality and compulsion to save the world.

She pushes down the accelerator, and the limousine and its stranded passengers become part of the thick darkness behind her.

“The front desk is empty at this hour. You know where you’re going,” Rudy makes sure.

There can be no mistakes and no sightings.

Lucy repeatedly glances in the rearview mirror, worrying that the limousine might be gaining on her and turn out to be real trouble. Her stomach tightens. What if those people back there genuinely need help? She left them alone in the dark on E28, where there is no way to pull off the road. They’ll probably get run over by a truck.

For several seconds she considers speeding to the next exit and turning around. She does it for lost dogs, for turtles crossing highways and streets. She always brakes for chipmunks and squirrels, and runs outside to check on birds that fly into her windows. But people are another matter. She can’t afford to take the chance.

“You can’t miss the Radisson,” Rudy is saying. “Don’t park in the courtyard for buses. They don’t appreciate it.”

He is joking. It goes without saying that Lucy will not park at the Radisson.

DELRAY BEACH, FLORIDA, is hot at six o’clock p.m., and Kay Scarpetta turns away from her kitchen window, deciding she will work another hour before venturing outside.

She has become an expert in judging shadows and light, monitoring them in her scientific manner before heading out to check on her fruit trees or walk on the beach. Making rather useless decisions based on analysis and calculations of how the sun moves across the sky helps her feel as though she has not lost complete control of her life.

Her two-story yellow stucco house is modest by her standards, just an old place with wobbly white railings, failing plumbing and wiring, and air-conditioning that seems to have a mean-spirited will of its own. Tiles sometimes fall out of the backsplash behind the electric stove, and yesterday the bathtub’s cold-water handle pulled loose from the wall. For the sake of survival, she has read home-repair books and manages to keep her surroundings from falling on her head as she tries not to remember what days were like before she relocated hundreds of miles south of her former career, and barely an hour’s drive north of Miami, where she was born. The past is dead, and death is just one more phase of existence. This is her creed. Most of the time she believes it.

Time on Earth is an opportunity to become more highly evolved, and then people move on or cross over—a concept that by no means is original to her, but she is not one to accept what isn’t obvious without dissecting it first. After much contemplation, her findings about eternity are simple: No one good or evil ceases to exist; life is energy and energy cannot be created or destroyed; it is recycled. Therefore, it is possible that the pure of heart and the purely evil have been here before and will be here again. Scarpetta doesn’t believe in heaven or hell, and she no longer goes to Mass, not even on religious holidays.

“What happened to your Catholic guilt?” Lucy asked her several Christmases ago when they were mixing a strong batch of eggnog and church was not on the agenda.

“I can’t participate in something I no longer believe in,” Scarpetta replied, reaching for freshly ground nutmeg. “Especially if I am at odds with it, which is worse than having a complete loss of faith in it.”

“The question is, what is it? Are you talking about Catholicism or God?”

“Politics and power. They have an unmistakable stench, rather much like the inside of the morgue fridge. I can close my eyes and know what’s there. Nothing alive.”

“Thanks for sharing,” Lucy said. “Maybe I’ll just drink a little straight rum on the rocks. Raw eggs suddenly don’t seem very appealing.”

“You’re not the least bit squeamish.” Scarpetta poured Lucy a glass of eggnog, adding a sprinkle of nutmeg. “Drink up before Marino gets here and there’s none left.”

Lucy smiled. The only thing that makes her gag is walking into a ladies’ room and finding someone in the middle of changing a baby’s diaper. To Lucy, that stench is worse than a decomposing body buzzing with blow flies, and she has experienced her share of offensive horrors because of her and her aunt’s unusual occupations.

“This mean you no longer believe in eternity?” Lucy challenged her.

“I believe in it more than ever.”

Scarpetta has made the dead speak most of her life, but always through the silent language of injuries, trace evidence, diseases and investigative details that can be interpreted with medicine, science, experience and deduction that borders on the intuitive, a gift that cannot be learned or taught. But people change. She is no longer entirely clinical. She has come to accept that the dead continue to exist and intervene in the lives of their earthbound loved ones and enemies. It is a conviction that she conceals from her detractors and certainly never mentions in professional presentations or in journal articles or in court.

“I’ve seen psychics on TV talking about people dying and crossing over—I believe that’s the term,” Lucy observed, sipping her eggnog. “I don’t know. It’s pretty interesting. The older I get, the less certain I am of most things.”

“I’ve noticed your advanced aging process,” Scarpetta replied. “When you turn thirty, you will begin to have visions and see auras. Let’s hope you don’t get arthritis.”

This conversation took place in Scarpetta’s former home in Richmond, a fortress of stone she designed with love and an abandonment of financial reason, sparing no expense in her insistence on old woods, exposed beams, solid doors and plaster walls, and a kitchen and office that were perfect for her precise way of going about her business, whether it was over a microscope or a Viking gas stove.

Life was good. Then it wasn’t and never would be again. So much went wrong. So much was spoiled and lost and could never be restored. Three years ago, she was well along her journey to disaster. She had resigned as president of the National Association of Medical Examiners. The governor of Virginia was about to fire her. One day, she cleared her office walls of scores of commendations, certifications and degrees that are now packed up somewhere in cardboard boxes. The pre-crash Scarpetta was impeccably, if not rigidly, intellectual, completely confident of her knowledge, her truthfulness and her ability to excavate for answers. She was a legend in law enforcement and criminal justice, and to some people unapproachable and cold. Now she has no staff except her secretary, Rose, who followed her to Florida with the excuse that it would be nice to “retire” near West Palm Beach.

Scarpetta can’t get over Benton Wesley. She has tried. Several times she has dated perfectly acceptable men, only to recoil at their touch. A simple touch, and it isn’t Benton’s, and then she is reminded. Then she reviews her last images of him, burned, mutilated. She still regrets reading his autopsy report, and yet she doesn’t. She regrets touching his ashes and scattering them, and yet she doesn’t. It was crucial, it really was, she constantly tells herself when she remembers the feel of the silky, lumpy cremains, when she remembers returning him to the pure air and sea he loved.

She wanders out of the kitchen, clutching the same mug of coffee she has warmed up in the microwave at least four times since noon.

“Dr. Scarpetta, can I get you anything?” Rose calls out from a spare bedroom that serves as her office.

“Nothing would help,” Scarpetta replies, halfway joking, as she heads in the direction of Rose’s voice.

“Nonsense.” It is her secretary’s favorite rebuttal. “I told you if you went to work for yourself, you’d only be busier, if that was possible. And worn-out and overextended.”

“And what did I tell you about retirement?”

Rose looks up from the autopsy report she is proofreading on her computer. She tabs to the space for brain and types 1, 200 grams. Within normal limits and corrects a typo.

Nails click across the wooden floor like Morse code as Scarpetta’s bulldog hears voices and walks rather lazily, then pauses, then walks some more toward them, then sits.

“Come here, Billy-Billy,” Scarpetta affectionately calls out.

He looks at her with drooping eyes.

“His name is Billy,” Rose reminds her, although there is no point in doing so. “If you keep calling him Billy-Billy, he’ll think he lives with an echo or has a split personality.”

“Come here, Billy-Billy.”

He gets up, takes his time. Click-click.

Rose is wearing a peach pantsuit. It is wool, as are all of Rose’s suits. The house is on the beach. It is bloody hot and humid, and Rose doesn’t hesitate to walk outside in a skirt and long-sleeved blouse and water the hibiscus, climb a ladder to pick bananas or key limes, or save baby frogs from drowning in the trap of the pool. It’s a wonder that moths haven’t carried off every bit of clothing Rose owns, but she is a proud woman, her dignity masking a fragile, gentle nature, and it is out of her respect for herself and her boss that she takes time each morning to make sure her choice of outfit for the day is pressed and clean.

If anything, she seems secretly pleased that her sense of style is dated, some of her suits so old that she was wearing them more than a decade ago when she first started working for Scarpetta. Rose hasn’t changed her hair, either, still pinning it up in a fussbudget French twist and refusing to get rid of the gray. Good structure makes the building, and her bones are exquisite. At the age of sixty-seven, men find her attractive, but she hasn’t dated since her husband died. The only man Scarpetta has ever seen her flirt with is Pete Marino, and she doesn’t mean it and he knows it, but they have tormented each other since Scarpetta was appointed chief medical examiner of Virginia, what now seems as though it were another incarnation.

Billy is panting as he appears at the desk. He is not quite a year old, white with a large brown spot on the middle of his back, and his underbite reminds Scarpetta of a backhoe. He sits at her feet, looking up.

“I don’t have any . . .”

“Don’t say that word!” Rose exclaims.

“I wasn’t going to. I was going to spell it.”

“He can spell now.”

Billy suffers no language barrier with the words bye-bye and treat. He also recognizes no and sit but pretends he doesn’t, stubbornness the right of his breed.

“You better not have been chewing on anything back there,” Scarpetta warns him.

In the last month, Billy has taken a fancy to gnawing and ripping molding off doorframes and around the base of the walls, especially in Scarpetta’s bedroom.

“This isn’t your house, and I will have to pay for all repairs when I move out.” She wags her finger at him.

“It would be worse if it was your house,” Rose remarks as the dog continues to stare up at Scarpetta and wag his tail, which looks like a croissant.

She picks up a slim stack of mail from her desk and offers it to her boss.

“I’ve dealt with the bills. There are a couple personal letters. And the usual journals and so forth. And this, from Lucy.”

She directs Scarpetta’s attention to a large manila envelope, her name and address neatly written in black Magic Marker, the return address Lucy’s New York office, also written in Magic Marker. The envelope is marked Personal in large letters and underlined twice. It is a die-hard habit for Scarpetta to look at postmarks, and this one is puzzling.

“The postal code isn’t for her part of the city,” Scarpetta says. “Lucy always mails things from her office, and as a matter of fact, she always overnights mail to me. I can’t remember a single time she’s ever sent me anything by regular mail, not since she was in college.”

Rose doesn’t seem concerned. “ ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,’ ” she quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson. In fact, it is her favorite quote.

Rose shakes the envelope. “Doesn’t sound like anything dangerous in there,” she teases. “If you’re feeling one of your bouts of paranoia coming on, I’ll open it for you, but it’s marked Personal . . .”

“Never mind.” Scarpetta takes it and her other mail from Rose.

“And Dr. Lanier from Baton Rouge left a message.” Rose pecks at the keyboard and corrects another typo. “It’s regarding the Charlotte Dard case. He says you’ll get it Monday, his reports and all that. He sounded stressed. He wants to know what you find, immediately.”

She gives her boss a look that always reminds Scarpetta of a schoolteacher about to single out some unsuspecting student and put him or her on the spot. “I think something’s going on in this case, something worse than a drug overdose.”

Scarpetta massages Billy’s soft, speckled ears. “Her cause of death isn’t straightforward. That’s plenty bad. What’s worse, the case is eight years old.”

“I don’t understand why it’s such a big deal right now, as if they don’t have enough unsolved murders and suspicious deaths down there. Those abducted women. Lord.”

“I don’t know why it’s suddenly become a priority, either,” Scarpetta replies. “But the fact is, it has, and I feel obliged to do what I can.”

“Because nobody else can be bothered.”

“I can be bothered, can’t I, Billy-Billy?”

“Well, let me tell you a thing or two, Dr. Echo. I think there’s something the coroner down there has no intention of telling you.”

“There had better not be,” Scarpetta remarks as she walks off.

LUCY DESPERATELY NEEDS a ladies’ room.

Forget looking for a gas station or a rest stop. She pushes the Mercedes up to 160 kilometers per hour, despite Rudy’s warning about speeding. Focusing on the dark road, she tries hard to concentrate and ignore her bladder. The drive seems to take twice as long as it should, but she makes excellent time and is ahead of schedule by thirty-five minutes. She redials Rudy’s cell phone.

“On final,” she says. “Just got to land this thing somewhere.”

“Shut up,” Rudy orders someone in the room, as the TV plays loudly. “Don’t make me tell you again.”

ROCCO CAGGIANO’S FAVORITE form of relaxation is to sit for hours in beer gardens, drinking one Gross Bier after another.

The pale gold elixirs are served in tall, plain glasses, and he prefers clean-tasting lagers and will not touch wheat beers. Rocco has never understood how he can drink a gallon of beer in one sitting but not a gallon of water. He could not drink a gallon of water during an entire day, probably not even in three days, and he has always puzzled over how much beer, wine, champagne or mixed drinks he can put away when he can scarcely finish a single glass of water.

In fact, he hates water. Perhaps what a psychic once told him is true: He drowned in a former life. What a terrible way to die, and he often thinks of the killer in England who drowned one wife after another in the tub by grabbing her feet and yanking until her head was under water and she could do nothing but helplessly flop her arms like a fish on a dock. The scenario was a constant emotional itch when Caggiano began to hate his first wife, then his second. Alimony was cheaper than the price he would pay if some medical examiner discovered bruises or God knows what. But even if he did drown in a former life and thought drowning someone was a good way to commit murder, this, in his mind, would not explain the enigma—the purely biological phenomenon—of how much alcohol he can consume and why he cannot and will not finish even one glass of water.

No one has ever been able to settle his mind with an answer he accepts. Small conundrums have always worried him like a sandspur stuck to his sock.

“It must be ’cause you pee all the time when you drink beer,” Caggiano introduces the question at virtually every social gathering. “When you pee, you make room for more, right?”

“You drink a gallon of water, you will be pissing all the time, too,” a Dutch customs agent challenged him some months back when he, Rocco and several other friends of the Chandonne cartel were taking time out in a beer garden in Munich.

“I hate water,” Rocco said.

“Then how do you know this about whether you would pee water as fast as beer?” a German container ship’s captain asked.

“He doesn’t know.”

“Yes. You ought to test it out, Rocco.”

“We’ll drink beer, you drink water, and see who pees the most and the fastest.”

The men laughed and clanked glasses in a drunken toast, slopping beer all over the wooden table. It had been a good day. Before they caroused at the beer garden, they had wandered into the nudist park where a naked man on a bicycle pedaled past and the Dutchman yelled at him in Dutch that he’d better be careful which gear he shifted, while the ship’s captain yelled in German that his kickstand was very small. Rocco yelled in English that the man didn’t have to worry about his dick getting caught in the spokes because it didn’t even hang over the seat. The bicyclist pedaled on, ignoring them.

Women sunbathe in the nude in the park and do not seem to care if men stare at them. Rocco and his henchmen would get very brazen and hover right over a woman stretched out on her towel and make comments about her anatomical points of interest. Usually, the woman would turn over on her belly and go back to sleep or continue reading her magazine or book while the men went on to survey her buttocks, as if they were hills they might climb. Rocco’s intense arousal would make him mean, and he would fire vile, lewd aspersions at the woman until his companions had to usher him away. Rocco is especially vicious with the homosexuals minding their own business in the park. He believes all homosexuals should be castrated and executed, and he would like to be the one to do it and watch them pee and defecate out of fright.

“It’s a medical fact that when you’re tortured or about to be snuffed, you piss and shit in your pants,” he announced later in the beer garden.

“What medical fact? I thought you were a lawyer, not a doctor.”

“So you know this, Rocco? And how do you know this? You take off their pants to see? Maybe you take their pants off to check for shit and piss?” Loud laughter. “Then you can know it as a fact. If this is true, I must come around to my important question. Do you go around taking the pants off dead bodies? I think all of us have a right to hear this. Because at least for me, if I die, I need to know if you will take my pants off.”

“If you die,” Rocco replied, “you won’t know a fucking thing.”

It is irrational that Rocco should remember this boozy conversation and what his doctor has preached to him for years. Rocco has gastritis and cranky bowel syndrome due to stress, smoking and heavy drinking. All ills in life are blamed on acute stress, smoking and heavy drinking, Rocco always retorts on his way out of the examination room. He files for medical reimbursement and resumes his self-destructive life.

His bowels and bladder let loose as he sits in a chair inside his hotel room, a Colt .380 cocked and pointed at his head.

JACK’S BOAT LANDING IS a clutter of trailers, bateaux, bass and flat-bottom boats, and runabouts tied to pilings along a crisscross of rickety docks strung with old tires that serve as fenders.

Pulled up on the muddy shore are several pirogues—or Cajun canoes—and a rotting bow rider that won’t be pulling water-skiers anymore. The parking lot is dirt, and on the fuel dock are two pumps—one for regular gas, the other for diesel. Jack works from five a.m. until nine p.m. in his one-room office with its mounted fish hanging at random angles on the wall with peeling paint. The calendar above his old metal desk features glossy photos of glitter-painted bass boats—the very expensive kind that can go up to sixty miles an hour.

Were it not for the window air-conditioning unit and the Port-a-John behind the building, Jack would lack all modern conveniences. Not that he would care, particularly. He was born into a hard life and raised to make any sacrifice that might keep him right where he is, in a world of water and the creatures in it, and trees draped in Spanish moss.

For those who frequent his boat landing, tying up for gas and making a trip into town for provisions is normal behavior. People who stay for weeks or longer in their fishing camps on the bayous and rivers are expected to leave vehicles and boat trailers parked at the landing. He never thinks twice about the white Jeep Cherokee tucked between trucks and other SUVs in a far corner of the lot near the water’s edge. He minds his own business, even if he does have instincts about people that are as strong as his sense of smell. Swamp Woman sent strong signals to him from day one—and that’s been some two years now. Her demeanor is no-nonsense about asking personal questions.

Bev Kiffin opens the hatch and pulls out her beach bag. She stands aft and drops in the plow anchor, then tosses two nylon lines up on the fuel dock as Jack waves, walking swiftly her way.

“Why if it isn’t Swamp Woman!” he calls out. “Can I top you off?”

The landing is lit and bugs are thick, roiling clouds in the yellow glow of lamps. Jack tosses her the bowline.

“I’ll be leaving her here for a few hours.” Bev turns the rope and makes a half hitch over the horns of the cleat. She pulls back the tarp and sets empty gas cans on the dock. “Fill ’em up. What’s your price these days?”

“One eighty-five.”

“Shit.” Bev hops up on the dock, moving nimbly for a woman her size. “That’s highway robbery.”

Jack laughs. “It ain’t me who decides the price of oil.”

He’s tall and bald, as dark and strong as a cypress. Bev’s never seen him once when he wasn’t wearing his sweat-stained orange Harley-Davidson cap and chewing on a plug of tobacco.

“You comin’ and goin’?” He spits and wipes his mouth on the back of a sunspotted, gnarled hand and helps her with the stern lines.

“Just to the store.”

Bev dips into her beach bag for a single key attached to a small fishing bobber—in case she ever accidentally drops the key into the water. Her attention wanders around the crowded parking lot, fixing on the Cherokee.

“I guess I’d better crank her up to make sure the battery ain’t dead.”

“Well if it is,” Jack says, lining up the four gas cans near the pump, “you know I’ll jump ’er.”

Bev watches him squat, sticking the gas nozzle into each can, the pump clicking away her cash. The back of his neck reminds her of alligator hide, and his elbows are big calluses. She’s been coming to him at least ten times a year, more often of late, and he doesn’t have a damn clue about her, which is a good thing for him. She heads to the SUV, suddenly worried about whether it needs gas, too. She can’t remember if she filled it up last time.

Unlocking the driver’s door, she slides in and turns the key in the ignition. The engine cranks after three tries, and she’s relieved to see she has more than half a tank of gas. When she runs low, she’ll fill up at a gas station. Turning the headlights on, she backs up and parks near the dock. While she is pulling cash out of her wallet and squinting to make out the bills, Jack wipes his hands on a rag and waits for her to roll down the window.

“That’ll be forty-four dollars and forty cents,” he tells her. “I’ll get those cans back in your boat for ya and keep an eye on it. I noticed you got your friend with ya.” He means the shotgun. “You plan on leaving it in the boat? I wouldn’t. Watch out shooting at gators with that thing. All it does is make ’em rageful.”

Bev can’t believe she almost drove off and left her shotgun. She’s not thinking clearly tonight, and her knee hurts.

“Last thing you do before you leave,” she adds as he steps down into the boat, “is fill the fish box with ice.”

“How much?” He fetches the shotgun, climbs back up on the dock and carefully places it on the backseat of the Cherokee.

“A hundred pounds will do.”

“Must be doing a lot of shopping to need all that ice.” He stuffs the rag in a back pocket of his old, soiled work pants.

“Stuff spoils quick out here.”

“That’ll be another twenty. I’m givin’ you three bucks off.”

She hands him two tens and doesn’t thank him for the discount.

“I’m gone by nine.” He looks past her, inside the beat-up Cherokee. “So if you ain’t back by then . . .”

“Won’t be,” Bev tells him, shifting the SUV into reverse.

She never is and doesn’t need the reminder.

He stares past her at the front passenger’s door, at the rolled-up window and the missing crank and push-in lock.

“You know, girl, I could fix that if you’re ever of a mind to leave the keys.”

Bev glances at the door. “Don’t matter,” she says. “Nobody rides in this thing but me.”

UPSTAIRS IN THE NORTH WING of the house is a guest bedroom overlooking the ocean, and in front of the bay window is Scarpetta’s large desk, not an antique or anything special, just an inexpensive computer desk with a matching return.

Bookcases fill the walls so tightly that some light switches and electrical outlets are behind them, out of reach, and she has to get by with power strips. Her furniture is a light maple veneer, in depressing contrast to the beautiful antiques and artistic pieces, including Oriental rugs, fine stemware and china, that she spent most of her career collecting. Scarpetta’s former life is locked up in a Connecticut storage warehouse, one secure enough for museum pieces.

She has not gone to see what she owns since Lucy took care of her aunt’s chattel more than two years ago, choosing the location because of its proximity to New York, where Lucy has her headquarters and apartment. Scarpetta doesn’t miss the furniture from her past. It is useless to care about it. Just the thought of it makes her tired for reasons she doesn’t completely comprehend.

The office in her Delray rental house is a comfortable size, although nowhere near as spacious and organized as what she was accustomed to in her Richmond house, where she had cabinets of hanging files, miles of workspace and a massive desk custom-built of Brazilian cherry. Her house there was modern Italian country, put together stone by stone, the walls antiqued plaster, the exposed beams nineteenth-century black jarrah railroad ties from South Africa. If the house she built in Richmond wasn’t beautiful before, it was spectacular by the time she remodeled it in an attempt to eradicate the past—a past haunted by Benton and Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. But she felt no better. The ghosts followed her from room to room.

Her denial of unbearable loss and her own near murder were fragmented dreams of horror that chilled her, no matter the temperature inside the house. Every creak of old wood and utterance of wind sends her hand reaching for the pistol she carried as her heart beat hard. One day she walked out of her magnificent home and never went back, not even to retrieve her belongings. Lucy handled that.

For one who had always walled her soul from a wicked world and unreachable pain, she found herself a wanderer, skipping from one hotel to another like a stone across water, making phone calls to set up private consulting, and quickly became so bound in the snarled chains of evidence, of investigative incompetence and carelessness of police and medical examiners all over the place, that she had no choice but to settle in another house because she had to settle somewhere. She could no longer review cases while sitting on a hotel bed.

“Go south, far south,” Lucy told her quietly, lovingly, one afternoon in Greenwich, Connecticut, where Scarpetta was in hiding at the Homestead Inn. “You aren’t ready for New York yet, Aunt Kay, and you sure as hell aren’t ready to work for me.”

“I’ll never work for you.” Scarpetta meant it, shame pulling her eyes away from her niece.

“Well, you don’t have to be insulting about it.” Lucy was stung too, and within a minute, the two of them were arguing and fighting.

“I raised you,” Scarpetta blurted out from the bed, where she sat rigidly and enraged. “My goddamn sister, the admired author of children’s books who doesn’t have a clue about raising her own goddamn child, dumped me on your doorstep . . . I mean, the other way around.”

“Freudian slip! You needed me worse than I needed you.”

“Not hardly. You were a monster. At ten, when you rolled into my life like the Trojan Horse, I was stupid enough to let you park, and then what? Then what?” The great Chief, the logical doctor-lawyer, was sputtering, tears rolling down her face. “You had to be a genius, didn’t you? The worst brat on Earth . . .” Scarpetta’s voice quavered. “And I couldn’t give you up, you awful child.” She could hardly speak. “If Dorothy had wanted you back, I would have taken the bitch to court and proved she wasn’t a fit mother.”

“She wasn’t a fit mother and she isn’t.” Lucy was beginning to cry, too. “A bitch? That’s charging her with a misdemeanor when she’s a felon. A felon! A character disorder. For God’s sake, how did you end up with a psycho for a sister?” Lucy weeps, sitting next to her aunt on the bed, their shoulders touching.

“She’s the dragon you always fight, have spent your life fighting,” Scarpetta said. “You’re really fighting Mom. She’s too small a quarry for me. She’s nothing more than a rabbit with sharp teeth that goes after your ankles. I don’t waste my time on rabbits. I don’t have time.”

“Please go south,” Lucy begged her, getting up from the bed and facing her with wet eyes and a red nose. “For now. Please. Go back to where you came from and start all over.”

“I’m too old to start over.”

“Shit!” Lucy laughed. “You’re only forty-six, and men and women stare at you everywhere you go. And you don’t even notice. You’re one hell of a package.”

The only time Scarpetta was ever called a package was when she was in worse trouble than usual and required off-duty police for security. On their radios, they referred to her as the package. Scarpetta wasn’t entirely sure what they meant.

She moved south to Delray Beach, not exactly returning to her roots, but to an area near where her mother and sister live, yet safely far away.

Inside her weather-beaten 1950s rented house, her office is piled with paperwork and stiff cardboard slide folders, so much of it stacked on the floor that she has to make an effort not to trip over her work, making it impossible for her to be her usual prepossessed self when she walks in. Bookcases are crammed, some medical and legal tomes are double-shelved, while her rare antique books are protected from the sun and humidity in a tiny room next door that was probably intended to be the nursery.

She picks at Rose’s fresh tuna salad as she goes through her mail, her letter opener a scalpel. She slices open the manila envelope first, apparently from her niece or perhaps someone else in her office, and is baffled to discover another envelope inside, this one plain white and addressed by hand in calligraphy to Madame Kay Scarpetta, LLB.

She drops the manila envelope on the table and hurries out of her office, rushing past Rose without speaking and into the kitchen for freezer paper.

TAXICABS REMIND BENTON OF INSECTS.

And during his exile, he has grown fond of certain insects. Stick bugs look remarkably like twigs. Benton often loses himself in parks and along sidewalks, patiently searching shrubbery for a stick bug or, better yet, a praying mantis, which is extremely rare and a good omen, although he has never experienced a positive change in fortune directly after spotting a praying mantis. Maybe someday he will. Ladybugs are good luck. Everybody knows that. If one ends up wherever he is staying, he gently coaxes it onto his finger and takes it outside, no matter how many flights of stairs, and deposits it on a bush.

One week he did this ten times and enjoyed the thought that it was the same ladybug flirting with him. He believes that all kindnesses will be repaid. He also believes that evil will get its ugly reward, and until he began his nonexistence, he argued about that with Scarpetta often, because he didn’t believe it at all back then. And she did.

We often don’t know the reason for things, Benton. But I believe there is one, always.

He hears Scarpetta’s voice in a remote cavern of his brain as he sits in the dark backseat of a southbound taxi.

How can you say that?

He hears his own voice answering her.

Because I’ve seen enough to say it. What reason can there possibly be for a sister or a daughter or a brother or a son or a parent or a significant other to be raped, tortured and murdered?

Silence. The taxi driver is listening to hip-hop.

“Turn that down, please,” Benton calmly says, this time out loud.

Or what about the old woman struck by lightning because her umbrella frame was metal?

Scarpetta doesn’t answer him.

Okay, then what about the entire family killed by carbon monoxide because no one told them not to cook with charcoal in the fireplace, especially with the windows closed? What reason, Kay?

His sense of her continues to linger like her favorite perfume.

So there’s a reason I was murdered and am gone from your life forever?

The conversation has turned one-sided and won’t stop. What reason has she assigned to what she believes happened to him, he asks, convinced she has come up with a reason, certainly by now.

You’re rationalizing, Kay. You have forgotten our talks about denial.

Benton’s facile mind moves on to another point as he rides in the taxi shortly after dark, en route to Manhattan, the trunk and every other space in the car piled with his belongings. The driver did not disguise his disgust when he realized that his fare came with a substantial pile of baggage. But Benton was clever. He hailed the cab from the street, and the driver didn’t see the pile of luggage in the thick shadows of the sidewalk until he was faced with the choice of speeding off or accepting the lucrative job of driving a fare to New York.

The driver’s name is Robert Leary, a white male with brown hair, brown eyes, approximately five-foot-ten and one hundred and eighty pounds. Those details and others, including the identification number on the photo ID clamped to the visor, are written in a refillable wallet-size leather notebook that Benton carries wherever he goes. As soon as he gets to his hotel room, he will, as is customary for him, transfer the notes to his laptop computer. Since he entered the witness protection program, Benton has recorded his every activity, his every location and every person he has met—especially if it is more than once—and even the weather and where he worked out and what he ate.

Several times now, Robert Leary has attempted to initiate a conversation, but Benton stares out the window and says nothing, the driver, of course, having no idea that the man with the tan, chiseled, bearded face and shaved head is silently making points and examining tactical requirements and possibilities and probabilities from every tilt imaginable. No doubt, the cabbie is thinking it is his sorry luck to have picked up a weirdo, who, based on the shabbiness of his luggage, has fallen on hard times, very hard times.

“You sure you can pay the fare?” he asks, or rather demands, for the third time. “It ain’t gonna be cheap, you know, depending on what route I end up taking, depending on traffic and what streets they got closed off in the city. These days, ya never know what streets the cops will close off. Security. It’s something. Me, I’m not a big fan of machine guns and guys in camouflage.”

“I can pay the fare,” Benton replies.

The headlights of passing cars slash his window, briefly lighting up his somber face. Of this he is certain: Jean-Baptiste Chandonne’s attempted murder of Scarpetta has no point or meaning beyond the remarkable fact that she used her wits and survived. Thank God, thank God. Other schemes to bring about her ruination have no meaning beyond the miracle that they, too, have failed. Benton is well versed in the details, perhaps not all of them, but what he has followed in the news is enough.

Every person involved in his plan is tangentially if not directly connected to the Chandonnes’ evil, intricate network. Benton knows what empowers the Chandonnes and what robs them of their strength. He knows the receptacles, without whom the major conduits between drones and the higher order cannot function. The solution to the situation has always been far too complicated for anyone to work out, but for six years, Benton has had nothing to do but work it out.

The answer, he discovered, is simple: Surgically snip and strip the wires and disconnect, then splice, rewire and reconnect so that the criminals short-circuit and the Chandonne empire implodes. Meanwhile, Benton—the dead Benton—invisibly watches what he has designed and implemented as if it is a video game, and no player in his game has an inkling about what is going on, except that something is, and whatever it is must be instigated by traitors from inside. Main players must die. Other players, many of whom Benton does not know, will be blamed and labeled traitors. They will die.

By this method, Benton will manipulate his enemies and delete them, one by one. By his calculations, the coalition comprised of himself and others who do not even know they have been conscripted into his private army will complete his mission in a few months, perhaps weeks. By his calculations, Rocco Caggiano is already dead or soon will be dead, killed in cold blood, his murder staged, and Lucy and Rudy may know what they are doing or have done, but what they don’t know is the video game. They don’t know that they are in it.

What Benton did not calculate and would never have anticipated is that Kay Scarpetta would form a connection to Baton Rouge, the most strategic position on Benton’s mental map. For some reason, this part of his near-perfect plan has failed. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know what happened. He reviews every detail repeatedly, but at the end of the routine, the screen is blank, a useless cursor blinking hypnotically at him. Now Benton must rush. It is against his nature to rush. Scarpetta was never supposed to have any contact whatsoever with anything or anybody in Baton Rouge. Marino was. The Last Precinct was.

Learning that his son is dead would inevitably result in Marino retracing Rocco’s steps, which would lead Marino and his compatriots to Baton Rouge, where Rocco keeps an apartment and has for many years. The port in Baton Rouge is formidable. The Gulf Coast is gold. All manner of valuable and dangerous materials travels the Mississippi daily. Baton Rouge is yet another Chandonne holding, and Rocco has enjoyed many successes and gratifications there, including sovereign immunity from the police, and intrigues, including protecting Jay Talley and Jean-Baptiste Chandonne as they enjoyed their fair share of fun in the Baton Rouge area.

Jean-Baptiste and Jay were only sixteen the first time they visited Baton Rouge. Jean-Baptiste honed his murderous skills by killing prostitutes after Jay was serviced by them. Those cases have never been linked because the former coroner abdicated his investigative rights to other agencies, and the police didn’t give a damn about prostitutes.

One step would lead to another until Marino discovered Jay Talley and Bev Kiffin in Baton Rouge and eliminated them. That was the plan. Scarpetta was never supposed to be part of it. His pulse beats rapidly in his temples.

He holds his wrist close to his face, unable to read the time on his cheap black plastic watch because the dial isn’t luminescent. By design, it isn’t. He wants nothing that glows in the dark.

“What time should we get there?” he asks in the same clipped tone.

“I dunno exactly,” his driver replies. “Depends if the traffic stays light like this. Maybe another two, two and a half hours.”

A car draws close to them from the rear, its high beams bouncing blinding white light off the taxi’s rearview mirror. The driver curses as a black Porsche 911 passes, its receding red taillights reminding Benton of hell.

SCARPETTA STARES AT THE unopened letter, the warm, damp air moving freely through her open door.

Clouds are black flowers floating low on the horizon, and she senses that rain will come before dawn and she will wake up with all the windows fogged up, which is intolerable. No doubt the neighbors think she’s obsessive and mad when they see her on her balcony with bath towels at seven a.m., vigorously wiping condensation off the outside of the glass. Then, because of her forced and despicable bond with him, she imagines him inside his death-row cell with no view, and her mission of scrubbing clean her dewy, opaque windows becomes all the more urgent.

The unopened letter addressed to Madame Scarpetta, LLB is centered on a square of clean white freezer paper. Female physicians in France are addressed as Madame. In America, referring to a female physician as anything but Doctor is an insult. She is unpleasantly reminded of crafty defense attorneys addressing her in court as Mrs. Scarpetta instead of Dr. Scarpetta, thereby stripping her of her credentials and expertise, in hopes that the jurors and perhaps even the judge would not take her as seriously as they would a Medicinae Doctor whose specialty of pathology and subspecialty of forensic pathology required six additional years of training after medical school.

While it is true that Scarpetta also has a law degree, virtually no one adds the abbreviation for legum baccalaureus after her surname, and for her to do so would be arrogant and misleading because she does not practice law. The three years she spent in law school at Georgetown were for the purpose of facilitating her eventual career in legal medicine, and that was all. To add the abbreviation LLB after her name is mocking in its pretentiousness and condescension.

Jean-Baptiste Chandonne.

She knows the letter is from him.

For an instant, she smells his horrible stench. An olfactory hallucination. The last time she had one was when she visited the Holocaust Museum and smelled death.

“I’ve been out in the yard with Billy. He’s done his business and is very busy chasing lizards,” Rose is saying. “Anything else I can do for you before I leave?”

“No thank you, Rose.”

A pause, then, “Well, did you like my tuna salad?”

“You could open your own restaurant,” Scarpetta says.

She puts on a fresh pair of white cotton examination gloves and picks up the letter and the scalpel, working the tip of the triangular blade into a top corner of the envelope. Stainless steel hisses through the cheap paper.

THE CHAIR ROCCO SITS ON is a padded one.

Two—no, maybe it was three or four—surreal hours ago, he was in this same chair, eating dinner, when room service knocked on his door to bring him a bottle of champagne, a very nice Moët & Chandon, compliments of the management. Rocco, who is streetwise and chronically paranoid, was not the least bit suspicious. He is an important man who stays in the Radisson whenever he is in Szczecin. It is the only decent hotel in the city, and management routinely sends him gifts, including fine cognac and Cuban cigars, because he pays his bills in American cash instead of worthless zloty.

His habit of feeling secure in this hotel is how the intruder with the Colt pistol got inside Rocco’s deluxe room. It happened so fast, he didn’t have time to react to the tall waiter who wasn’t wearing a uniform and shoved his way inside with an empty bottle of champagne on a service tray he obviously had picked up outside another guest’s room. This asshole—whoever he is—grabbed Rocco that easily.

Rocco pushes his plate as far away from him as possible. He worries that next he will vomit. He has soiled himself. The room smells so foul he cannot understand how his captor endures it, but the young, muscular man sitting on the bed doesn’t seem to notice. He stares at Rocco, the stare of a man high on adrenaline and ready to kill. He will not allow Rocco to clean up. He won’t allow Rocco to get out of the chair. He drops his cell phone on the bed after another brief conversation with someone, and goes over to the tray with its empty champagne bottle. Rocco watches the man carefully wipe off the bottle with a napkin. Rocco tries to place him. Maybe he has seen him before, or maybe the explanation is that he has that look—the look of a federal agent.

“Listen,” Rocco says over the noise of the TV, “just tell me who and why, come on. You tell me who and why, maybe we can work something out you’ll like better. You’re an agent, aren’t you? Some kinda agent. That don’t mean we can’t work something out.”

He has said this at least six times since the agent walked in with the empty bottle on its tray, then slammed the door shut with a back kick and pulled his gun. Several times now, he has opened the door and slammed it shut. This makes Rocco increasingly nervous. Although he doesn’t understand the agent’s purpose, it has crossed his mind, even during previous stays, that the doors shut so loudly in this hotel that they sound like gunshots.

“Keep your voice down,” the agent tells him.

He places the champagne bottle on Rocco’s table.

“Pick it up.” The agent nods at it.

Rocco stares at the bottle and swallows hard.

“Pick it up, Rocco.”

“So I’ll ask you again. How come you know my name?” Rocco persists. “Come on. You know me, right? We can work things out . . . .”

“Pick up the bottle.”

He does. The agent wants Rocco’s fingerprints on the bottle. This is not good. The agent wants it to appear as though Rocco ordered or somehow acquired the champagne and drank it. This is very bad. His fears gather in strength as the agent returns to the bed, picks up a jacket and pulls out a leather flask. He unscrews the cap and returns to Rocco’s table, pouring a large amount of vodka in what is left of one of Rocco’s cocktails.

“Drink up,” the agent says.

Rocco swallows the vodka in several gulps, grateful as it burns its way down, warming him and sending its seductive, dulling agents along his blood and to his head. His confused thoughts float toward the hope that the agent is showing mercy, treating him decently, trying to make him relax. Maybe the agent’s rethinking things, wants to make a deal.

Rocco speculates, but it is a fact that someone sent the man, someone who knows Rocco’s business intimately and is aware that once a month he travels to Szczecin to handle Chandonne affairs at the port. Rocco’s primary responsibility is to deal with police and other officials. This is business as usual. He can do it drunk, nothing more than routine legal finagling and the usual fees and, if necessary, reminders of what a dangerous world it is.

Only an insider would know Rocco’s schedule and where he stays. The hotel staff doesn’t know what he does, only that he is from New York, or so he says. No one cares what he does. He is generous. He is rich. Instead of passing off the usual zloty, he pays and lavishly tips in American cash, which is very hard to come by and very useful on the black market. Everyone likes him. The bartenders double the Chopin vodka in his drinks at the upstairs bar, where he frequently sits in the dark, smoking cigars.

His captor looks about twenty-eight, maybe early thirties. His black hair is short and styled with gel in that spiked look that a lot of young men like these days. Rocco notices the square jaw, straight nose, dark blue eyes, stubble and the veins standing out in the man’s biceps and hands. He probably doesn’t need a weapon to crush someone. Women like him. They probably stare at him, hit on him. Rocco has never been attractive. As a teenager, he was already suffering from pattern baldness, and he couldn’t stay away from pizza and beer, and looked it. Envy possesses him. It always has. Women sleep with him only because he has power and money. Hatred toward his captor flares.

“You don’t know what you’re messing with here,” Rocco says.

The agent doesn’t bother answering him, his eyes darting around the room. Rocco wipes his face with his greasy napkin, his attention wandering to the steak knife on his plate.

“Try it,” the agent says, looking at the steak knife. “Go ahead. Please try it. Make my life a hell of a lot easier.”

“I wasn’t gonna do nothing. Just let me go and we’ll forget this ever happened.”

“I can’t let you go. Truth is, this isn’t my idea of fun. So I’m in a bad mood already. Don’t piss me off. You want to help yourself? Well, you know what they say about coming clean at the end.”

“No. What the hell do they say?”

“Where’s Jay Talley, and don’t tell me another fucking lie, asshole.”

“I don’t know,” Rocco whines. “I swear to God I don’t. I’m scared of him, too. He’s crazy. He don’t play the game, and every one of us stay clear of him. He marches to his own beat, swear to God. Can’t I please change my pants? You can watch me. I won’t try nothing.”

Rudy gets off the bed and opens the closet door, the Colt casually by his side, indicating to an increasingly defeated and terrified Rocco that this man is not afraid of anything. There are maybe half a dozen flashy suits hanging on the rod, and he pulls off a pair of pants and tosses them to Rocco.

“Go on.” The agent opens the bathroom door and sits back down on the bed.

Rocco trembles as he walks inside the bathroom and peels off his pants and briefs. He tosses them into the tub, douses a towel with tap water and wipes himself.

“Jay Talley,” the agent says again. “Real name, Jean-Paul Chandonne.”

“Ask me something else.” Rocco means it as he sits in a different chair.

“Okay. We’ll get back to Talley later. You got plans to take out your father?” The agent’s stare is cold. “It’s no secret you hate him.”

“I don’t claim him.”

“Doesn’t matter, Rocco. You ran away from home. You changed your name from Marino to Caggiano. What’s the plan and who’s involved?”

Rocco hesitates for the longest time, thoughts jumping behind his bloodshot eyes. The agent gets up, breathing through his mouth as if to avoid the stench. He presses the barrel of the Colt against Rocco’s right temple.

“Who, what, when and where?” he says, tapping the barrel of the pistol against Rocco’s head with each word. “Don’t fuck with me!”

“I was gonna do it. In a couple months when he goes fishing. He always goes fishing at Buggs Lake the first week of August. Nail him in his cabin, make it look like a burglary gone bad.”

“So you would kill your own father when he’s on a fishing trip. You know what you are, Rocco? You’re the worst shit I ever met.”

WHENEVER NIC ROBILLARD drives past the Sno Depot in downtown Zachary, she feels like crying.

Tonight, the stand, with its handpainted signs advertising snow cones, is dark and deserted. If Buddy were with her, he’d be staring out the window and begging, not caring that the Sno Depot is closed and it isn’t possible for his mother to buy him a treat. That boy loves snow cones more than anybody Nic’s ever heard of, and despite her efforts to steer him away from sweets, he demands a snow cone—cherry or grape—every time she takes him anywhere in the car.

Buddy is with his grandfather in Baton Rouge right now, where he always is when Nic has to work late, and ever since she returned from Knoxville, she works constantly. Scarpetta inspired her. The need to impress Scarpetta dominates Nic’s life. She is determined to bring about the arrest of the serial killer. She is frantic about the abducted women, knowing it absolutely will happen again if the maniac isn’t caught. She is tormented by grief and guilt because she is neglecting her son after she was away from him for two and a half months.

If Buddy ever stopped loving her or turned out wrong, Nic would want to die. Some nights when she finally returns to her tiny Victorian house around the corner from St. John the Baptist Catholic Church on Lee Street, she lies in bed, staring at dark shapes inside her small room, and listens to the silence as she imagines Buddy sound asleep at her father’s house in Baton Rouge. Thoughts about her son and ex-husband, Ricky, flit about like moths. She contemplates whether she would shoot herself in the heart or the head if she were to lose everything that matters.

Not one person has any idea that Nic gets depressed. Not one person would ever imagine that there are times when she entertains thoughts of suicide. What keeps her from the unthinkable is her belief that self-murder is one of the most selfish sins a person can commit, and she envisions the dire consequences of such an act, pushing the fatal fantasy far out of reach until the next time she dives into a dead man’s spin of powerlessness, loneliness and despair.

“Shit,” she whispers as she drives south on Main Street, leaving the Sno Depot behind in her emotional wake. “I’m so sorry, Buddy-Boy, my Buddy-Boy.” What a decision she faces: choosing between doing nothing about women being murdered and doing nothing about her son.

MON PETIT AGNEAU PRISÉ!” My little treasured lamb, Scarpetta translates as her heart freezes at the sight of Chandonne’s handwriting and she feels his presence in his letter to her.

She has been sitting in the same position for so long—in the straight-backed wooden chair by her bedroom’s open door—that her lower back aches and the small glass table is sweating from the humid sea air. As she remembers to breathe, she realizes that every muscle is tense, her entire body like a clenched fist.

The letter, the letter, the letter.

It stuns her that his handwriting is beautiful, a practiced calligraphy penned in black ink, not a single word crossed through, not a single mistake that she can see at a glance. He must have spent a lot of time writing this letter to her, as if it was a loving endeavor, and the idea of that just adds to the horror. He thinks of her. He is telling her so by the very act of his artistic penmanship.

She reads his words:

Do you know about the Red Stick yet and that you must go there?

But not until you come to see me first. In the Longhorn State, as they say!

You see, I direct you.

You have no will of your own. You may think you do, but I am the current running through your body, every impulse coming from me. I am inside you. Feel it!

Do you remember that night? You eagerly opened your door and then attacked me because you could not face your longing for me. I have forgiven you for taking my eyes, but you could not take my soul. It follows you constantly. If you try, you can touch it.

Maintenant! Maintenant! It is time. The Red Stick awaits you.

You must come to me first or it will be too late to hear my stories.

Only for you will I tell them.

I know what you want, mon petit agneau prisé! I have what you want.

In two weeks I will be dead and have nothing to say. Ha!

Will you release me to the ecstasy?

Or will I release you? Sinking my teeth into your soft, round loveliness.

If you do not find me, I will find you.

Love and rapture,
Jean-Baptiste

In the old-style bathroom with its plain white toilet, its plain plastic shower curtain around the plain white tub, its mildew-stained white walls, Scarpetta vomits. She drinks a glass of water from the tap and returns to the bedroom, to the table, to that blighted piece of paper, which she suspects will offer her no evidence. He is too clever to leave evidence.

She sits in the chair, trying to fight the images of the filthy beast flying through her front door like an evil spirit crackling out of hell. Scarcely can she recall in detail the pursuit, that terrible pursuit around her living room, as he swung an iron hammer, the same iron hammer he had used before to shatter women’s heads and bodies to battered flesh and splintered bone, especially their faces.

At the time she was the medical examiner for the Richmond murders, it never occurred to her that she might be the next one. Since that near-death experience, she struggles to will away her imagined destruction of her own body and face. He would not have raped her. He isn’t capable of rape. Jean-Baptiste’s revenge on the world is to cause death and disfigurement, to re-create others in his own image. He is the ultimate embodiment of self-hate.

If it is true that she saved her life by permanently blinding him, then he should be so lucky as to be spared his own reflection in the polished metal mirror he must look at every day inside his death row cell.

Scarpetta goes to a hallway closet and moves the vacuum cleaner out of the way. She rolls out a suitcase.

IF YOU NEED ANYTHING, CALL me on my cell phone,” Nic says, standing in the front doorway of her father’s white brick house in the Old Garden District, where homes are large and spreading canopies of magnolias and live oaks keep much of the city’s old establishment in the shade.

Even on the brightest days, Nic finds her childhood home dark and foreboding.

“Why, you know I’m not calling that newfangled little phone of yours,” her father says, winking at her. “Even if you don’t make the call, you have to pay for it, isn’t that right? Or does unlimited mileage, I mean minutes, apply?”

“What?” Nic frowns, then laughs. “Never mind. My new number’s taped to the refrigerator, whether you decide to call it or not. If I don’t call back right away, you know it’s because I’m busy. Now you be good, Buddy-Boy. You’re my big man, right?”

Her five-year-old son peeks out from behind his grandfather and makes a face.

“Got it!” Nic pretends to snatch his nose and tries the old trick of sticking her thumb up between two fingers. “Do you want your nose back or not?”

Buddy looks like the proverbial towheaded choir boy, dressed in overalls that are an inch too short. He touches his nose and sticks out his tongue.

“You keep sticking out that tongue of yours and one day it won’t fit in your mouth anymore,” his grandfather warns him.

“Shhhh,” Nic says. “Don’t be saying things like that, Papa. He’ll believe you.”

She peeks around him and grabs her son. “Gotcha!” She lifts him up and covers his face with kisses. “Looks like it’s time to go shopping, my big man. You’re outgrowing your clothes again. How come you keep doing that, huh?”

“I dunno.” He hugs her tightly around the neck.

“Do you think it’s possible you might wear something besides overalls?” she whispers in his ear.

He vigorously shakes his head. She gently puts him down.

“Why can’t I come?” Buddy pouts.

“Mama has to work. By the time you wake up, I’ll be back, okay? You go on to bed like my big man and I’ll bring you a surprise.”

“What surprise?”

“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise, now would it?” Nic kisses the top of his head again, and he irritably musses his hair as if swatting away bugs. “Uh-oh,” she says to her father. “I believe someone’s getting grumpy.”

Buddy gives her a look, a mixture of anger and hurt that never fails to make Nic feel as though she has betrayed and failed him. Ever since her salesman ex-husband Ricky got the promotion he always wanted, he got more impossible to live with, traveling all the time, complaining and unkind. He’s gone, and Nic’s glad, relieved, but deeply wounded in ways she can’t define. Hardships in life are always for the best if you do God’s will, according to the doctrine of her father, who loves her but won’t take her side in her failed marriage.

“You ought to know that being a cop doesn’t mix with holding on to a man, if you ever get married,” he told her when she got accepted to the police academy eight years ago, after a dreary career of working as a bookkeeper at the Ford dealership in Zachary, where she eventually met Ricky. They dated three months and moved in together. Another sin. At last she was free of her haunted house.

“Mama had her own business,” Nic reminded her father every time he made his comments.

“Honey, that’s not the same. She didn’t carry a gun.”

“Maybe if she had . . .”

“Now, you hush your mouth!”

She finished the sentence only once. This was after she filed for divorce and her father berated her for an entire afternoon, pacing in his living room, his face a storm of disbelief, fear and anger. He’s a big, lanky man, and every upset stride seemed to carry him from one wall to the other and jostled the antique crystal lamp on the table next to the couch until it finally fell over and broke.

“Now look what you did!” he cried out. “You broke your mother’s lamp.”

“You broke it.”

“Girls don’t need to be chasing criminals and shooting guns. That’s why you lost Ricky. He married a pretty woman, not an Annie Oakley. And what kind of mother . . .”

That was when Nic said it. “If Mama had a gun, maybe she wouldn’t have been butchered by some fucking asshole right here in our own house!”

“Don’t you dare use words like that,” he told her, emphasizing each stony word with a violent stab of his finger, stabs that reminded her of what was done to her mother.

They never touched the subject again. It remains a stalled storm front between them. No matter how often they see each other, she can’t feel his warmth or get too close. After two premature babies who didn’t survive, Nic was born and is the only child her father has. After he retired from teaching high school sociology, he got bored and pretty much quit life. He spends his mornings working crossword puzzles when he’s not baby-sitting, and taking obsessively long, brisk walks.

She knows he blames himself. Her mother was murdered eight years ago in the middle of the day while he and Nic were both at work. Maybe she blames herself, too, not so much for her mother’s death, she tells herself, but because if Nic hadn’t gone out with friends after work, her father might not have been the one to find his wife’s body and blood all over the house, from where she fought her killer, running from room to room. By the time Nic got home, slightly drunk from beer, police were swarming the property, her mother’s body already removed. Nic never saw it. It was a closed-casket funeral. She’s never been able to bring herself to get a copy of the police report, and because the case remains unsolved, the coroner’s office won’t give her a copy of the autopsy records. All she knows is that her mother was stabbed and slashed and bled to death. Knowing that was enough. But for some reason, it isn’t anymore.

On this particular night, Nic is determined to talk, but that can’t happen unless Buddy is occupied.

“You want to watch TV for a few minutes before bed?” she asks him.

It is a special privilege indeed.

“Yes,” he says, still pouting.

He runs inside the house, and the TV goes on.

She nods at her father, and he accompanies her outside.

“Come on,” she whispers to him, and they pick their usual spot beneath the ancient live oak tree at the edge of the yard.

“This had better be good.” He has his lines and never tires of reusing them.

She catches the gleam of his teeth as he talks and knows he’s pleased when she drags him out in the middle of the night to have a secret conversation, one not meant for a toddler’s ears.

“I know you don’t want to talk about it,” Nic begins, “but it’s about Mama.” She feels him jerk and withdraw, as if his spirit has suddenly fled from his body. “I need to know more, Papa. Not knowing is doing something to me. Maybe because of what’s happening around here now, with these women disappearing. I’m feeling something. I don’t know how else to say it, but I’m feeling something. Something terrible.” Her voice trembles. “And it’s scaring me, Papa. The way I’m feeling sometimes is scaring me bad.”

His silence is as formidable as the tree they stand under.

“Remember when I got the ladder and propped it against this very tree.” She looks heavenward, her vision caught in thick, dark branches and leaves. “Next thing I know, I’m stuck up there, too scared to climb higher or come back down. And you had to get me.”

“I remember.” His voice sounds as if nobody is home.

“Well, that’s the way I feel right now,” she goes on, trying to appeal to the part of him that shut down after his wife was murdered. “I can’t climb up or down, and I need you to help me, Papa.”

“There’s nothing I can do,” he says.

SZCZECIN’S SKYLINE IS PIERCED by antennas, the streets quiet, the downtown shabby.

Not one of the stores looks inviting, especially at this late hour, and the few cars out are old and worse for the wear. The Radisson is built of brick, the courtyard gray and red pavers, and a large blue banner out front welcomes a Methods and Models in Automation and Robotics meeting, and that is fortunate.

The more people in the hotel, the better, and Lucy used to program robots and can talk technology with anybody if need be. But it won’t be necessary. She has a plan, a very good one in all respects. She finds a spot to park several streets down from a Fila store, just past a delikatesy.

Flipping down the mirror on the visor, she quickly applies makeup and puts on gold hoop earrings. She yanks off her tennis shoes and pulls on black satin cowboy boots that are disgustingly necessary should someone spot her inside the hotel. She struggles into a black blouse, linen and wrinkled, and tucks her tactical baton up its sleeve. She unbuttons it low enough to show off cleavage. Transformed into a sexy young woman who is staying in the hotel, Lucy is sufficiently disheveled and alluring to pass for a typical convention attendee who has been out having a good time half the night. Throwing on a windbreaker and cursing her boots, she walks quickly to the hotel beneath the dim auras of streetlights.

This Radisson is self-service, as Lucy calls hotels where she carries her own bags, uses her magnetized room key to let herself into the gym and fills her own ice bucket, and where the housekeepers are shocked when left a tip. There is no doorman or bellman at this hour, only a young woman reading a Polish magazine behind the front desk. Lucy stays outside in the dark, glancing around, making certain no one suddenly walks up and sees her. In that unlikely event, she will dig inside the small leather satchel looped over her shoulder, pretending to look for her room key. She waits restlessly for ten minutes before the bored, weary desk clerk gets up and walks off, perhaps to the ladies’ room, perhaps to find coffee. Lucy strolls across the lobby and disappears inside the elevator, pushing the button for the fifth floor.

Rudy is in room 511. It is not his room. He got inside the hotel very much the same way Lucy did, only he got a good break, got to walk in with a crowd of businessmen returning from dinner. Fortunately, he was smart enough to wear a suit and tie. Rudy is an odd breed. Former HRT comrades envied his beautiful muscular body and accused him of taking steroids, which he has never touched. Lucy would know, because Rudy may have his flaws, but he is so honest and sincere that she sometimes calls him girlfriend. She knows every detail of his diet, vitamin and protein supplements, and grueling workout routines, and his favorite magazines and television shows. She can’t remember the last time he read a book. She also understands why he sexually assaulted her in the Tire House and, if anything, feels bad that she broke his nose.

“I thought you were hot for me, too. I swear,” he explained with the most pitiful expression on his face. “I guess I got all excited rolling around between tires and shooting, and you were right there with me with cartridge cases pinging everywhere, both of us dirty and sooty, and you looked so good I couldn’t stand it, so I asked you that question—when I shouldn’t have—and then you said you wanted sex whenever you could get it. I thought you meant with me.”

“Right that minute?” Lucy said. “You really thought that?”

“Yeah. That you were hot and bothered too.”

“Now and then you should watch something besides action movies,” Lucy replied. “Walt Disney, maybe?”

They had this conversation inside her room at the FBI Academy, both of them sitting on her bed because she was not afraid of Rudy and never has been. He was the one with stitches below his lip and a broken nose that required the skills of a plastic surgeon.

“Besides, and I know this may sound like bullshit to you, Lucy, but I’d had it with what the other guys were saying. Maybe I wanted to prove something—prove you weren’t what they’ve been saying.”

“I get it. If we had sex, then you could go back and tell them all about it.”

“No! I didn’t mean it like that. I wouldn’t have told them anything. It’s none of their business!”

“Hmmm. Let me sort through this. Having sex in the Tire House would have proven to the other guys that I’m into guys—even though they wouldn’t have known about our having sex in the Tire House because you’re too honorable to kiss and tell.”

“Ah, fuck.” Rudy stared dejectedly at the floor. “I’m not saying it right. I wouldn’t have told them a thing, but next time they bad-mouthed you, accused you of being gay or frigid or whatever, I could have given them a look, done something to indicate they didn’t know what they were talking about.”

“I appreciate that your intention was my welfare as you tried to rip off my clothes and rape me,” Lucy replied.

“I wasn’t trying to rape you! For Christ’s sake, don’t use a word like that! I thought you were turned on, too. Shit, Lucy. What do you want me to do?”

“Never try a stunt like that again. Or next time I’ll break more than your nose.”

“Fine. I won’t ever do anything again unless you start it. Or change your mind.”

He resigned from the Bureau and eventually came to work for her at The Last Precinct. Rudy is a perplexing mix. In some ways, he is the big, handsome dope incapable of making a commitment to any woman he has ever claimed to desperately love (and his choices, as far as Lucy knows, demonstrate appallingly bad judgment). But as a crime fighter, he is as meticulous and skillful as he is as a helicopter pilot. Rudy isn’t selfish or narcissistic. He rarely drinks and never touches drugs, not even aspirin.

“One good thing about it.” Rudy looked up at Lucy as they sat on her bed. “When the plastic surgeon was fixing my nose, he went ahead and shaved that little bump off it.” He gently touched the splint on the bridge of his nose. “He says I’ll have a perfect Roman nose. That’s what he called it, a Roman nose.”

He paused, slightly perplexed. “What exactly is a Roman nose?”

LUCY KNOCKS ON the door of room 511.

It has a Do Not Disturb sign hanging on the knob, and the TV is loud inside, hoofs pounding, guns firing. It sounds like Rudy is watching a Western. But what he’s watching is Rocco.

“Yeah.” After a pause, Rudy’s voice sounds from inside.

“Down and secure,” she uses helicopter talk and scans the hallway as she pulls latex gloves out of a pocket and works her hands into them.

The door opens wide enough for her to slip through, and she closes it behind her. Rudy is also wearing surgical gloves, and turns the lock and dead bolt. Lucy takes off her windbreaker and stares hard at Rocco Caggiano, at his flabby, fat body and his bloodshot eyes. She takes in every detail of the room. Draped over a chair is his black cashmere overcoat, and in a corner on the carpet are a plastic tray and an empty bottle of champagne next to a stainless-steel ice bucket filled with water. It would have taken hours for the ice to completely melt. The bed is king-size, and directly across from it in front of a window with the drapes drawn are a small glass table and two chairs. On the carpet are several British newspapers. He’s recently been in England, maybe. But Rocco has never bothered to learn a second language. The papers could have come from anywhere along his route here.

Parked between the table and the bed is a room-service cart with nothing on it but four stainless-steel plate covers. Lucy can’t help but think of Rocco’s estranged father, Pete Marino, as she eyes a gnawed T-bone, the shredded skin of a baked potato, a plate with one pat of butter left (melted), an empty bread basket and a glass goblet filled with wilted lettuce, cocktail sauce, wedges of lemon and shrimp tails. He so completely devoured a slice of chocolate cake, nothing is left but smears made with Rocco’s fingers.

“I gotta go.”

“Be my guest.”

She hurries into the bathroom. The stench is horrible.

“He sober?” Lucy asks Rudy when she returns.

“Sober enough.”

“Must be in the genes.”

“What?”

“The way father and son take care of themselves,” she says. “But that’s all he and Marino have in common.” This to Rocco: “Drop by Szczecin to check on a few spare firearms? Maybe some ammunition, explosives, electronics, perfumes and designer clothing? How many phony bills of lading are in your briefcase?”

Rocco glares at her, his attention dropping to her cleavage.

“Keep your goddamn eyes to yourself,” Lucy snaps, having forgotten about her appearance. She buttons up and resumes her interrogation. “Probably thousands of them floating around somewhere, right, Rocco?”

He says nothing. Lucy notices vomit on the carpet between his black crocodile loafers.

“ ’Bout time you gagged on your own shit, Rocco.” She sits on the edge of the bed.

“That a pickle up your sleeve, or you just happy to see me,” Rudy says to Lucy without a smile, without taking his eyes off Rocco.

Lucy remembers the tactical baton up the sleeve of her linen blouse, slips it out and sets it on the bedside table. It is warm in the room. She glances at the thermostat, verifying that Rudy turned up the heat to seventy-four degrees. Any higher than that could arouse suspicion. Blowing heat moves the drapes drawn across the window on the other side of the room. The window is large and faces the front of the hotel. Rocco stares at the pistol, his eyes filling with tears.

“My, my,” Lucy remarks, “you’re quite a crybaby for someone so mean and tough. And by the way, your father doesn’t cry.” She looks at Rudy. “You ever seen Marino cry?”

“Nope.”

“You ever seen him shit in his pants?”

“Nope. Did’cha know that Rocco here had plans to put a bullet in Marino’s head on his fishing trip? You know, the one he always takes to Buggs Lake.”

Lucy doesn’t comment. A flush creeps up her neck. Hopefully, Marino will never know that she and Rudy came here and probably saved his life. Rocco won’t be shooting anyone ever again.

“You could have killed your father years ago. Why this August?” Lucy asks him.

She knows when Marino takes his annual fishing trip.

Rocco shrugs. “Instructions.”

“From whom?”

“My former client. He has scores to settle.”

“Jean-Baptiste,” Lucy says. “So the two of you have remained close. That’s touching, because he’s the reason you’re about to die.”

“I don’t believe you!” Rocco exclaims. “He’d never . . . He needs me.”

“For what?” Rudy asks.

“Outside work,” Rocco replies. “I’m still his attorney. He can send me anything he wants. Contact me anytime he wants.”

“What does he send you?” Rudy asks.

“Anything. All he’s got to do is mark it Legal Mail, and no one can open it. So if he wants letters or shit sent to somebody who obviously ain’t a lawyer, he sends it through me.”

“The letter I got from him that ratted you out, Rocco, did he send it through you?” Lucy asks.

“No. He’s never sent me a letter with your name on it. I never open them. Too risky. If he ever found out.” He pauses, his eyes glassy. “I don’t believe he sent you a letter!”

“We’re here, aren’t we?” Rudy says. “So how did that happen if Chandonne didn’t send a letter and tell us everything we need to know?”

Rocco has no answer.

“Why would he want you to kill your father?” Lucy isn’t about to forget that subject. “Especially now. What scores to settle?”

“Maybe Jean-Baptiste don’t like him. I guess you could consider it a parting shot.” Rocco briefly looks smug.

“Mind if I see that for a minute?” Lucy holds out her hand for Rudy’s pistol.

He drops out the magazine and clears the round from the chamber. The cartridge bounces on the bed. Lucy picks it up and Rudy gives her the Colt. She walks close to Rocco and pushes the loose cartridge into the magazine with her thumb.

“Your father taught me how to drive,” she tells Rocco in a conversational tone. “You ever seen those huge pickup trucks of his? Well, that’s what I learned in when I was so little I had to sit on a pillow, even with the seat raised.”

She racks back the slide and aims the pistol between his eyes.

“He taught me how to shoot, too.”

She squeezes the trigger.

Click.

Rocco jumps violently.

“Oops.” Lucy smacks the magazine back inside the handle. “Forgot it wasn’t loaded. Get up, Rocco.”

“You’re cops.” His voice trembles in fear and disbelief. “Cops don’t kill people. They don’t do this!”

“I’m not a cop,” Rudy says to Lucy. “Are you a cop?”

“No. I’m not a cop. I don’t see a single cop in this room, do you?”

“Some CIA paramilitary operatives. Bet they sent you into Iraq, didn’t they? To take out Saddam Hussein. I know what people like you do.”

“Never been to Iraq, have you?” Lucy says to Rudy.

“Not recently.”

ANOTHER WESTERN is playing on the TV.

Mouths move out of sync as two cowboys dismount their horses, voices dubbed in Polish.

“One last chance,” Rudy says to Rocco. “Where’s Jay Talley? Don’t lie. I promise I’ll know.”

“He took a statement analysis course at the FBI Academy,” Lucy says drolly. “Was the star of the class.”

Rocco slowly shakes his head. It is apparent by now that if he knew, he would tell them. He is a self-serving, sniveling coward, and right now he is more afraid of them than he is of Jay Talley.

“Here’s the deal. We’re not going to kill you, Rocco.” Lucy tosses the pistol back to Rudy. “You’re going to commit suicide.”

“No.” He shakes as if he has Parkinson’s disease.

“You’re history, Rocco,” Rudy says. “A fugitive. A Red Notice. You can’t go anywhere anyway. You’ll be grabbed. If you’re lucky, you’ll end up in prison, probably in Sicily, and I hear that’s not a holiday. But you know better. The Chandonnes will take you out. Instantly. And perhaps not as humanely as you can end your own miserable, stinking life. Right now.”

Lucy goes to the bed and digs an envelope out of her shoulder bag’s back pocket. Inside it is a folded sheet of paper. She opens it.

“Here.” She offers it to Rocco.

He makes no effort to touch it.

“Take it. A hard copy of your Red Notice. Hot off the press. You must be curious.”

Rocco doesn’t respond. Even his eyeballs seem to be shaking.

“Take it,” Lucy tells him.

Rocco does. The Red Notice shakes violently in his hands as he leaves his fingerprints on the paper, a detail he probably isn’t thinking about.

“Now read it out loud. I think it’s very important you see what it says. Because I’m confident you’ll decide you have no choice but to kill yourself right here in this lovely hotel room,” Lucy says.

The single page has Interpol’s crest in the upper right corner, of course in bright red. Prominently displayed is Rocco’s photograph, easily acquired. Egotist that he is, he has never ducked the camera when he’s represented criminals in scandalous trials. The picture on the Red Notice is recent and a very good likeness.

“Read out loud,” Lucy orders him again. “Story time, Rocco.”

“Identity particulars.” His voice wavers, and he continues to clear his throat. “Present family name, Rocco Caggiano. Name at birth, Peter Rocco Marino, Junior.”

He pauses at this, and tears brighten his eyes. He bites his lower lip, then continues, reading on and on, all about himself. When he gets to the judicial information and reads that he is wanted for the murders of the Sicilian and French journalists, he rolls his eyes toward the ceiling.

“Jesus,” he mutters, taking a deep breath.

“That’s right,” Lucy says. “Arrest warrant number seven-two-six-oh for poor Mr. Guarino. Arrest warrant number seven-two-six-one for poor Monsieur La Fleur. Issued April twenty-fourth, 2003. Two days ago.”

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Your faithful client, Jean-Baptiste,” Lucy reminds him.

“The bastard,” Rocco mutters. “After all I did for the ugly piece of shit.”

“It’s over, Rocco,” Rudy says.

He drops the Red Notice on top of the table.

“I understand the Chandonnes can be pretty creative,” Lucy says. “Torture. Remember how much Jay Talley liked to string people up with rope and eyebolts and burn them with heat guns? Burn them until their skin was charred black. While they were alive and conscious. Remember how he tried to do that to my aunt while his fucking accomplice Bev Kiffin tried to blow me away with a shotgun?”

Rocco stares off.

She steps closer to him, the thought of what almost happened to her aunt tempting her to whip open her tactical baton and beat Rocco to death. She glances at it on the bedside table, knows better.

“Drowning is another pet choice,” she goes on.

Rocco jerks at this. “No,” he begs.

“Remember Jean-Baptiste’s cousin Thomas? Drowned. Not a nice way to die.” She gives Rudy a look.

He carefully wipes off the Colt with a corner of the bedsheet as an extra precaution, his face hard, his eyes gleaming with a detachment and determination that makes it possible for him to block out the sudden wave of empathy he feels for Rocco, no matter how unworthy of life he is.

Rudy glances at Lucy and briefly their eyes touch like two sparks.

Sweat rolls down Lucy’s face, wisps of hair plastered to her temples. She is pale, and Rudy knows that each of her attempts at dry humor and harshness are forced as she plays the most terrible role of her life.

He pulls back the slide, chambering a round, and approaches Rocco.

“Right-handed, you agree, partner?” Rudy calmly says to Lucy.

“I agree.”

She doesn’t take her eyes off Rocco. Her hands have begun to shake, and she wills herself to think of Jay Talley and his evil paramour Bev Kiffin.

Images.

Lucy envisions the grief on her aunt’s face as she scattered what she believed were Benton Wesley’s ashes over the water. Lucy’s brain seems to slide inside her skull. She has never been seasick. It must feel something like this.

“Your choice,” she says to Rocco. “I mean it. You can die now and feel no pain. No torture. No burns. No drowning. The Red Notice is found right where you dropped it, your suicide completely understandable. Or you can walk out of here, never knowing when you’ll breathe your last breath and what nightmare you’ll suffer when the Chandonnes get you. And they will.”

He nods. Of course they will. It is a given.

“Put out your right hand,” Rudy tells Rocco.

Rocco rolls his eyes toward the ceiling again.

“See? I’m holding the gun, I’m going to help you,” Rudy goes on, lightly, indifferently, as sweat drips on the carpet.

“Make sure the barrel is pointed up,” Lucy says, thinking of the decapitated Nazi’s head.

“Come on, Rocco. Do what I say. It won’t hurt. You won’t even know it.”

Rudy touches the barrel against Rocco’s right temple.

“Up,” Lucy reminds him again.

“Your hand goes around the grips, and my hand goes around yours.”

Rocco closes his eyes, and his hand jumps up and down. He closes his pudgy, short fingers around the grips, and Rudy’s big, strong hand immediately clamps over his.

“I have to help you because you can’t hold the gun still,” Rudy tells him. “You don’t shoot straight, and that could be ugly. And I can’t let you hold the gun all by yourself, now can I? That would make me stupid.” Rudy’s voice is gentle now. “See, that’s not so hard. Now press the barrel tight against your head.”

Rocco gags, his chest heaving. He begins to hyperventilate.

“Pointed up,” Lucy says it one more time, fixated on the decapitated Nazi’s head, trying not to see Rocco’s head.

He sways in his chair, grabbing shallow breaths, his face livid, his eyes squeezed shut. Rudy’s gloved finger pulls the trigger.

The gun fires in a loud pop.

Rocco and his chair fall backward. His head lands on the British newspapers strewn over the carpet, his face turned toward the window. Blood gushing out of his head sounds like running water. Gunsmoke turns the air acrid.

Rudy squats to tuck Rocco’s limp right arm and the pistol under his chest. Any prints or partial prints recovered on the blue steel Colt will be Rocco’s.

Lucy opens a window a crack, no more than three inches, and yanks off her gloves as Rudy presses two fingers against Rocco Caggiano’s carotid artery. His pulse beats faintly and stops. Rudy nods at Lucy and stands up. He digs inside a pocket of his jacket and pulls out a German mustard jar. Holes have been punched in the lid, and blow flies crawl along the inside of the glass, feeding on what is left of the rotting meat that yesterday baited them into captivity at a Dumpster crammed with garbage behind a Polish restaurant.

He opens the jar and shakes it. Several dozen flies lethargically lift off, buzzing to lamps and bouncing against illuminated shades. Sensing pheromones and the plume of an open wound, they greedily drone straight to Rocco’s motionless body. Blow flies, the most common of carrion-feeding insects, alight on his bloody face. Several disappear inside his mouth.

IT IS ONLY eight p.m. in Boston.

Pete Marino sits at the US Air gate, eating chocolate-dipped pretzels and listening to another apologetic announcement that promises his flight will depart after another minor delay of only two hours and ten minutes. This is after an earlier delay that has already held him hostage in Logan Airport for an hour and twenty-five minutes beyond his scheduled departure.

“Shit!” he exclaims, not caring who hears him. “I coulda walked by now!”

Rarely does he have plenty of time to ponder his life, and he thinks of Benton and diverts his misery and rage by focusing on Benton’s physical conditioning and hard, manly body. He looks even better than he used to, Marino depressingly decides. How can that be possible after six years of what amounts to solitary confinement? Marino can’t comprehend it. He starts on a brownie from the basket of Delicious Desserts of Gainesville that he happened upon in the airport gift shop and wonders what it would be like if he quit working for Lucy, just gave up going after dirtbags. They’re cockroaches. Squash one, and five others take its place. Maybe Marino should go fishing, maybe become a professional bowler (he almost had a perfect score once), find him a nice woman and build a cabin in the woods.

Once, very long ago, Marino was admired, too, and the mirror did not hate him. Women—and men, he supposes with confusion and disgust—stare at Benton and lust for him. Marino is certain of this. They can’t resist him when added to his good looks are his brain and his big-shot FBI status, or, more accurately, former FBI status. Marino pushes back strings of gray hair and wakes himself up to the fact that people don’t meet Benton anymore and know his real name or admire his former FBI career. He is supposed to be dead or Tom or nobody. That Scarpetta could miss Benton so much causes Marino a sick pain somewhere around his heart and topples him into deeper despair. He hurts deeply for her. He hurts deeply for himself. If he died, she would grieve, but not forever. She has never been in love with him, never will be, and doesn’t want his fat, hairy body in her bed.

Marino wanders into another gift shop and snatches a fitness magazine off a pile on the floor, an action as foreign to him as Hebrew. Men’s Workout has a handsome young man on the cover who looks as if he’s cut of smooth stone. He must have shaved his entire body except for his head and polished his tanned skin with oil. Marino returns to a nearby sports bar, orders another Budweiser on tap, finds his same table, brushes off pizza crumbs, and sets down the magazine, somewhat afraid of opening it. He finally musters the nerve to pick it up, and its slick cover sticks to the table.

“Hey!” Marino calls to the bartender. “Anyone ever wipe off a table in this joint?”

Everyone in the bar stares at Marino.

“I just paid three-fifty for this watered-down beer, and the table’s so disgusting, my magazine’s sticking to it.”

Everyone in the bar stares at Marino’s magazine. Several young men nudge one another and smile. The annoyed bartender, who would have to be an octopus to keep up with orders, tosses a wet bar towel to Marino. He wipes off his table and tosses it back, almost hitting an old woman in the head. She sips her white wine, oblivious. Marino starts flipping through his magazine. Maybe it isn’t too late to reclaim his masculine plumage, to have muscles he can flex like a peacock fanning its tail. As a boy in New Jersey, he made himself strong from chin-ups, push-ups and maniacal repetitions with free weights he constructed from cinder blocks and mop or broom handles. He lifted the rear ends of cars to work on his back and biceps, clutched a laundry bag filled with bricks while doing squats or running up and down stairs. He boxed with laundry drying on the clothesline, always on windy days when the clothes and linens fought back.

“Peter Rocco! You stop fighting with the laundry! You knock it in the dirt and you get to wash it!”

His mother was a meshed figure behind the screen door, hands on her hips, trying to sound severe as her son’s savage right hook yanked one of his father’s wet undershirts from wooden clothespins and sent it sailing into a nearby bush. As Marino got older, he wrapped his fists in layers of rags and threw wicked punches at an old mattress he kept in the crawl space beneath the house. If it was possible to kill a mattress, this one died a thousand times, propped up against the porch, its ticking finally ripping and its dry-rotted foam rubber disintegrating with each blow. Marino scavenged neighborhood trash piles for discarded mattresses, and he battled his stained obtuse opponents as if he hated them for some unforgivable sin they had committed against him.

“Who you trying to kill, honey?” his mother asked him one afternoon when he was dripping with sweat and wobbly from exhaustion and flinging open the refrigerator door for the ice water his mother always kept there. “Don’t drink out of the jug. How many times I gotta tell you? You know what germs are? They’re little ugly bugs crawling out of your mouth right into the jug. Don’t matter if you can’t see ’em. Doesn’t make them any less real, and those very germs are what gives you and everyone else the flu and polio, and you end up in an iron lung and . . .”

“Dad drinks outta the jug.”

“Well.”

“Well what, Mom?”

“He’s the man of the house.”

“Well, ain’t that something. Guess he ain’t got little ugly bugs crawling out him like everybody else, since he’s the man of the house. Guess he don’t give a rat’s ass who ends up in an iron lung.”

“Who you fighting out there when you beat up the mattress? Fight, fight, fight. You’re always fighting.”

Marino buys another beer and consoles himself with the thought that the male models in the workout magazine are not fighters, because they have the flexibility of a rock. They don’t dance on their feet, boxing. They don’t do anything but lift iron and pose for photographers and poison themselves with steroids. Still, Marino wouldn’t mind having a stomach that looks like moguls in a ski run, and what he wouldn’t give for his hair to come home to his head instead of continuing its relentless migration to other parts of his body. He smokes and drinks to the noise of a basketball dribbling, shoes squeaking and crowds yelling on the big-screen TV. Loudly flipping through a few more pages of his magazine, he begins to notice advertisements for aphrodisiacs, performance enhancements and invitations to skin parties and strip volleyball.

When he reaches a centerfold of hairless hunks wearing G-strings and fishnet bikini briefs, he slaps the magazine shut. A businessman sitting one table over gets up and moves to the other end of the bar. Marino takes his time finishing his beer and gets up and stretches and yawns. People in the bar watch him as he makes his way toward the businessman and drops the magazine on top of his Wall Street Journal.

“Call me,” Marino says with a wink as he saunters out of the bar.

BACK AT THE US AIR GATE, Marino is seized by agitation and impetuosity.

His flight has been delayed another hour due to weather. Suddenly, he doesn’t want to go home to Trixie and get up in the morning and realize what happened in Boston. Thinking of his small house with its carport in its blue-collar neighborhood sinks his spirit lower into bitterness and a need to fight back. If only he could identify the enemy. Why he continues to live in Richmond makes no sense. Richmond is the past. Why he allowed Benton to blow him off makes no sense. He should never have walked away from Benton’s apartment.

“You know what due to weather means?” Marino asks the young red-headed woman sitting next to him, filing her nails.

Two rude behaviors Marino simply can’t tolerate are public farts and the scratching sound of manicures accompanied by drifting nail dust.

The file continues to rapidly scratch-scratch.

“It means they ain’t decided whether to fly our asses outta Boston yet. See? There ain’t enough passengers to make it worth their while. They lose money, they don’t go nowhere and blame it on something else.”

The file freezes and the woman looks around at dozens of empty plastic seats.

“You can sit here all night,” Marino goes on, “or come find a motel room with me.”

After a moment of disbelief, she gets up and walks off in a huff.

“Pig,” she says.

Marino smiles, civility restored, his boredom assuaged, if only briefly. He is not going to wait for a flight that probably will never happen, and then he thinks of Benton again. Anger and paranoia ooze into his skull. His feeling of powerlessness and rejection settle more closely around him, choking him with a depression that stalls his thoughts and fatigues him as if he hasn’t slept in days. He can’t stand it. He won’t. He wishes he could call Lucy, but he doesn’t know where she is. All she told him was that she had business to take care of that required traveling.

“What business?” Marino asked her.

“Just business.”

“Sometimes I wonder why the hell I work for you.”

“I don’t wonder about it in the least. I never give it a thought,” Lucy said over the phone from her office in Manhattan. “You adore me.”

Outside Logan Airport, Marino flags down a Cambridge Checker cab, practically stepping in front of it and waving his arms, ignoring the taxi line and the dozens of weary, unhappy people in it.

“The Embankment,” he tells the driver. “Near where the band shell is.”

SCARPETTA DOESN’T KNOW where Lucy is, either.

Her niece doesn’t answer her home or cell phones and hasn’t returned numerous pages. Scarpetta can’t reach Marino, and she has no intention of calling Rose and telling her about the letter. Her secretary worries too much already. Scarpetta sits on her bed, thinking. Billy makes his way up the dog ramp and plops down just far enough away to make her reach if she wants to pet him, and she does.

“Why do you always sit so far away from me?” she talks to him as she stretches out to stroke his soft, floppy ears. “Oh, I get it. I’m supposed to reposition myself and move closer to you.”

She does.

“You’re a very willful dog, you know.”

Billy licks her hand.

“I have to go out of town for a few days,” she tells him. “But Rose will take good care of you. Maybe you’ll stay at her house and she’ll take you to the beach. So promise you won’t get upset that I’m leaving.”

He never does. The only reason he comes running when she heads out on a trip is that he wants a ride in the car. He’d ride around in a car all day, given the choice. Scarpetta dials Lucy’s office a second time. Although it is long past closing time, the phone is answered by an alive and awake human being twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Tonight, it is Zach Manham’s turn.

“Okay, Zach,” she says right off. “It’s bad enough you won’t tell me where Lucy is . . .”

“It’s not that I won’t tell . . .”

“Of course it is,” she cuts him off. “You know, but you won’t tell me.”

“I swear to God I don’t know,” Manham replies. “Look, if I did, I’d call her on her international cell phone and at least tell her to call you.”

“So she has her international cell phone with her. Then she’s out of the country?”

“She always carries her international cell phone. You know, the one that takes photographs, videotapes, connects to the Internet. She’s got the latest model. It makes pizza.”

Nothing is funny to Scarpetta right now.

“I tried her cell phone. She’s not answering,” she says, “whether she’s in this country or some other one. So what about Marino? You holding out on me about him, too?”

“I haven’t talked to him in days,” Manham says. “No, I don’t know where he is. He not answering his cell phone or pages, either?”

“No.”

“Want me to take a polygraph, Doc?”

“Yes.”

Manham laughs.

“Okay, I quit. I’m too tired to keep this up all night,” Scarpetta says as she rubs Billy’s tummy. “If and when you ever hear from either one of them again, tell them to contact me immediately. It’s urgent. Urgent enough that I’m flying to New York tomorrow.”

“What? Are you in danger?” Manham asks, alarmed.

“I don’t want to talk about it with you, Zach. No offense intended. Good night.”

She locks her bedroom door, sets the alarm and places her pistol on the bedside table.

MARINO DOESN’T LIKE the taxi driver and asks him where he’s from.

“Kabul.”

“Kabul’s where, exactly?” Marino asks. “I mean, I know what country” (he doesn’t), “but not its exact geographical location.”

“Kabul is the capital of Afghanistan.”

Marino tries to envision Afghanistan. All that comes to mind are dictators, terrorists and camels.

“And you do what there?”

“I do nothing there. I live here.” The driver’s dark eyes glance at him in the rearview mirror. “My family worked in the wool mills, and I came here eight years ago. You should go to Kabul. It is very beautiful. Visit the old city. My name is Bbur. You have questions or need a cab, call my company and ask for me.” He smiles, his teeth gleaming white in the dark.

Marino senses the driver is making fun of him, but he doesn’t get the joke. The driver’s identification card is fastened to the passenger’s seat visor, and Marino tries to read it, but can’t. His vision isn’t what it used to be, and he refuses to wear glasses. Despite Scarpetta’s urging, he also refuses laser surgery, which he adamantly claims will make him blind or damage his frontal lobe.

“This way don’t look familiar,” Marino comments in his usual grumpy tone as unrecognizable buildings flow past his window.

“We take a shortcut along the harbor, past the wharfs and then the causeway. Very pretty sights.”

Marino leans forward on the hard bench seat, avoiding a spring that seems determined to work its way out of the vinyl upholstery and uncoil and bite his left buttock.

“You’re heading north, you Mohammed scumbag! I may not be from Boston, but I know where the Embankment is, and you ain’t even on the right side of the fucking river!”

The cabdriver who calls himself Bbur completely ignores his passenger and continues along his route, cheerfully pointing out the sights, including the Suffolk County Jail, the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Shriners Burn Center. By the time he drops Marino off on Storrow Drive, close but not too close to Benton Wesley’s apartment building, the meter registers $68.35. Marino slings open the door and throws a crumpled one-dollar bill onto the front seat.

“You owe me sixty-seven dollars and thirty-five cents.” The taxi driver smooths open the dollar bill on his leg. “I will call the police!”

“And I’ll beat the shit out of you. And you can’t do nothing about it, because you ain’t legal, right? Show me your green card, asshole, and guess what, I’m the police and got a pistol strapped under my arm.” He snatches out his wallet and flashes the badge he did not return to the Richmond Police Department after he retired.

He said he lost it.

Tires squeal as the taxi driver speeds off, screaming curses out his open window. Marino heads toward the Longfellow Bridge and veers off southeast, briefly following the same sidewalk he and Benton walked along earlier today. He takes a roundabout way beneath gas lamplight on Pinckney and Revere, constantly listening and checking his surroundings, making certain he isn’t being followed, as is his habit. Marino isn’t thinking about the Chandonne cartel. He is on the lookout for the usual street punks and lunatics, although he has seen no evidence of either in this section of Beacon Hill.

When Benton’s building comes into view, Marino notices that the windows of unit 56 are dark.

“Shit,” he mutters, tossing his cigarette, not bothering to stamp it out.

Benton must have gone out for a late dinner, or to the gym, or for a jog. But that isn’t likely, and Marino’s anxieties tighten his chest with his every step. He knows damn well that Benton would leave lights on when he goes out. He isn’t the sort to walk into a completely dark house or apartment.

Climbing the stairs to the fifth floor is worse than last time, because adrenaline and beer quicken his straining heart until he can scarcely breathe. When he reaches unit 56, he bangs on the door. Not a sound comes from inside.

He pounds harder and calls out, “Yo, Tom!”

LUCY STARTS THE MERCEDES and suddenly stares at Rudy in the pitch dark.

“Oh my God! I can’t believe it!” She pounds the steering wheel with her fist, accidentally blaring the horn.

“What!” Rudy jumps, startled and suddenly frantic. “What the hell? What the hell are you doing!”

“My tactical baton. Goddamn son of a bitch! I left it on the night table inside the room. It’s going to have my fingerprints on it, Rudy.”

How could she make such a brain-dead mistake? All went according to plan until she made an oversight, a mindless blunder, the very sort of blunder that catches people on the run all the time. The engine rumbles quietly on the side of the dark street, neither Lucy nor Rudy quite sure what to do. They are free. They got away with it. No one near or inside the hotel saw them, and now one of them must go back.

“I’m sorry,” Lucy whispers. “I’m a fucking idiot,” she says. “You stay here.”

“No. I’ll take care of it.” Rudy’s fear turns to the more manageable emotion of rage, and he resists taking it out on her.

“I fucked it up. I get to fix it.” She swings open the car door.

BEV KIFFIN RUNS HER FINGERS through a rack of cheap acetate panties and bras.

The women’s lingerie section of Wal-Mart is near arts and crafts and directly across from men’s athletic shoes, a section of the store she frequently haunts. She is certain, however, that the clerks in their cheap blue vests and name tags don’t recognize her. This is the type of business where tired, glazed employees don’t pay much attention to common-looking people like Bev who root around for bargains in a discount store that is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

A red, lacy bra captivates her imagination, and she checks sizes, looking for a 38D. Finding one in black, she tucks it up a sleeve of her dark green rain slicker. The bra is followed by two pairs of bikini-cut panties, size large. Stealing lingerie and other items that do not have security sensors is so easy. She wonders why everybody doesn’t do it. Bev has no fear of consequences. No frontal-lobe alarm sounds when she contemplates committing a crime, no matter how serious. Opportunities come and go on her radar screen, some bigger and brighter than others, such as the woman who has just wandered into the arts and crafts section, interested in needlepoint.

The thought of such a stupid domestic hobby fills Bev with contempt as she instantly deduces that the attractive blonde dressed in jeans and a light blue jacket is naïve.

A lamb.

Bev continues rummaging through the lingerie rack, the target on her radar flashing brighter with each passing second, her pulse picking up, her palms getting clammy.

The woman drops skeins of colorful floss and a needlepoint pattern of an eagle and a flag into her cart. So she’s patriotic, Bev thinks. Maybe she has a husband or boyfriend in the military, might be gone, maybe still in Iraq. She’s at least thirty-five, maybe close to forty. Could be her man’s in the National Guard.

The cart rolls forward, getting closer.

Bev detects cologne. The scent is unfamiliar and probably expensive. The woman’s legs are slender, her posture good. She works out in the gym. She’s got free time on her hands. If she has children, she must be able to afford having someone take care of them while she’s trotting off to the gym or maybe the hair salon.

Bev scans a scrap of paper, a shopping list, feigning that she is unaware of the woman, who pauses in the aisle, looking directly at the rack of lingerie. She wants to keep her man happy.

A lamb.

Good-looking.

An air about her that Bev associates with intelligence.

She can sense when people are smart. They don’t have to say one word, because the rest of them is talking. The woman pushes her cart straight to the rack, not even a foot from where Bev is standing, and the perfume crawls up Bev’s sinuses, burrowing way up inside her skull, and her focus sharpens to a point as the woman unzips her jacket, picks a sheer red bra off the rack and holds it up to firm, ample breasts.

Hatred and envy electrify every nerve and muscle in Bev’s matronly body, her upper lip breaking out in a cold sweat. She wanders in the direction of men’s running shoes as the woman dials a cell phone. It rings somewhere for several seconds.

“Honey?” she sweetly, happily says. “Still here. I know. Such a big place.” She laughs. “I like the Wal-Mart off Acadian better.” She laughs again. “Well, maybe I will if you’re sure you don’t mind.”

She holds out her left arm, glancing at the watch peeking out of her sleeve, the sort of watch runners wear. Bev expected something fancier.

A
LIGHT, MISTY RAIN DAMPENS the streets of Szczecin as Lucy nears the Radisson Hotel.

This time she doesn’t have to wait for the clerk to leave the front desk. The lobby is deserted. She walks inside, casually but briskly, and heads to the elevators. Her finger is about to make contact with the elevator button when the doors part and a very intoxicated man lurches out, knocking into her.

“ ’Scussssse me!” he says loudly, startling Lucy and jerking her mind out of gear.

What to do? What to do?

“Now, aren’t you the prettiest thing I’ve seen forever!”

His words slur as if his mouth is numb with lidocaine, and he is almost yelling as he leers at her, checking her out from her hair to her cleavage to her satin cowboy boots. He announces that his party is going strong in room 301 and she must come. He goes on and on. My, my, how beautiful and sexy she is, and obviously American, and he was from Chicago, transferred recently to Germany, and is lonely and separated from his wife, who is a bitch.

The desk clerk rushes back to the lobby, and not a minute later a security guard follows and speaks in English to the drunk.

“Perhaps you should go back to your room. It is late, and you should go to sleep,” the guard says stiffly, eyeing Lucy with distaste and suspicion, as if assuming she is the vulgar man’s girlfriend, or perhaps a prostitute, and is probably drunk, too.

She stabs at the elevator button, missing it several times, swaying and clutching the drunk man’s arm.

“Come on, baby, let’s go,” she slurs with a Russian accent, leaning against him.

“Now ain’t that sweet . . .” He is about to show besotted surprise and pleasure in her company when she reaches up and kisses him hard on the mouth.

The elevator doors open and she pulls him inside, wrapping herself around him and continuing a long, tongue-groping kiss that tastes like garlic and whiskey. The security guard stares stonily at them as the doors shut.

Mistake.

The guard will remember her face. Lucy’s face is hard to forget, and the guard had plenty of time to look at it because Lucy was trapped with the drunk asshole.

Big mistake.

She hits button 2 as the man paws her. He doesn’t seem to notice that the elevator is stopping at the wrong floor, but suddenly his new lover is running away, clutching at her clothes. He tries to chase after her, wildly waving his arms, cursing, catching his toe on the carpet and stumbling.

Lucy follows exit signs, turning into another hallway, then into a stairway. She silently makes her way up three flights and waits on the dimly lit landing, holding her breath and listening, sweat rolling down her face and soaking her sexy black blouse. Possibly, it was habit more than instinct that caused her to pluck up a plastic hotel key from the table in Caggiano’s room and tuck it in a pocket of her windbreaker. Whenever she checks out of a hotel, she always keeps a key, if it is a disposable one, in the event she suddenly realizes she has forgotten something. Once, and she doesn’t like to remember this, she left her gun in a bedside drawer and didn’t realize it until she was climbing into a taxi. Thank God she still had a key.

The Do Not Disturb sign hangs ominously from the doorknob of room 511, and Lucy searches the hallway, desperately hoping she is not surprised by anyone else. As she makes her approach, she faintly hears the television inside Rocco’s room, and a sick pain stabs her stomach. Fear burns. Recalling what she and Rudy just did is awful, and now she must confront their sin again.

A green light flickers, and she pushes open the door with her elbows because she has no fresh gloves, having raced off without them. She runs into a wall of rank smell from Rocco’s last greasy meal and detects his alcohol-saturated blood. It coagulates like pudding under his head, his eyes half open and dull, the chair overturned, the gun under his chest, every detail exactly as she and Rudy had left it. Blow flies buzz around his body, searching for the perfect piece of moist human real estate to appropriate for their eggs. Lucy stares, transfixed, at the frenzied insects.

She focuses on her tactical baton. It, too, is exactly as she left it, on the table to the left of the bed.

“Oh, thank God,” she mutters.

The baton is safely back up her sleeve as she cautiously opens the door, wiping the knob with her blouse. This time she takes the stairs all the way down to the service level, where she hears the murmur of voices, possibly from the kitchen. Along walls are carts loaded with dirty dishes, wilted flowers in bud vases, empty wine bottles and what is left from cocktails and other beverages. Food is hardened on hotel china and stains white cloths and wadded napkins. There are no flies down here. Not one.

She swallows repeatedly, suddenly nauseous as she envisions the blow flies crawling all over Rocco and feeding on his gore. She thinks about what will happen next. Inside his warm room, blow fly eggs will hatch into maggots that, depending on how long he remains undiscovered, will teem over his decomposing body, especially inside his wound and other orifices. Blow flies love deep, dark, moist crevices and passageways.

The intense presence of carrion predators will throw off Rocco’s time of death, as intended when Rudy introduced the flies into the room. The forensic pathologist who examines Rocco’s body will be confused by the story of when room service delivered his late dinner and the advanced stage of maggot infestation and decomposition. His blood-alcohol level will indicate that Caggiano was intoxicated when he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound that penetrated his temple and tore through his brain in a storm of lead shrapnel and the ragged razor-sharp copper edges of a semi-jacketed hollow-point bullet. Prints on the gun will be his.

The warmth of the room will be factored in but should not arouse suspicion. The empty champagne bottle has Caggiano’s prints on it, should the police bother to check, although there will be no record of his ordering the champagne or receiving it compliments of the manager. He could have bought it elsewhere. The Red Notice will have his prints on it, should anyone bother to check, and she must assume someone will.

She wishes Rocco had not ordered room service, but she planned for that possibility, realizing that whoever delivered his dinner will recall the tip and not want to reveal that it was American cash. He or she will not want to be implicated in any sort of scandal that involves the police. In addition, if Rocco’s time of death, as determined by the forensic pathologist, doesn’t jibe at all with what the hotel employee who delivered the room service has to say—assuming the person talks—then it may very well be assumed that the person is mistaken about the time, possibly even the day. Or is lying. No one in that hotel will want to admit to accepting American money and who knows what other favors and contraband that Rocco, a fugitive, has probably bestowed on them over the many years he has stayed in that hotel.

Who will care that Rocco Caggiano is dead? Perhaps no one except the Chandonne family. They will wonder. Lucy plotted with the expectation that they will press hard to know the facts. Maybe they will. Maybe they won’t. Suicide will be accepted, and no one will feel grief or even give a damn.

LUCY SPRINTS THROUGH the dark, her aching chest not due to physical exertion.

The Mercedes is quiet on the side of the street, and she can’t see Rudy through the tinted windows. The locks click free and she opens the driver’s door.

“Mission accomplished?” he grimly asks in the dark. “Don’t start the car yet.”

She tells him about her encounter with the drunk and the hotel staff and explains the way she handled it. He says nothing. She feels his disapproval and irritation with her.

“Give me some credit. I think we’re fine.”

“As fine as you could be under the circumstances,” he has to admit.

“There’s no reason for anyone to connect me with Rocco’s room, with his death,” she goes on. “I guarantee that hotel staff won’t touch his room with that Do Not Disturb sign on the door. More flies will come in through the opening in the window. Say he’s found in three or four days, maggots will have devoured him to the point he won’t be recognizable. And in case you didn’t know it, blow flies are attracted to shit, too.

“And his blood alcohol will be high, no reason in the world for anyone to think anything but suicide, and the hotel will want his rotting body and maggots out of there as quickly as possible. And the medical examiner will think he’s been dead longer than room service says—assuming there is an exact time associated with Rocco’s dinner order, and there probably won’t be. Orders aren’t handled by computer. I know that for a fact.”

“For a fact?” Rudy asks. “How the hell can you know that for a fact?”

“What do you think I am, fucking stupid? I called. Days ago. Said I was a Hewlett-Packard rep checking on their computers and that the one the kitchen used for room service needed a software upgrade. And they didn’t know what I was talking about, said they didn’t use computers for room service, only for inventory. Then I talked about the advantages of using an hp pavilion 753n with an Intel Pentium processor and eighty-gigabyte hard drive and CD-ROM and all the rest for room service orders. .  . . Point is, there is no computer record of what time Rocco ordered dinner, okay?”

Rudy was silent, then said, “They use Hewlett-Packards at that hotel?”

“Easy enough to find out by calling the business office. Yes,” she replied.

“Okay. Good job on that one. So even if the drunk or anyone else paid any attention to you, the way we’ve staged Rocco’s crime scene will make it appear he was dead long before you went off to party with the drunk.”

“That’s right, Rudy. We’re fine. We’re fine. Rocco’s already being infested. Masses of maggots will produce heat and speed up decomposition, and it looks like a suicide, anyway—one committed earlier—much earlier—than anyone will imagine.”

She starts the car, laying a hand on his arm. “Now, can we get the hell out of here?”

“We can’t make any more mistakes, Lucy,” he says in a defeated way. “We just can’t.”

She pulls away from the sidewalk, angry.

“The fact is, at least two people in that hotel think you might be a drunk conventiongoer or maybe even a prostitute, and you aren’t easy to forget, no matter what they think you are. It probably doesn’t matter one goddamn bit, but . . .” He doesn’t finish.

“But it could have.” Lucy drives carefully, checking her mirrors and the sidewalks, dark with shadows.

“Right. It could have.”

She feels his eyes and the shifting of his moods. He is softening toward her, sorry he was so rough.

“Hey, you-Rudy-you.” She reaches out and affectionately touches his cheek, his stubble reminding her of a cat’s tongue. “We’re on the go and we’re okay.”

She reaches for his hand and holds it tightly.

“This went down bad, Rudy, really bad, but it’s going to turn out fine. We’re fine,” she says again.

When one or the other or both of them are scared, they never admit it, but they know because they need each other. Each becomes desperate for the other’s warm flesh. Lucy lifts his hand to her mouth, resting his arm against her.

“Don’t,” he says. “We’re both tired, strung-out. Not a good time to . . . to not have both hands on the wheel. Lucy, don’t,” he mutters as she deeply kisses his fingers, his knuckles, his palm.

She makes love to one hand and slides the other inside her black linen blouse.

“Lucy, stop . . . oh, Jesus . . . it’s not fair.” He unfastens his seat belt. “I don’t want to feel this way about you, goddamn it.”

Lucy drives.

“You do feel it for me. At least sometimes, don’t you?”

Lucy pets his hair, his neck, slips her hand into his collar and traces the muscles of his upper back. She doesn’t look at him as she drives fast.

SEVERAL TIMES, NIC SENT MEMOS to the Baton Rouge Task Force, reminding the men and women—mostly men—that a Wal-Mart or other huge store like it would be a very good place for a killer to stalk his victims.

No one would pay any attention to a vehicle in the parking lot, no matter the hour, and based on charge-card receipts, every one of the missing women shopped at Wal-Mart, if not the one closest to the Louisiana State University campus, then at others in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Ivy Ford did. The Saturday before she disappeared, she drove from Zachary and shopped at this very Wal-Mart, the one near LSU.

The task force never responded directly to Nic, but someone associated with it must have called her chief because he found her in the break-room before she took off to Knoxville and said, out of nowhere, “Most everybody in the world shops at Wal-Marts, Sam’s Clubs, Kmarts, Costcos and so on, Nic.”

“Yes, sir,” she replied. “Most everybody does.”

Baton Rouge isn’t her jurisdiction, and the only way she might change that fact would be for the attorney general to say the hell with boundaries. She has no good reason to request this, and he would have no good reason to grant it. Nic has never been the sort to ask permission unless the subject rises before her like a drawbridge, giving her no choice but to put on the brakes or turn around. These days, she works undercover wherever her instincts take her, which frequently is the Wal-Mart near LSU, close to where her father lives in the Old Garden District. It isn’t difficult to intuit which area of the store a killer might frequent if he is looking for prey. Women’s lingerie would excite him, especially if a potential victim was holding up bras and panties, checking out styles and sizes, as that fleshy woman with short graying hair was doing moments earlier before leaving the store with stolen merchandise tucked up the sleeve of her raincoat. The petty thievery will go unreported because Nic has a much bigger agenda. She leaves her shopping cart in the aisle and walks out of the store, aware of every man she spots, aware of his awareness and activity, and acutely conscious of the pistol in her fanny pack.

Outside, the parking lot is fairly well lit by tall lamps. What few cars there are—less than a hundred—are parked close together, as if to keep one another company. She spots the heavyset petty thief walking swiftly toward a dark blue Chevrolet with Louisiana tags. Nic memorizes the plate number as she heads in the woman’s general direction without appearing to notice her. In fact, Nic doesn’t notice anyone in the area who might be a potential serial killer. If the woman is being stalked, and of course that was a long shot to begin with, there is no hint of it.

Once again, Nic is prodded by guilt because she is disappointed. The idea that she could possibly feel regret that a woman is not about to become another victim is so abhorrent that Nic will not acknowledge her sinful hopes to anyone and scarcely to herself. She represses that truth so completely that she would probably pass a polygraph test if the examiner asked her, “Do you feel disappointed when you tail a potential victim and the killer doesn’t try to abduct her or succeed in abducting her?” Nic wouldn’t get tense or hesitate. Her pulse rate would stay the same as she replied, “No.” The shorter the answer, the less chance of her nervous system betraying her.

She does not walk anywhere near her own car, a five-year-old forest green Ford Explorer that is clandestinely equipped with a portable dash-mounted flashing beacon, a shotgun, a first-aid kit, jumper cables, flares, a fire extinguisher, a jump-out bag containing Battle Dress Uniforms, boots, extra magazines and other tactical gear, a handheld scanner tucked under the dash and a charger for her international cell phone, which also works as a two-way radio. A lot of her equipment she bought with her own money. In life, she is always overprepared for the worst.

The woman digs inside a dirty canvas beach bag, maybe ten feet from the Chevrolet. Certainly she doesn’t fit the victimology, not in the least. But Nic doesn’t trust so-called patterns or MOs. She remembers Scarpetta emphasizing that profiles are dangerous, because they’re fraught with errors. Not everybody does everything the same way every time, and, if nothing else, the woman is a loner in a dark, relatively deserted parking lot at the edge of a major university campus, and that makes her vulnerable to predators.

The woman fumbles with keys and drops them. Stooping to pick them up, she loses her balance and falls, suddenly crying out and clutching her left knee.

She casts about helplessly, spots Nic and begs, “Help me!”

Nic sprints and squats by the woman.

“Don’t move,” she tells her. “What hurts?”

She smells insect repellent and body odor. It vaguely brushes against her thoughts that the car keys on the pavement don’t look as if they belong to a relatively new Chevrolet.

“I think I pulled something in my knee,” the woman says, her eyes fixed on Nic’s. “It’s my bad knee.”

Her accent is Southern with a distinct lilt. She is not native to the area, and her hands are rough and raw as if she is accustomed to hard, physical work such as cleaning or shucking shellfish. Nic notices no jewelry, not even a watch. The woman pulls up her pant leg and looks at an angry purple bruise centered on her kneecap. The bruise isn’t fresh. Instinctively, Nic is repulsed by the woman’s unpleasant odor, her bad breath and something about her demeanor that she can’t pinpoint but finds disturbing. She gets to her feet and steps back.

“I can call an ambulance,” Nic says. “Not much else I can do, ma’am. I’m not a doctor.”

A look takes over the woman’s face, making it harsher in the glow of the parking lot lamps.

“No, I don’t need an ambulance. Like I said, I have this happen all the time.” She tries to get up.

“Then why do you have just one bruise?”

“I always fall the same way.”

Nic keeps her distance. She has no intention of offering further assistance. The woman is dirty, maybe mentally ill, and Nic knows better than to tangle with that type. They can be contagious, unpredictable, even violent if one has physical contact with them. The woman is on her feet now, favoring her left leg.

“Believe I’ll get me a coffee and rest for a bit,” she says. “I’ll be fine, just fine.”

Slowly, she limps away from the Chevrolet, back toward the store.

Nic softens. She digs in a pocket of her jeans as she trots after the woman.

“Here.” She hands her a five-dollar bill.

The woman smiles, her quick dark eyes hot on Nic’s.

“God bless you.” She clutches the money. “You’re a lamb,” she says.

THE DOOR ACROSS THE HALLWAY opens and an older man in an undershirt and sweatpants studies Marino suspiciously. “What’s all the racket about?” he inquires, his gray hair sticking up like the bristles of a hedgehog, his wrinkled face patchy with stubble, his eyes puffy and bloodshot.

Marino knows the look all too well. The man’s been drinking, probably since he got up and downed his first eye-opener.

“You seen Tom?” Marino asks, sweating and struggling for air.

“Can’t say I really know him. Don’t have a heart attack. I can’t do CPR, although I am familiar with the Heimlich maneuver.”

“He promised to meet me”—Marino catches a breath—“and I came all the friggin’ way from California.”

“You did?” The man is very curious now and steps out into the hallway. “What for?”

“What do you mean, what for?” Marino recovers enough to snap at him, as if it is any of the man’s business. “ ’Cause the friggin’ gold rush’s over. ’Cause I’m tired of sittin’ on the friggin’ dock of the bay. ’Cause I got bored being a friggin’ movie star.”

“If you were in the movies, I’ve never seen you, and I rent movies all the time. What else is there to do around here?”

“Have you seen Tom?” Marino persists, trying in vain to force the knob by turning it hard and shaking the door.

“I was asleep when you started all the racket,” says the man, who looks at least sixty and a bit deranged. “I haven’t seen Tom and don’t care for the likes of him, if you get my drift.”

He scrutinizes Marino.

“What do you mean, the likes of him?”

“Homo.”

“That’s news to me, not that I give a shit what people do, as long as I ain’t around to see it. He bringing men to his apartment or something? ’Cause I’m not sure I want to get in if . . .”

“Oh, no. Never saw him bring anybody to his apartment. But another homo in the building who wears leather and earrings told me he’s seen Tom in some of those bars where homos go and pick each other up for a quick visit to the bathroom.”

“Listen, jerkface, I’m supposed to be subletting this dump from the son of a bitch,” Marino heatedly informs the man. “Already paid him the first three months’ rent, and drove from California to get the key and move in. All my stuff’s down there in my damn truck.”

“That would really piss me off.”

“No joke, Sherlock.”

“I mean, really piss me off. Who’s Sherlock? Oh, yes. That detective with the hat and pipe. I don’t read violent books.”

“So if you hear any noise coming from this apartment, ignore it. If I have to use dynamite, I’m getting in.”

“You don’t really mean that,” the old man worries.

“Right,” Marino says sarcastically. “I walk around with dynamite in my pockets. I’m a suicide bomber with a New Jersey accent. Know how to fly planes, just can’t take off or land.”

The old man disappears inside his apartment, and a burglar chain rattles.

MARINO STUDIES the hollow metal door of unit 56.

Some twelve inches above the knob is a dead-bolt lock. He lights a cigarette, squinting through smoke at the enemy: a cheap brass knob with a push-button lock and the more problematic single cylinder dead bolt. None of the other doors along the hallway have dead bolts, confirming Marino’s suspicion that Benton installed the lock himself. Knowing him, he opted for a jimmy-proof deadbolt that neither a thief nor a hit man nor an aggravated Marino can drill through without a spring-actuated plate sliding shut like a bank window and foiling the drill bit. One security risk that Benton couldn’t have done much about was the door frame, which is a thin strip of metal screwed into wood.

Piece of cake, Marino says to himself as he unsnaps a bucktool from his belt and slides it out of its worn leather sheath.

The hinges are the common loose-pin variety, and Marino unfolds a pair of pliers from his all-purpose tool, attacks the pin and works it out of the hinge like a cork out of a bottle. Soon, three pins are on the floor, the door free on the left side. With two powerful yanks, Marino breaks the locks loose from the metal jamb. Inside the apartment, he props the door against the opening to give himself a little privacy. He flips on the overhead lights.

Benton had moved out, leaving nothing behind but food in the cupboards, a refrigerator full of Budweiser and half a bag of trash in the kitchen. May as well grab a beer while I’m here, Marino thinks. The bottle opener is on the counter where Marino saw it last, seeming to welcome him in a generous, affectionate way, like a Christmas stocking. Nothing else is out of place. Even the dishwasher is empty.

Strange.

Benton was careful not to offer so much as a partial fingerprint on windowpanes, tabletops or drinking glasses, dishes, cookware or silverware. Marino continues to hold up objects and look at them in oblique light. Sweep marks of the vacuum cleaner are visible on the carpet. Benton wiped down the entire place, and when Marino digs through the garbage bag, he finds nothing but his own empty Budweiser bottles and the broken glass from the Dos Equis he smashed in the sink. Every piece of glass is clean, the labels wet and soapy.

“What the hell is going on?” Marino asks the living room.

“I don’t know,” a male voice answers from behind the propped-up door. “Everything all right in there?”

Marino recognizes the neighbor from across the hall. “Go to bed,” he gruffly tells him. “And if you and me are gonna get along, you need to mind your own business . . . what’s your name?”

“Dave.”

“That’s funny, I’m Dave, too, as in t-o, not t-w-o.”

“T-o-o.”

“Sorry, I forgot to bring spell-check with me.” Marino glares through the space between the propped-up door and the frame.

Dave appears more curious than frightened, peering in, trying to look around the room. Marino’s considerable size blocks the nosy neighbor’s view.

“Can’t believe the bastard left like this,” Marino says. “How’d you like to break into your own damn apartment?”

“I wouldn’t.”

“Not only that, the joint’s a pigpen, and he made off with the silverware, pots and pans, and every bar of soap and roll of toilet paper.”

“Silverware and cookware belong to the apartment,” Dave says disapprovingly. “But from where I’m looking, the place looks quite tidy.”

“Yeah, from where you’re looking.”

“I always thought he was an odd man. I wonder why he took the toilet paper.”

“I only hooked up with him a couple months back, answering his ad for subletting,” Marino comments.

He straightens up and steps away from the door, scanning the inside of the apartment again as Dave peers in. His eyes are red-rimmed and glassy, his cheeks sagging and rosy with broken blood vessels, probably from years of living inside a whiskey bottle.

“Yup,” he says. “He never talked, I mean never, not even when he passed me in the hall or we both just happened to open our doors at the same time. There we are, face-to-face, and the most he ever did was sort of give me a little smile and a jerk of his chin.”

Marino isn’t a great believer in coincidences and suspects Dave listened for Benton to come and go and just happened to open his door when Benton was opening his.

“Where were you this afternoon?” Marino wonders if Dave heard the altercation, a loud one, coming from Benton’s apartment.

“Oh, I don’t know. After lunch, I sleep a lot.”

Drunk, Marino thinks.

“He’s the sort who didn’t have friends,” Dave goes on.

Marino continues looking around, standing near the door while Dave peers through the crack.

“Never saw him have a single visitor, and I’ve been living here five years. Five years and two months. Hate this place. He seemed to go away sometimes. Since I retired from being the head chef at the Lobster House, I have to watch my pennies.”

Marino has no idea how watching pennies has anything to do with the man’s mysterious neighbor.

“You was the head chef there? Every time I come to Boston, I eat at the Lobster House.”

This isn’t true, nor is Marino a frequent visitor to Boston.

“You and the rest of the world, yessir. Well, I wasn’t the head chef, but I damn well should’ve been. I’ll cook for you one of these days.”

“How long did the weirdo live here?”

“Oh.” Dave sighs, his eyes shining through the space as he watches Marino. “I’d say goin’ on two years. On and off. What was your favorite dish at the Lobster House?”

“Two damn years. That’s interesting. Told me he’d just moved in and gotten transferred or something, which is why he had to give up the apartment.”

“Well, probably lobster,” Dave remarks. “All tourists get the lobster and sop it in so much butter it’s a wonder they taste anything but butter, so I was always commenting to the other workers in the kitchen, what was the point of bringing in nice fresh lobsters if nobody tastes anything but the butter?”

“I hate seafood,” Marino says.

“Well, we do have mighty fine steaks. Aged one-hundred-percent-prime Angus.”

“Aged always worries me. In the grocery store, aged means spoiled. You know, clearance buggy shit.”

“Now, he wasn’t here all the time,” Dave says. “In and out, sometimes gone for weeks. But no way he’d just moved in. I’ve seen him coming in and out for two years, like I said.”

“Anything else you can tell me about this homo who locked me out and made off with half the stuff in the joint?” Marino asks. “When I find him, I’m gonna kick his ass.”

Dave shakes his head and disappointment glints. “Sure wish I could help you out, but like I’ve been saying, I didn’t know the man and I’m glad he’s gone, and it’s looking like you and me will be great neighbors, Dave Too.”

“Thick as thieves. Now you go on to bed. Let me get a few things done in here, and I’ll catch you later.”

“So nice to meet you. I guess I’ll be calling you Dave Too from now on, if that’s okay with you.”

“Nighty-night.”

BENTON LIVED HERE TWO YEARS and nobody knew him, not even his lonely, busybody neighbor Dave.

Not that Marino is really surprised, but the realization is a reminder of Benton’s desolate, confining life, which is all the more reason his refusal to return to himself, his friends and those who love him makes no sense. Marino sits on Benton’s perfectly made bed, staring in a glazed way at the mirror over the dresser. As well as Benton knows him, he must have suspected that Marino would come back and rant and rail at him again. Not much could be more wounding than for him to have said he doesn’t want to see Marino again—ever.

He focuses on his big, unhealthy self in the mirror, sweat rolling down his face, and it occurs to him that Benton turned off the air-conditioning in the living room when he and Benton were arguing. But when Marino just broke in, the air-conditioning was back on in that room but turned off in this one. Virtually every move Benton makes is deliberate. That’s the way he is, and for him to crank the air-conditioning on high in the living area and turn it off in the bedroom was for a reason. Marino gets off the bed and walks to the window unit, noticing an envelope taped to the side of it.

Perfectly centered on it in block letters are the initials PM.

Excitement kicks in but is tempered by Marino’s wariness. He returns to the kitchen for a sharp knife. Back in the bedroom, he sets it on top of the air-conditioning unit. Then he heads to the bathroom and yanks off several long sections of toilet paper, wrapping it around his fingers. He returns to the window unit and carefully removes the envelope, noticing that both ends of the tape are folded over so that they adhere to themselves, the same technique police use to prevent fingerprint tape from sticking to their gloves.

He slits the top of the envelope and pulls out a folded sheet of plain white paper and smooths it open. Written in the same block printing that’s on the envelope is: “Please keep on.”

Baffled, Marino considers for a moment that the note wasn’t intended for him and wasn’t written by Benton. He considers that neither the tape nor the paper is old, and they are very clean, and the folded ends of the tape hint that whoever used it might have been wearing latex gloves. Marino’s initials are PM, and Benton knows that handwriting comparisons are usually foiled by block printing unless a documents examiner is comparing block printing exemplars written by the same individual. Benton also knows that Marino would be hot as hell in this room and would turn on the air conditioner. Or if nothing else, Marino would notice the inconsistency of one window unit left on while the other isn’t and would wonder about it.

“Keep on the air conditioner?” Marino says out loud, frustrated and exhausted.

He returns to the kitchen and snatches open a cupboard where a few minutes earlier he noticed a neat, tidy stack of small paper grocery bags. Shaking one open, he drops the envelope inside it.

“What the hell are you talking about? Are you just fucking with me, you son of a bitch?”

Frustration tightens his chest as he thinks of the way Benton treated him, as if the two of them hadn’t been lifelong friends, buddies, almost like brothers, sharing the same woman but in entirely different ways. In a fantastic and secret part of Marino’s mind, he and Benton were married to Scarpetta—at the same time. Now Marino has exclusive rights to her. But she doesn’t long for him, and that repressed anguish adds to his volatility, his upset. A flutter of panic stirs in his stomach and floats up his throat.

Outside in the dark without a cab in sight, Marino lights a cigarette and weakly sits on a brick wall, breathing hard, his heart pounding violently against his ribs like a boxer pounding him, battering him, knocking the wind out of him. Pain shoots through the left side of his chest, terrifying him, and he takes slow, deep, sharp breaths but can’t get enough air.

An empty taxicab drives by, seems to drift by, as sweat drips from Marino’s face while he sits perfectly still on the wall, eyes wide, hands on his knees. The cigarette drops from his clamped fingers and rolls on cobblestones, stopping in a crack.

BEV CAN’T STOP thinking about her.

She should stay far away from that lamb who just gave her five dollars in the Wal-Mart parking lot. But she can’t. Bev can’t control the compulsion, and although her reaction defies any rational explanation, there is a cause and effect in her black, ugly thoughts. The lamb spurned her. The woman backed away from Bev as if she was repulsive and then dared to degrade her further by giving her money.

Inside Wal-Mart, Bev lingers near a display of insect repellents, picking up bottles, pretending to read the labels as she watches the parking lot through the plate glass. To her surprise, the lamb isn’t driving a new car, but an old forest-green Explorer that for some reason doesn’t seem in character for a spoiled, rich housewife or girlfriend. More interesting yet, she’s sitting inside the SUV with the engine running and the headlights off. Bev is in and out of a dressing room in five minutes, outfitted in a loud Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts—none of it paid for and the sensors cut off with her buck knife. Her rain slicker is inside out and draped over her arm, a cheap plastic rain bonnet over her hair, even though the night is clear. If people notice her at all, they will assume she is either crazy or processing her hair.

The Explorer hasn’t moved. Bev walks directly to Jay’s beat-up, filthy white SUV, confident the lamb doesn’t notice her or at least doesn’t connect her with the woman she encountered and gave money to not even half an hour ago. Driving off, Bev turns left onto Perkins, then crosses Acadian and parks in a small parking lot filled with cars because Caterie is a popular restaurant, especially with university students. She turns off her engine and headlights, waiting, her desire burning hotter the longer the lamb sits in the forest-green Explorer in the Wal-Mart parking lot across the street.

Maybe she is on the phone. Maybe this time she is fighting with her man instead of sounding so disgustingly sweet. Bev is an expert at tailing people. She does it regularly when she is driving Jay’s Cherokee. Before she began biding her time as a fugitive at a fishing camp, she followed people, depending on what needed to be done or just for the hell of it. But in those days, her activities had a purpose, or at least were a means directed toward a useful end. Whatever Bev did, she was following orders.

To some extent, she is following Jay’s orders now, but methods and emotions change when one is asked repeatedly to perform the same task. Bev has begun to indulge herself, entertain her own fantasies and have her own fun. It’s her right.

The Explorer heads into the heart of the Old Garden District. The pretty blonde driver has no idea that the woman with the bad knee is not far behind. This amuses Bev. She smiles as the Explorer slows down and makes a right turn into a dark driveway bordered by tall shrubs. Bev drives past, pulls off the road and gets out. She quickly covers herself in her dark rain slicker and backtracks to the white brick house just in time to see its front door close, the woman safely inside. Bev returns to her Cherokee, writes down the address and cuts across a side road so she doesn’t pass the house again. She waits.

MORE THAN ANYTHING, Jean-Baptiste Chandonne wants a dipole antenna, but he is not allowed commissary privileges, and the commissary is where the antennas are sold.

Inmates who enjoy favored status can buy dipole antennas, headphones, portable radios, an AM/FM booster and a religious medal with a chain. At least some inmates can. Beast, in particular, loves to boast about his portable radio, but he does not own a dipole antenna because inmates are allowed only one item from a special list of the Big Ten, as they call it. On death row, privileges are limited out of fear of inmates fashioning weapons.

Jean-Baptiste does not care about a weapon. His body is his weapon, should he ever decide to uncoil it. Uncoiling it is of no interest, not now. When he is led in restraints to the shower, he has no need to attack officers, which he could most assuredly do because of his magnetism, which is only enhanced when he is led past multiple metal doors with iron bars. His power builds. It throbs in his groin and lifts the top of his skull to a hover above his head. He leaves a visible trail of sparks. The corrections officers never understand what he smiles about, and his demeanor greatly annoys them.

Lights-out was at nine. The officer in the control booth enjoys flipping every switch and throwing the inmates into complete darkness in the pod. Jean-Baptiste has overheard officers comment that darkness gives the “dirtbags” time to think hard about their impending executions, the punishment for what they did when they were on the outside, free and able to satisfy their love. Those who do not kill do not understand that the ultimate union with a woman is to release her, to hear her scream and moan, to cover himself with her blood as he ravishes her body and then poses her, that all people might see, and therefore share in her ecstasy and the marriage of her magnetism to him for all eternity.

He lies on his bunk, sweat soaking through the sheets, his odor filling his small, airless cell, the stainless-steel toilet a toadstool shape against the right side of the back wall. The condemned inmates are quiet, with the exception of Beast. He talks quietly to himself, almost whispers, not realizing that Jean-Baptiste can hear without ears. Beast is transformed at night into the powerless, weak entity that he really is. He will be so much better off when the cocktail settles him to sleep and he no longer needs his weak, flawed flesh.

“. . . Hold still. It’s nice, isn’t it? Feels so nice. Stop it, please stop it. Stop it! That hurts! Don’t cry. This feels good. Don’t you understand, you little bitch. It feels good! I want my mommy! So do I. But she’s a whore. Now you quit crying, you hear me! You scream one more time . . .”

“Who’s there?” Jean-Baptiste asks the foul-smelling air.

“Shut up. Shut the fuck up. It’s your fault. You had to scream, didn’t you. When I told you not to. Well, no more chewing gum for you. Cinnamon. Dropping the wrapper by the swingset so I know what flavor you like. Stupid little cunt. You stay right here in the shade, okay? I’ve gotta run, gotta run. How’s that for a good one, I gotta run, gotta run, gotta run.” He begins to softly sing. “Gotta run, gotta run, gotta run-run-run . . .”

“Who’s there?”

“Knock, knock, who’s there?” Beast calls back in a searing, mocking tone. “Hairy, hairy, quite contrary, how does your dickie grow? With little nuts hiding in your butt and a weenie smaller than your nose.” Softly, softly singing, but loud enough. “I’m a poet, don’cha know it? You know that, dickless wonder? A real sensitive guy, I am, I am. Green eggs and ham. Cat in the hat. I like ’em meaty but not too fat. A drumroll please.”

“Who’s there?” Jean-Baptiste bares his widely spaced, tiny, pointed teeth. He licks them hard and tastes the salty metallic flavor of his own blood.

“Just me, Hair Ball. Your best pal in the world. Your only pal in the world. You got nobody but me, you know that? You must. Who else talks to you and sends little love notes door to door to door until it’s slid under yours, all dirty and read by everybody?”

Jean-Baptiste listens, sucking blood out of his tongue.

“You got this pow-er-ful family. I heard all about it on my radio. More’an once I heard it.”

Silence. Jean-Baptiste’s ears are satellite dishes.

“Con-nec-tions. Where are those fucking guards when you need ’em?” he mocks the darkness.

His hateful voice flies like tiny bats through the iron bars in Jean-Baptiste’s door. Words flutter around him, and he waves them off with sweeps of his hairy hands.

“Did ya know ya get crazy in here, Hair Ball? If you don’t get out, you’re crazy as a cat with M40s up its ass. You know that, Hair Ball?”

“Je ne comprends pas,” Jean-Baptiste whispers, a drop of blood running down his chin and disappearing in his baby-fine hair.

He feels for the blood and licks his finger.

“Oh, you comprendez vous, all right. Maybe they stick something up your ass, huh? And kaboom!” Beast softly laughs. “See, once they get you over there in that cage, they can do whatever the fuck they like, and who’s gonna know? You snitch and they hurt you more and say you did it to yourself.”

“Who’s there?”

“I’m so fucking sick of you saying that, knock-knock-shit, Mini-Me Dick! You know damn well who’s there. ’Tis me. Your bud-dy.”

Jean-Baptiste hears Beast breathing. His air travels past two cells and Jean-Baptiste smells garlic and red Burgundy, a young Clos des Mouches, what he calls a stupid wine because it has not slept long enough in dark, damp places to become brilliant and wise. In the dark, Jean-Baptiste’s death-row cell is his cave.

“But here’s the thing, my special pal, your only pal. They gotta transport me in this van to where they do me. Huntsville. What a name. Hunted and a villain, right? Takes an hour, the ride. What if something happens between point A and B?”

At Place Dauphine, chestnut trees, azaleas and roses are blossoming and blooming. Jean-Baptiste does not need to see, only to smell to know where he is: Bar du Caveau and Restaurant Paul, which is a good one. People are disconnected from him, eating and drinking behind glass, smiling and laughing or intensely leaning into candlelight. Some of them will leave and make love, not knowing they are watched. Jean-Baptiste glides through the night to the tip of the Ile St.-Louis, and the lights of Paris are caught in the current of the Seine and shimmer like fine hair. In but a few minutes, he is a mile or so from the morgue.

“Now I ain’t got the wherewithal to do nothing. Bet you do, though. You get that van stopped when I’m on my way to the needle, and I’ll come back for you, Hair Ball. My time’s up. Three days. You hear that? Three goddamn days. I know you can figure out a way. You can arrange it, save my ass and then we’ll be partners.”

Inside a brasserie on the Ile St.-Louis, he sat in a corner and stared out at a balcony crowded with flowerpots, and a woman stepped out to look, perhaps at the blue sky and the river. She was very beautiful, and her windows were open to the fresh, fall air. He remembered that she smelled like lavender. He thought she did.

“You can have her when I’m done,” Jay said as he sipped a Clos de Bèze of the Domaine Prieuré Roch. The wine hinted of smoked almonds.

He slowly swirled the red Burgundy, and it licked around the wide bowl of the glass like a warm tongue slowly licking in circles.

“I know you want some.” Jay lifted the glass and laughed at the double entendre. “But you know how you get, mon frère.”

“You listening, Hair Ball? Three fucking days, just a week before you, I’ll make sure you got all the bitches you want out there. I’ll bring ’em to you, long as you don’t mind if I have my piece of ’em first. Since you can’t, right? So why shouldn’t you share?” A pause, and Beast’s voice turns sinister. “You listening to me, Hair Ball? Free as a bird!”

“So here we go,” Jay said with a wink.

He set down his wineglass and said he’d be right back. Jean-Baptiste, clean-shaven with a cap pulled low over his face, was not to speak to anyone while Jay . . . He can’t call him Jay. Jean-Paul, Jean-Paul was gone. Through the window, Jean-Baptiste watched his beautiful brother call up to the woman on the balcony. He was motioning, pointing, as if in need of directions, and she smiled and began to laugh at his antics. Instantly, she was overcome by his spell and disappeared back inside her apartment.

Then his blessed brother was magically sitting in the booth again. “Leave,” he commanded Jean-Baptiste. “Her apartment is on the third floor.” He nodded toward it. “You see where it is. Hide while she and I have a drink. She will be simple enough. You know what to do. Now get out of here and don’t frighten anyone.”

“You fucking ugly piece of hairy shit.” Beast’s hideous whisper drifts inside Jean-Baptiste’s cell. “You don’t want to die, do ya? Nobody wants to die except the people we do, when they can’t take no more and start begging, right? Free as a bird. Just think of that. Free as a bird.”

Jean-Baptiste envisions the woman doctor named Scarpetta. She will fall asleep in his arms, his eyes never leaving her, and she will be with him always. He strokes the letter she sent him, typed and brief, begging to come see him, asking for his help. He wishes she had written it by hand so he could study every curve and contour of her sensual penmanship. Jean-Baptiste imagines her naked and sucks his tongue.

THUNDER SOUNDS LIKE kettledrums in the distance, and clouds roll past the waning moon.

Bev will not head back to Dutch Bayou until the storm passes if it moves this far southeast, and the forecast on the car radio doesn’t call for that. But she isn’t ready to return to the boat landing. The lamb in the forest-green Ford Explorer has followed an interesting route for the past two hours, and Bev can’t figure it out. She—whoever she is—has cruised streets and especially parking lots for no reason that Bev can tell.

Her guess is that the lamb had a fight with her man and refuses to go home right now, probably to worry him sick, one of those little games. Bev has been careful to keep her distance, to turn up side streets, to pull off in gas stations along Highway 19, then speed up. Several times, Bev has passed the Explorer in the left lane, going ahead at least ten miles, pulling off the highway and waiting for her prey to get ahead of her again. Soon enough, they pass through Baker, a tiny town with businesses that have strange names: Raif’s Po-Boy, Money Flash Cash, Crawfish Depot.

The town vanishes like a mirage, and the stretch of highway becomes pitch dark. There is nothing out here, no lights, only trees, and a billboard that reads: You Need Jesus.

GATOR EYES REMIND BEV OF periscopes fixing her in their sights before vanishing under water the color of weak coffee.

Jay told her gators won’t bother her unless she bothers them. He says the same about cottonmouths.

“Did you ask them their opinion? And if it’s the truth, then how come cottonmouths come crashing out of the trees, trying to get in the boat? And remember that movie we watched? Oh, what was it called . . . ?”

“Faces of Death,” he replied, on this occasion amused instead of annoyed by her questions.

“Remember that game warden who fell in the lake and right there on camera, this huge gator got him?”

“Cottonmouths don’t fall into the boat unless you startle them,” Jay explained. “And the gator got the game warden because the game warden was trying to get him.”

That sounded reasonable enough, and Bev felt slightly reassured until Jay smiled that cruel smile of his and did a complete about-face and explained how she can tell if an animal or reptile is a predator, and therefore an aggressor, and therefore the fearless hunter.

“It’s all in the eyes, baby,” he said. “The eyes of predators are in front of the head, like mine.” He pointed to his beautiful blue eyes. “Like a gator’s, like a cottonmouth’s, like a tiger’s. Us predators are going to look straight-on for something to attack. The eyes of non-predators are more on the sides of the head, because how the hell is a rabbit going to defend itself against a gator, right? So the little bunny needs peripheral vision to see what’s coming and run like hell.”

“I’ve got predator eyes,” Bev said, pleased to know it but not at all happy to hear that gators and cottonmouths are predators.

Eyes like that, she realized, meant something’s on the prowl, looking to hurt or kill. Predators, especially reptiles, aren’t afraid of people. Shit! As far as Bev’s concerned, she’s no match for a gator or a snake. If she falls in the water or steps on a cottonmouth, who’s going to win? Not her.

“Humans are the ultimate predator,” Jay said. “But we’re complicated. A gator is always a gator. A snake’s always a snake. A human can be a wolf or a lamb.”

Bev is a wolf.

She feels her wolfish hot blood stirring as she glides past cypress knees jutting from the bayou like the ridges of a sea monster’s back. The pretty blonde woman hog-tied on the floor of the boat squints in intermittent early morning sunlight. Wherever cypress roots break the surface, the water isn’t deep, and Bev is vigilant as she motors slowly toward the fishing shack. Now and then her prisoner tries to shift her position to ease the terrible pain in her joints, and her labored breathing flares her nostrils, the gag around her mouth wetly sucking in and out.

Bev doesn’t know her name and warned her not to say it. This was hours ago, inside the Cherokee, after the lamb realized she couldn’t get out the passenger door, and if she tried to climb over the seat, Bev was going to shoot her. Then the lamb got chatty, trying to be friendly, trying to make Bev like her, going so far as to politely ask Bev’s name. They all do that, and Bev always says the same thing: “My name is none of your fucking business, and I don’t want to know yours or a damn thing about you.”

The woman was instantly powerless, realizing that she wasn’t going to talk her way out of whatever horror was in store for her.

Names have only two purposes: use them to manipulate people into feeling that their lives have value, and refuse to use them, to cause people to feel that their lives have no value. Besides, Bev will learn a lot about this pretty little lamb soon enough, when Jay monitors the news on his battery-powered radio.

“Please don’t hurt me,” the lamb begs. “I have family.”

“I’m not listening,” Bev tells her. “You know why? Because you’re nothing but the catch of the day.”

Bev laughs, enjoying the strength of her own voice, because very soon, she won’t have a voice. Jay will. Once he takes possession of the lamb, there will be nothing left for Bev to do, except what he orders her to do or not to do. Mostly, Bev will watch, and thoughts of that overwhelm her with a compulsion to control and abuse while she can. She binds the lambs tighter than Jay does, tying ankles to wrists behind the back so the body is bowed, making it all the more difficult for the lamb’s diaphragm to relax and contract as she struggles to breathe.

“Tell you what, honey,” Bev says as she steers. “We’re going to anchor right over there under those shade trees, and I’m gonna cover you good with skeeter spray, every inch of you, because my man ain’t gonna want you swelled up and itching.”

She laughs as her prisoner’s eyes widen and tears flood her puffy red lids. This is the first the lamb’s heard mention of a man.

“Now you quit your bawling, honey. You need to look pretty, and right now you’re looking like shit.”

The lamb blinks hard, the gag making wet noises with each agonizing, rapid, shallow breath. Bev steers the boat closer to shore, cuts the engine and drops anchor. She picks up the shotgun and scans the trees, checking for snakes. Satisfied that the only one in harm’s way is her prisoner, she lays the pump-action shotgun on top of the tarp and places a boat cushion on the floor just inches from her “cute little catch of the day,” as she continues to call her. Bev digs in her beach bag and pulls out a plastic squirt bottle of insect repellent.

“What I’m going to do now is take off your gag and untie you,” Bev says. “You know why I can be that nice, honey? Because you ain’t got nowhere to go but overboard, and if you think about what’s in these waters, you ain’t likely to want to go for a little swim. Or how about the fish box?”

Bev opens the lid of the coffin-sized fish box. It is filled with ice.

“That’ll keep you nice and fresh if you decide to get rowdy. And you’re not gonna do that, are you?”

The woman vigorously shakes her head and dryly says “No” as the gag comes off. “Thank you, thank you,” she says in a shaking voice, wetting her lips.

“Bet your joints are hurting like hell,” Bev says, taking her time untying her. “My man Jay tied me up once, my ankles and wrists tied up tight together behind my back until I was bent like a pretzel, just like you. It turned him on, you know.” She tosses the rope on top of the tarp. “Well, you’ll find out soon enough.”

The woman rubs her raw ankles and wrists, trying to catch her breath. She reminds Bev of a cheerleader, one of those athletic blondes with pure prettiness, like those in Seventeen magazine. She wears small horn-rimmed glasses that make her look smart, and she’s the right age, late thirties, maybe forty.

“You go to college?” Bev asks her.

“Yes.”

“Good. That’s real good.” She disappears inside her thoughts for a moment, a slack expression on her fleshy, weathered face.

“Please take me back. We’ve got money. We’ll pay you whatever you want.”

Bev’s meanness snaps back into her eyes. Jay’s smart and has money. The woman is smart and has money. She leans close to the woman, the whine of mosquitoes loud beneath the trees. Not far away, a fish splashes. The higher the sun gets, the hotter it is, and Bev’s Hawaiian shirt is damp with sweat.

“Money’s not what this is about,” Bev says as the woman stares at her, hope fading from her light blue eyes. “Don’t you know what this is about?”

“I didn’t do anything to you. Please just let me go home and I’ll never tell anyone. I won’t ever do anything to get you into trouble. How could I, anyway? I don’t know you.”

“Well, you’re getting ready to know me, honey,” Bev says, laying a rough, dry hand on the woman’s neck and stroking it with her thumb. “We’re getting ready to know each other real good.”

The woman blinks, wetting her chapped lips as Bev’s hand works its way down, touching the hollow of her neck, then down lower, exploring wherever she pleases. The woman sits rigidly and shuts her eyes. She jerks when Bev reaches under her clothing, unhooking her bra in back. Bev starts squeezing the insect repellent, rubbing it on the lamb’s naked body, feeling her luscious, firm flesh tremble like Jell-O. Bev thinks of Jay and the bleached area of the floor beneath the bed, and she shoves the lamb hard, slamming her head into the outboard motor.

AT THE CORNER OF 83RD and Lexington, a delivery truck struck a pedestrian—an elderly woman.

Benton Wesley overhears excited talk in the gawking crowd as emergency lights flash, the block cordoned off in yellow crime-scene tape. The fatal accident occurred less than an hour earlier, and Benton has seen enough gore in his life to walk swiftly past and respectfully avert his eyes from the body trapped under one of the truck’s back tires.

He catches the words brains and decapitated, and something about dentures lying on the street. If the public had its way, every death scene would be pay-per-view: Five dollars for a ticket, and you can stare at blood and guts to your heart’s content. When he used to arrive at crime scenes and all the cops would move out of the way to allow his expert eye to take in every detail, he had the right to order unauthorized people to leave. He could vent his disgust as he pleased—sometimes calmly, sometimes not.

He surveys the area from behind his dark glasses, his lean body moving along the crowded sidewalk, cutting in and out with the agility of a lynx. A plain black baseball cap covers his shaved head, and he backtracks toward Lucy’s headquarters, having gotten out of a taxi ten blocks north instead of directly in front of her building or even near it. Benton probably could walk right past Lucy and say “excuse me,” and she would not recognize him. Six years it has been since he has seen or talked to her, and he is desperate to know what she looks like, sounds like, acts like. Anxiety presses him onward at his determined pace until he nears the modern polished granite building on 75th Street. A doorman stands in front, hands behind his back. He is hot in his gray uniform and shifts his weight from leg to leg, indicating that his feet hurt.

“I’m looking for The Last Precinct,” Benton says to him.

“The what?” The doorman looks at him as if he’s crazy.

Benton repeats himself.

“You talking about some kind of police precinct?” The doorman scrutinizes him, and homeless and wacko register on his jaded Irish face. “Maybe you mean the precinct on Sixty-ninth.”

“Twenty-first floor, suite twenty-one-oh-three,” Benton replies.

“Yeah, now I know what you’re talking about, but it ain’t called The Last Precinct. Twenty-one-oh-three’s a software company—you know, computer stuff.”

“You sure?”

“Hell, I work here, don’t I?” The doorman is getting impatient, and he glares at a woman whose dog is sniffing too close to the planter in front of the building. “Hey,” he says to her. “No dogs doing their business in the hedge.”

“She’s just sniffing,” the woman indignantly replies, jerking the leash, tugging her hapless toy poodle back to the middle of the sidewalk.

Having asserted himself, the doorman ignores the woman and her dog. Benton digs in a pocket of his faded jeans and pulls out a folded piece of paper. He smooths it open and glances at an address and phone number that have nothing to do with Lucy or her building or the office that really is called The Last Precinct, despite what the doorman thinks. If the doorman happens to relay to her, perhaps in jest, that some weirdo stopped by asking for The Last Precinct, she will go on the alert, get very worried. Marino believes that Jean-Baptiste knows Lucy’s company by that name. Benton wants Marino and Lucy on the alert and worried.

“Says here, twenty-one-oh-three,” Benton tells the doorman, shoving the piece of paper back in his pocket. “What’s the name of the company? Maybe the information I was given is wrong.”

The doorman steps inside and picks up a clipboard. Running his finger down a page, he replies, “Okay, okay, twenty-one-oh-three. Like I said, some computer outfit. Infosearch Solutions. You want to go up, I gotta call ’em and see an ID.”

An ID, yes, but calling isn’t necessary, and Benton is amused. The doorman is openly rude and prejudiced toward the scruffy stranger before him, no longer mindful—as many New Yorkers aren’t—that the city’s greatest virtue in the past was to welcome scruffy strangers, desperately poor immigrants who barely spoke English. Benton speaks English exquisitely when he chooses, and he isn’t poor, although his funds are regulated.

He reaches inside his jacket for his wallet and produces a driver’s license: Steven Leonard Glover, age forty-four, born in Ithaca, New York, no longer Tom Haviland because Marino knows him by that alias. Whenever Benton has to change his identity, which he does whenever needed, he suffers a period of depression and meaninglessness, finding himself once again angrier than is necessary and all the more determined to prevail without burning with hate.

Hate destroys the vessel that holds it. To hate is to lose clarity of mind and vision. Throughout his life he has resisted hate, and it would be all too easy and appropriate to hate the hate-filled sadistic and unremorseful offenders he has relentlessly tracked and trapped beyond what was appropriate while he was with the FBI. Benton’s gift at evasion and imperviousness would not be possible if he hated or gave in to any extreme of emotion.

He became Scarpetta’s lover while he was still married, and perhaps that is his only sin he won’t forgive. He can’t bear to imagine the anguish Connie and their daughters suffered when they believed he was murdered. At times he considers his exile punishment for what he did to his family, because he was weak and gave in to an extreme of an emotion that he still feels. Scarpetta has that effect on him, and he would commit the same sin again—he knows it—were he to go back in time to when they first realized what they were feeling for each other. His only excuse—a weak one, he knows—is that their lust and falling in love wasn’t premeditated by either one of them. It happened. It simply happened.

“I’ll call ’em up for you,” the doorman says, returning the fraudulent ID to Benton.

“Thank you . . . what is your name?”

“Jim.”

“Thank you, Jim, but that won’t be necessary.”

Benton walks off, ignoring a Don’t Walk sign, crossing 75th Street and becoming part of the anonymous flow of pedestrians along Lexington Avenue. Swerving under scaffolding, he pulls his cap lower, but behind his dark glasses, his eyes miss nothing. Were any of the same oblivious people to pass him again on another block, he would recognize their faces, always aware and on guard. Three times, and he will tail whoever it is and capture him or her on his pocket-size video camera. He has amassed hundreds of tapes in the past six years, and so far they mean nothing beyond demonstrating that he lives in a very small world, no matter how big the city.

Cops have an obvious presence in New York, sitting in their cruisers, talking to one another on sidewalks and street corners. Benton passes them, stoically looking straight ahead, his pistol strapped around his ankle, a violation so serious he would probably be tackled or slammed against a building, were a cop to spot the gun. He would be handcuffed, stuffed inside a police car, interrogated, run through the FBI computer system, fingerprinted and arraigned in court, all to no avail, really. When he worked crime scenes, his prints were stored in AFIS, the automated fingerprint identification system. After his alleged death, his prints—including his ten-print card in cold storage—were altered, swapped with a man who had died of natural causes and was surreptitiously fingerprinted in the embalming room of a Philadelphia funeral home. Benton’s DNA profile is in no automated system anywhere on Earth.

He steps into a doorway and dials directory assistance on a cell phone that has the billing address of a phone number at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Programming the billing address was not so difficult. Benton has had years to become adept on the computer, using and violating cyberspace to his advantage. An occasional collect call added to the Texas penitentiary’s telephone bills is likely to escape notice and could not be traced to anyone, certainly never to him.

Benton knows that when he makes his call to Lucy’s office, the Texas penitentiary’s name and number will show up on whatever sophisticated security system she has. Of course, all calls are taped. Of course, Lucy will have her own forensic voice analysis computer system. Of course, Benton has Jean-Baptiste’s voice on tape and has had it for years, reaching back to the very dangerous days of an undercover operation that did not bring down the Chandonne cartel, but instead annihilated Benton’s identity and life. For this, Benton has not yet forgiven himself. He doesn’t believe he will ever be able to give up his guilt and humiliation. He underestimated those whose trust was synonymous with his life.

As a child, Benton and his magic ring made mistakes in his fantasy investigations. As an adult, he and his gold FBI ring have also made mistakes, errors in judgment, and flat-out wrong psychological assessments of murderers. But the one time in his career when he needed his acumen and wits the most, he slipped, and the thought of it still enrages him, sickens him, fills him with self-recrimination.

He tells himself during his most despondent moments, No one else is to blame. Not even the Chandonnes and their minions are to blame. You dug your pit, and now you must get out of it.

JUST PLAIN-JANE COPYING PAPER,” Polunsky’s public information officer, Wayne Reeve, explains to Scarpetta over the phone.

“We buy it by the ream and sell it to the inmates for a penny a sheet. Envelopes are cheap white dime-store variety, three for a quarter,” he adds. “If you don’t mind my asking, why are you interested?”

“Research.”

“Oh.” His curiosity lingers.

“Forensic paper analysis. I’m a scientist. What if the inmate doesn’t have commissary privileges?” Scarpetta inquires from her office in Delray Beach.

She was rushing out of the house with her suitcase when the phone rang. Rose answered it. Scarpetta eagerly took the call. She will miss her flight to New York.

“He—or she—can get writing paper, envelopes, stamps and so on. No one is denied that privilege, no matter what. You can understand it. Lawyers,” Reeve says.

Scarpetta doesn’t ask him if Jean-Baptiste Chandonne is still on death row. She doesn’t hint that she’s gotten a letter from him and is no longer certain Chandonne is safely locked up.

Enough, you son of a bitch.

I’ve had enough, you son of a bitch.

You want to see me, you’ll see me, you son of a bitch.

You want to talk, we’ll talk all right, you son of a bitch.

If you’ve escaped, I’m going to find out, you son of a bitch.

If you did or didn’t write this letter, I’m going to find out, you son of a bitch.

You’re not going to hurt anybody else, you son of a bitch.

I want you dead, you son of a bitch.

“Can you send me samples of commissary paper?” she asks Reeve.

“You’ll get them tomorrow,” he promises.

TURKEY BUZZARDS SWOOP LOW in the blue sky, the smell of death and decay drawing them to the marsh beyond the gray, weathered pier.

“What’d you do, throw meat in the saw grass?” Bev complains to Jay as she loops a rope over a piling. “You know how much I hate those damn buzzards.”

Jay smiles, his attention on the lamb cowering in the stern of the boat. She rubs her wrists and ankles, her clothing partially unbuttoned and in disarray. For an instant, relief passes through her terrified eyes, as if the handsome blond man on the dock couldn’t possibly be evil. Jay wears nothing but threadbare cutoff jeans, the muscles in his sculpted, tan body popping out with every move he makes. He lightly steps down into the boat.

“Get inside,” he orders Bev. “Hi,” he says to the woman. “I’m Jay. You can relax now.”

Her wide, glassy eyes are riveted to him. She keeps rubbing her wrists and wetting her lips.

“Where am I?” she asks. “I don’t understand . . .”

Jay reaches out to help her up, and her legs won’t work, so he grabs her around the waist.

“There we go. A little stiff, are we?” He touches the dried bloody clumps of hair matted to the back of her head and his eyes burn. “She wasn’t supposed to hurt you. You’re hurt, aren’t you? Okay. Hold on. I’m going to pick you up, just like this.” He lifts her as if she weighs nothing. “Put your arms around my neck. Good. He places her on the dock and climbs out after her. Helping her to her feet again, he picks her up and carries her inside the shack.

Bev sits on the narrow, sour-smelling bed. It has no covers, just a dingy, rumpled white form-fitted sheet and a stained pillow that has lost its shape and is almost flat. Bev’s eyes follow Jay as he lowers the woman to the floor, holding her around the waist while she struggles for balance.

“I can’t seem to stand up,” she says, avoiding Bev, pretending Bev isn’t there. “My feet are numb.”

“She tied you too tight, didn’t she?” Jay says as his eyes burn brighter. “What’d you do to her?” he asks Bev.

Bev stares at him.

“Get off the bed,” he says to her. “We need to let her lie down. She’s hurt. Get a wet towel.” To the lamb he says as he helps her on the bed, “I don’t have any ice. I’m sorry. Ice would be good for your head.”

“There’s ice in the fish box. And groceries,” Bev says in a flat tone.

“You didn’t bring me any pups,” Jay comments.

“I was busy, and nothing was open.”

“Plenty of strays out there, if you aren’t too lazy to look for them.”

She opens the refrigerator and pours cold water on a dish towel.

“That’s all right,” the lamb meekly replies, relaxing a little.

Jay is handsome and sweet. He is a friend. Not horrid, like that ugly beast of a woman.

“I’ll be fine. I don’t need any ice.”

“It’s not all right.” Jay gently arranges the pillow under her head, and she cries out in pain. “No, it’s not all right.”

He slips a hand under her neck, moving her head so he can feel the back of it. The pressure of his fingers is too much, and the woman cries out again.

“What’d you do to her?” he asks Bev.

“She fell in the boat.”

The woman says nothing and refuses to look at Bev.

“Fell with a little help, maybe?” Jay asks in a tone of perfect self-control.

He gathers the lamb’s blouse together and buttons it without touching her.

BENTON TAKES OFF his jacket and drops it in a trash can.

A block south, he tosses his baseball cap into another trash can and ducks into the shadows of scaffolding to unfasten his canvas knapsack. Inside is a black do-rag, and he ties it tightly around his head. He slips on a denim vest that has an American flag embroidered on the back. During a brief lull in pedestrian traffic, he substitutes his sunglasses for amber-tinted ones in different frames. Rolling up the knapsack, he tucks it under his arm and cuts left on 73rd Street, then left again on Third and back on 75th, where he stands at the corner of Lucy’s building. Jim the doorman ignores him and wanders inside the lobby for a welcome rush of air-conditioning.

New technology is Benton’s ally and enemy. Cell phone calls can be traced by more than caller ID. Signals bounce off satellites and boomerang to where the caller is located geographically when the call is made, and to date, it is impossible to foil this technology. Benton has no choice but somehow to work around it. While caller ID will erroneously indicate that the call is being made from a Texas prison, the satellite transmission will reveal that the call was made in Manhattan, pinpointed to an area that is smaller than a city block.

He uses this to his advantage, however. All obstacles can be steps to a higher benefit.

Benton makes the call from Lucy’s address at Lexington and 75th Street. Jean-Baptiste is on death row, and that is easy enough to check. Logic would dictate that Jean-Baptiste could not have called collect from Manhattan. Then who did? Lucy will puzzle over the call made in the immediate area of her office building, and knowing her as well as Benton does, he is certain she will make a call from her own address and see that the same coordinates are pinpointed by the satellite.

This will lead her to the conclusion that there must have been a technical glitch, that somehow the transmission traced back to where the call was received instead of where it was initiated. She will not understand how this could have happened when it has never happened before. Lucy will be paranoid. Without a doubt, she will be angry, because she does not forgive sloppy work or technical screwups. She will blame the snafu on the telephone company or her staff. Probably the latter.

As for Jim the doorman, when asked, he will say that at the precise moment the call was made, he saw no one on a cell phone in front of the building or close to it. This will be a lie. Almost everybody in New York walks around with a cell phone to his or her ear. The truth is, even if Jim remembers the precise time he left his post for the air-conditioned lobby, he won’t want to admit it.

The last obstacle is voice analysis, which Lucy will conduct immediately to verify that the caller was Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. That is no threat. Benton has spent several years meticulously studying, transcribing and editing recordings of Jean-Baptiste’s voice, then rerecording them into digital files with a single directional microphone that, when used in a high-sensitivity mode, picks up multidirectional sound, or background noise—in this case, the inside of a prison. He edited and spliced it on a computer, and the results are seamless, each file a blitz of sound bites intended for voicemail or a live recipient who has no chance for a response that would force a mental engagement that is impossible. Switching from Menu to a folder he named Redstick for Baton Rouge, he verifies the time stamp on the LCD and double-checks that all details of the setup are in order.

He plugs the microphone into a speaker port and tucks in the earpiece.

The phone at Infosearch Solutions—The Last Precinct—is picked up.

“Manhattan. Collect call to Infosearch Solutions on Seventy-fifth,” he says into the microphone.

“Your name?”

“Polunksy Unit.”

“Please hold.”

The operator connects the call.

“Collect call from Polunksy Unit. Will you accept charges?”

“Yes,” without pause or change of inflection.

“Good afternoon. May I ask who’s calling?” a male voice continues, the caller ID showing the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

Benton sets noise cancel on high to eradicate the live feedback of New York traffic and other sounds that would be ruinous for a call supposedly made from the interior of a penitentiary. He presses Play. The indicator light glows green, and File One begins.

“When Mademoiselle Farinelli returns, tell her Baton Rouge.” Jean-Baptiste’s recorded voice is as natural as if he himself is speaking in real time.

“She’s out of the office. Who’s calling? Who is this?” The man in Lucy’s office tries to talk to what is nothing more than a memory chip on the line. “May I give her a message?”

The call ended seven seconds ago. Benton erases File One from Redstick, to ensure that Jean-Baptiste’s faked message cannot be played again, ever, by anyone.

He walks swiftly along the congested sidewalk again, head bent, missing nothing.

PLEASE DON’T HURT ME,” the lamb says.

Jay helps the woman sit up. She cries and moans as he gently cleans her bloody hair, worrying about the split in her scalp, caused by the blunt-force trauma of her head cracking against the outboard motor. He reassures her that the injury isn’t serious and didn’t fracture her skull. She’s not seeing double, is she?

“No,” she says, her breath catching as he touches her hair again with the wet, bloody towel. “I can see fine.”

Jay’s sweetness, his protectiveness, has the usual effect, and the woman’s attention is fixed only on him. She identifies with him to the extent that she feels she can tell him that Bev—whose name the woman doesn’t know—pushed her into the outboard motor.

“That’s how I hit my head,” she confides to Jay.

He tosses the bloody towel to Bev. She hasn’t moved, just stands in the middle of the small room, staring at him like a cottonmouth coiled to strike. The towel lands at her feet, and she doesn’t pick it up.

He tells her to pick it up.

Bev doesn’t.

“Pick it up and wash it in the sink,” he says. “I don’t want to look at that thing on the floor. You shouldn’t have hurt her. Clean the towel and get all this insect repellent off her.”

“I don’t need her to get it off me,” the woman pleads. “Maybe it’s good to keep it on because of all the bugs.”

“No. You need it washed off,” Jay says, leaning close and smelling her neck. “You have too much on. It’s toxic. She must have soaked you with an entire bottle. That’s not good.”

“I don’t want her touching me again!”

“She hurt you?”

The lamb doesn’t answer.

“I’m here. She won’t hurt you.”

Jay gets up from the edge of the bed, and Bev collects the wet, gory towel.

“We don’t need to waste water,” she says. “The tank’s low.”

“It’s supposed to rain, eventually,” Jay replies, studying the woman as if she’s a car he might buy. “The tank’s got plenty, anyway. Wash the towel and bring it back in here.”

“Please don’t hurt me.”

The woman lifts her head up from the pillow. It is pinkish and wet, and a bright red spot indicates that her laceration has begun to bleed again.

“Just take me home and I won’t tell anybody. Not anybody, I swear to God.”

Her eyes plead with Jay, her only hope because he’s glorious to look at, and so far he’s been nice.

“Won’t tell anybody what?” Jay asks her, moving closer, sitting on the edge of the iron-frame bed with its foul, broken-down mattress. “What’s there to tell? You hurt yourself, now, didn’t you, and we’re Good Samaritans, taking care of you.”

She nods, uncertainty, then fear contorting her face.

“Make it quick. Please,” she whispers between convulsions, sobs and hiccups jerking her body. “If you aren’t going to let me go. Make it quick.”

Bev returns with the towel and hands it to Jay. Water drips on the bed and trickles down his bare, muscular arm. Bev runs her fingers through his hair and kisses the back of his neck, then presses close to him as he opens the woman’s blouse.

“Ah. No bra,” he says. “She wasn’t wearing one?” He cranes his head around, demanding an answer in a soft voice that by now has become scary.

Bev slides her hands down his sweaty chest.

The woman’s eyes are wide with the same glassy terror that Bev saw in the boat. She trembles violently, her naked breasts quivering. A drop of saliva slips out of the side of her mouth, and Jay stands up, disgusted.

“Get the rest of her clothes off and clean her up,” he orders Bev. “You touch her again, you know what I’ll do to you.”

Bev smiles. Theirs is a well-rehearsed, long-running drama.

THE NEXT MORNING, Scarpetta is still in Florida.

Once again, she was about to leave and was waylaid, this time by FedEx delivering two packages, one from the Polunsky Prison Information Office, the other a thick package containing Charlotte Dard’s case, mostly copies of autopsy and lab reports and histological slides.

Scarpetta places a slide of the left ventricular free wall on the compound microscope’s stage. If she could add up the hours she’s spent looking at slides throughout her career, the number would be in the tens of thousands. Although she respects the histologist, whose devotion is to the minuscule structures of tissues and the tales their cells can tell, she has never been able to comprehend sitting inside a tiny lab day in and day out, surrounded by sections of heart, lung, liver, brain and other organs, and injuries and stigmata of diseases that are cut into sections and turn rubbery inside bottles of a fixative such as formalin. Each tissue section is embedded in paraffin wax or a plastic resin and shaved into slices thin enough for light to pass through them. After they are mounted on glass slides, they are stained with a variety of dyes that were developed by the nineteenth-century textile industry.

Mostly, Scarpetta sees a lot of pinks and blues, but there are a perfusion of colors used, depending on the tissue and the cellular structure and possible defects that need to give up their secrets to her at the other end of the lens. Dyes, like diseases, are often named for whoever discovered or invented them, and this is where histology becomes unnecessarily complicated, if not annoying. It isn’t enough for dyes or dyeing techniques to be called blue or violet; they must be Cresyl blue, Cresyl violet, or Perl’s Prussian blue, or Heidenhain’s haematoxylin (purplish red), or Masson’s trichrome (blue and green), or Bielschowsky (neutral red), or her favorite mundanity: Jones’s methenamine silver. A typical egocentric pathological legacy is a van Gieson staining of a Schwann cell nuclei from a Schwannoma, and Scarpetta fails to understand why German naturalist Theodor Schwann would have wanted a tumor named after him.

She peers into the lens at the contraction bands in the pink-stained tissue shaved from a section of Charlotte Dard’s heart at autopsy. Some fibers are missing their nuclei, indicating necrosis, or the death of tissue, and other slides reveal pink-and-blue-stained inflammation and old scarring, and narrowing of the coronary arteries. The Louisiana woman was only thirty-two when she dropped dead at the door of a motel room in Baton Rouge, dressed to go out, keys in hand.

It was suspected eight years ago, at the time of her death, that her family pharmacist illegally gave her the powerful pain medication OxyContin, found in her pocketbook. She didn’t have a prescription for the drug. In a letter to Scarpetta, Dr. Lanier suggests that this pharmacist might have fled to Palm Desert, California. Dr. Lanier doesn’t indicate what he bases this possibility on or offer further details for his reopening Charlotte Dard’s case.

It is a mess for multiple reasons: The case is old; there is no evidence the drug came from the pharmacist, and even if it did, unless he premeditated killing her with OxyContin, he is not guilty of first-degree murder; at the time of Charlotte Dard’s death, he would not talk to the police but through his attorney claimed that a family friend with a ruptured disk must have given Charlotte Dard OxyContin, and she accidentally overdosed on it.

Several copies of letters sent eight years ago to Dr. Lanier are from the pharmacist’s attorney, Rocco Caggiano.

BEYOND THE WINDOW IN FRONT of Scarpetta’s desk, shadows crawl over sand dunes as the sun moves.

Palm fronds rattle lightly, and a man walking his yellow lab on the beach leans into a headwind. Far off on the hazy blue horizon, a container ship forges south, probably to Miami. If Scarpetta is too caught up in her work, she will forget the time and where she is and soon will miss another flight to New York.

Dr. Lanier answers his phone and is hoarse as he says, “Hello.”

“You sound terrible,” Scarpetta says sympathetically.

“I don’t know what I caught, but I feel like hell. Thanks for getting back to me.”

“What meds are you taking? I hope it’s decongestants and a cough suppressant with an expectorant, and that you’re staying away from antihistamines. Try the daytime or nondrowsy formulas that don’t list antihistamines or doxylamine succinate on the label—unless you want to dry yourself out and get a bacterial infection. And stay away from alcohol. It lowers your immunities.”

He blows his nose. “I’m a real medical doctor, just so you know. And an addictionologist, meaning I do know a thing or two about drugs.” He says this without a trace of defensiveness. “Thought you might be relieved to hear that.”

Scarpetta is embarrassed for making assumptions. Coroners are elected officials and unfortunately, nationwide, many of them are not physicians.

“I didn’t mean to insult you, Dr. Lanier.”

“You didn’t. By the way, your sidekick Pete Marino thinks you walk on water.”

“You checked me out.” She is nonplussed. “Good. Now hopefully we can get down to business. I’ve been through Charlotte Dard’s case.”

“An oldie but goodie, and I don’t mean that literally. There’s nothing good about it. Hold on. Let me get something to write with. Unquestionably, there’s a Bermuda Triangle for pens, and in my home it’s my beloved wife. All right.”

“Mrs. Dard’s case is definitely perplexing,” Scarpetta begins. “As you know from her tox reports, oxymorphone—the metabolite of OxyContin—is only four milligrams per liter of blood, which puts her in the low lethal range. Her gastric is negative, and the level in her liver’s no higher than the level in her blood. In other words, death from an overdose of OxyContin is equivocal. Clearly, her drug level isn’t as critical as her clinical findings.”

“I agree. My thought all along. If you interpret her tox in light of the histological findings, it’s possible she didn’t need as high a level for an accidental overdose. Although her reports and body diagrams don’t indicate any cutaneous stigmata of past intravenous drug abuse,” he adds. “So I’m guessing she was a pill-popper but didn’t shoot up.”

“Certainly she was a chronic drug abuser,” Scarpetta says. “Her heart tells us that. Patchy necrosis and fibrosis of varying age, and chronic ischemia, plus an absence of coronary artery disease or cardiomegaly. Basically, a coke heart.”

It is a catch-all phrase that does not necessarily mean the person was a cocaine addict. Drugs such as narcotics, synthetic narcotics, OxyContin, hydrocodone, Percocet, Percodan and whatever else the addict can get his or her hands on will destroy the heart just as completely as cocaine will. Elvis Presley is a sad example.

“I need to ask you about blackouts,” Dr. Lanier says, after a pause.

“What about them?” This must be what he so urgently wanted to talk to her about. “I saw nothing in the case file you sent me that mentions blackouts.”

She checks her irritation. As a private consultant, she is limited by the medicolegal information presented to her, and the absence of pertinent findings—or the presence of incorrect findings—is intolerable. Until she gave up working her own cases or supervising those worked by her other forensic pathologists throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia, she did not have to rely on the competence or veracity of virtual strangers.

“Charlotte Dard suffered occasional blackouts,” Dr. Lanier explains. “Or at least this is what I was told at the time.”

“Who told you?”

“Her sister. It appears,” he goes on, “or let me qualify this by saying it is alleged, that she suffered from retrograde amnesia . . .”

“I certainly would think her family would know that, unless no one was ever home.”

“Problem is, her husband Jason Dard’s a rather shady character. Nobody around here knows much, maybe nothing about him, except he’s rich as hell and lives on an old plantation. I wouldn’t call Mrs. Guidon a reliable witness. Although she certainly could be telling the truth about her sister’s condition prior to her death.”

“I’ve read the police narrative, which is brief. Tell me what you know,” Scarpetta says.

After a coughing bout, Dr. Lanier replies, “The hotel where she died is in a not-so-nice part of the city, in my jurisdiction. A housekeeper found her body.”

“What about blood tests? In the paperwork you sent me, all I got were postmortem levels. So I don’t know whether she might have had the elevated GGTP or CDT associated with alcohol abuse.”

“Since I first contacted you, I have managed to track down premortem blood test results, because she was in the hospital about two weeks before her death. Misfiled, I’m embarrassed to say. I’ve got a particular clerk I’d pay heaven and earth to get rid of. But she’s the sort to sue for one thing or another. The answer to your question is no—no elevated GGTP or CDT.”

“In the hospital for what?”

“Tests after her most recent blackout. So, obviously, she had one of these blackouts two weeks before she died. Again, I say allegedly.”

“Well, if she didn’t have elevated GGTP or CDT, it would seem to me that we can rule out alcohol as the cause of her blackouts,” Scarpetta replies. “And Dr. Lanier, I can’t offer you a second opinion if I’m not supplied with all of the information.”

“Be nice if I was supplied all the information, too. Don’t get me started on the police down here.”

“What was Mrs. Dard’s behavior during her blackouts?”

“Supposedly violent, throwing things, trashing the house or wherever she was staying. On one occasion, she vandalized her Maserati by smashing the windows, doors and hood with a hammer. She poured bleach all over the leather seats.”

“A record of this with a body shop?”

“It happened in May of 1995 and required two months to repair the damage, then her husband traded it in on a new one for her.”

“That wasn’t her last blackout, though.” Scarpetta flips to another page in her legal pad, writing quickly and illegibly.

“No, the last one—two weeks before her death—was in the fall. September first, 1995. On that occasion, she took a razor of some sort to paintings valued at more than a million dollars. Supposedly.”

“This was in her home?”

“In a parlor, as I understand it.”

“Witnessed?”

“Only the aftermath, based on what I’m told. Again, this is according to what her sister and husband said way back when.”

“Certainly her drug abuse could cause blackouts. Another possibility is temporal lobe epilepsy. Any record of her having suffered a head injury?”

“None that I’m aware of, and no old fractures or scarring showed up on X ray and gross examination. Hospital records indicate that after her second blackout, which, as I’ve said, was September first, 1995, she went through the gamut of tests: MRI, PET scan and so on. Nothing. Of course, temporal lobe epilepsy doesn’t always show up, and maybe she did suffer some sort of head injury and we just don’t know about it. Hard to imagine. I’m inclined to think her drug abuse was to blame.”

“Based on the information I have, I agree. Her findings correlate with chronic abuse and not from one single overdose of OxyContin. Sounds like the only answer as to manner of death is investigation.”

“Jesus God. That’s the problem. The cops who worked the case didn’t do shit and sure as hell aren’t going to do shit now. Hell, everything’s a problem down here. Except the food.”

“Mrs. Dard is probably a heart death with chronic drug abuse as a contributing factor,” Scarpetta tells him. “That’s the most I can offer you.”

“Doesn’t help that we’ve got an idiot of a U.S. Attorney, Weldon Winn,” Dr. Lanier continues to complain. “Since this damn serial killer’s been on the loose, a lot of people are sticking their noses in everything. Politics.”

“I presume you’re on the task force,” Scarpetta interrupts him.

“No. They say I’m not needed, since no bodies have turned up.”

“And if a body does turn up, you don’t need to know anything about the investigation? Even though it’s believed that each of the women was murdered? Everything you’re telling me goes from bad to worse,” Scarpetta says.

“You’re absolutely right. I haven’t been invited to look at the scenes of their abductions. I haven’t looked at their homes, cars, not a single crime scene.”

“Well, you should have,” Scarpetta replies. “When a person is abducted and assumed to be a homicide, the police should ask you to look at everything and know every detail. You should be fully informed.”

“Should doesn’t mean crap down here.”

“How many of the abducted women are—or were—from your parish?”

“So far, seven.”

“And you haven’t been to a single scene of an abduction? I’m sorry to keep asking you the same questions. But I’m incredulous. And now those scenes no longer exist, am I right?”

“Cases are as cold as an ice block,” he replies. “I guess the cars are still impounded, and at least that’s a good thing. But you can’t secure a parking lot or house forever, and I have no idea what’s happened with their homes.” He pauses to cough. “It’s going to happen again. Soon. He’s escalating.”

THE SKY IS TURNING A dirty blue with haze, and the wind picks up.

Scarpetta picks through paperwork as she talks to Dr. Lanier. Just now she finds a copy of the death certificate, folded up inside an envelope. The document isn’t certified and should not have been released by Dr. Lanier’s office. Only vital records would be authorized to send Scarpetta or any other requesting party a copy—a certified one. When Scarpetta was Chief, it would have been unthinkable for one of her clerks to make such an egregious error.

She mentions the problematic copy of the death certificate, adding, “I’m not trying to interfere with how you run your office, but thought you should know . . .”

“Goddamn!” he exclaims. “Let me guess which clerk. And don’t assume it was a mistake. Some people around here would love nothing better than to get me into serious trouble.”

The maiden name on her death certificate is De Nardi, her father Bernard De Nardi, her mother Sylvie Gaillot De Nardi.

Charlotte De Nardi Dard was born in Paris.

“Dr. Scarpetta?”

She vaguely hears his hoarse voice and coughing. Her mind locks on the abducted women, on Charlotte Dard’s suspicious death and the information blackout that keeps the coroner clueless. The Louisiana legal system is infamous for corruption.

“Dr. Scarpetta? You there? Did I lose you?”

Jean-Baptiste Chandonne is scheduled to die soon.

“Hello?”

“Dr. Lanier,” she finally says. “Let me ask you something. How did you hear about me?”

“Oh, good. I thought we’d gotten disconnected. An indirect referral. A rather unorthodox one suggesting I contact Pete Marino. That led me to you.”

“An unorthodox referral from whom?”

He waits for another coughing fit to pass. “A guy on death row.”

“Let me guess. Jean-Baptiste Chandonne.”

“I’m not surprised you would figure that out. I’ve been checking, I admit it. You have a pretty scary history with him.”

“Let’s don’t go into that,” she says. “I also assume he’s the source of information about Charlotte Dard. And by the way, Rocco Caggiano, the lawyer who represented our mysterious pharmacist who allegedly fled to Palm Desert? He’s also Chandonne’s lawyer.”

“Now that I didn’t know. You think Chandonne had something to do with Charlotte Dard’s death?”

“I’m betting that he or someone either in his family or associated with it did,” she says.

LUCY ISN’T SHOWERED, her usual demeanor in the office fractured by exhaustion and by post-traumatic stress that she will not acknowledge.

Her clothes look slept in because they were—twice. Once in Berlin, when the flight was cancelled, and the next time in Heathrow, when she and Rudy had to wait three hours to board an eight-hour flight that landed them at Kennedy Airport not even an hour ago. At least they had no baggage to lose, their few belongings stuffed into one small carry-on duffel bag. Before leaving Germany, they showered and disposed of the clothing they had worn in room 511 of the Szczecin Radisson Hotel.

Lucy wiped all prints off her tactical baton, and without a pause in her step, tossed it through the slightly open window of a dented Mercedes on the side of a quiet, narrow street crowded with parked cars. Certainly the Mercedes’s owner would puzzle over the baton and wonder who deposited it inside his or her front seat and why.

“Merry Christmas,” Lucy muttered, and she and Rudy briskly walked off into the dawn.

The morning was too dark and cool for blow flies, but with the afternoon, when Rudy and Lucy were long gone, the flies would awaken in Poland. More of the filthy winged insects would find Rocco Caggiano’s slightly open window and heavily drone inside to feed on his cold, stiff body. The flies should be busy depositing hundreds—maybe thousands—of eggs.

Lucy’s chief of staff, Zach Manham, needs but one piece of evidence to deduce that his boss is not herself and that something very bad happened wherever she’s just been. She reeks of body odor. Even when Manham has spent hours in the gym or run miles with Lucy, she doesn’t stink, not like this. Hers is the strong odor of fear and stress. Its secretion requires little perspiration, which is clammy and concentrated in the armpits and strongly permeates clothing, becoming more unpleasant and noticeable with time. Accompanying this acute reaction is an elevated heartbeat, shallow breathing, pallor and constricted pupils. Manham doesn’t know the physiology of a response he learned to recognize early in his former career as a detective for the New York District Attorney’s Office, but he doesn’t need to know.

“Go home and get some rest,” he repeatedly says to Lucy.

“Cut it out,” she finally barks at him, interested in the large digital recorder on Manham’s desk.

She slips on headphones and presses the Play button again, manipulating the volume.

For the third time, she listens to the cryptic message that their highly technical caller-identification system has narrowed down to the Polunsky Unit, while a satellite tracking system indicates the call was made from virtually the front door of Lucy’s office building, or perhaps even inside it. Hitting the Off button, she sits down, worn-out and beside herself.

“Goddamn, goddamn it!” she exclaims. “I don’t get it! You screw up something, Zach?”

She rubs her face, a residue of mascara sticky on her eyelashes and driving her crazy. When she played the role of pretty young thing who seemed perfectly in place at the Radisson in Szczecin, she somehow grabbed a tube of waterproof mascara, and she hates mascara, and she had no makeup remover because she’s rather much a stranger to cosmetics. So she scrubbed her face hard, succeeding only in getting soap in her eyes, which are bloodshot and puffy, as if she had been drinking all night. With rare exception, alcohol on the job is forbidden, and the first words out of her mouth when she appeared in her office not even an hour ago, leaving a jet stream of stench whenever she moved, was that she had not been on a bender, as if Manham or anybody else would have suspected, for even two seconds, that she had been.

“I didn’t screw up anything, Lucy,” Manham patiently replies, looking at her with concern.

He is moving closer to fifty years old, fit, six feet tall, with thick brown hair and a brush of gray at the temples, his former thick Bronx accent neutralized or altered when necessary. Manham is a natural mimic. Amazingly, he can fit into virtually any environment. Women find him irresistibly attractive and entertaining, and he uses this to his professional advantage. Moral judgments do not exist at The Last Precinct, unless an investigator is foolish and selfish enough to violate an unbending code of impeccable behavior. One’s personal choices must never, absolutely never, come within miles of the boundaries of missions that place lives at risk daily.

“I honestly have no idea what happened here, why the satellite tracking system pinpoints the immediate area of this building,” Manham tells her. “I contacted Polunsky, and Jean-Baptiste is there. They say he’s there. He could not have been here. That would be impossible, unless he can levitate, for Christ’s sake.”

“I think what you mean is travel out of body,” Lucy retorts, and her unfairness and arrogance are uncontrollable right now, and she feels terrible about it. “Levitate means to hover off the ground.”

She feels powerless because her usually brilliant and logical mind cannot decipher what has happened, and she wasn’t here when it happened.

Manham politely looks at her. “It’s him. You’re sure?”

Lucy knows Jean-Baptiste’s voice, soft, almost sweet, with a heavy French accent. His is a voice she will never forget.

“It’s him, all right,” she says. “Go ahead and run voice analysis, but I already know what it’s going to show. And I think Polunsky needs to prove that the asshole they’ve got on death row is really Chandonne—as in proving it with DNA. Maybe his fucking family’s pulled something. If need be, I’ll go there and look at his ugly face myself.”

She hates that she hates him. No competent investigator can give in to emotions, or judgment is obscured, even deadly. But Jean-Baptiste tried to kill Lucy’s aunt. For that, she despises him. For that, he should die. Painfully, Lucy wishes. For what he intended and attempted, he should feel the abject terror he inflicted on others and lusted to inflict on Scarpetta.

“Demand a new DNA test? Lucy, we need a court order.” Manham is aware of jurisdictional and legal limitations and has lived by their standards for so long that he is programmed to at least worry when Lucy suggests a plan that in the past would have been unthinkable and impossible and, if nothing else, would have resulted in a suppression of evidence that would destroy a case in court.

“Berger can request it.” Lucy refers to Assistant DA Jaime Berger. “Give her a call and ask her to come over here as soon as she can. Like right now.”

Manham has to smile. “I’m sure she has nothing to do and will welcome the diversion.”

SCARPETTA SPREADS OUT dozens of eight-by-ten color photographs she made by placing each sheet of the Polunsky commissary paper on a lightbox and photographing all of them under ultraviolet light, and then again at a magnification of 50X.

She compares them to photographs of the Chandonne letter she received. The paper has no watermarks and is composed of closely matted wood fibers, common in cheap paper as opposed to fine papers that include rag.

Visually, the paper has a smooth, shiny surface, typical in typing paper, and she sees no irregularities that might suggest it came from the same manufacturer’s batch, which doesn’t matter, really. Even if the paper did come from the same batch, that scientific evidence would be weak in court because the defense would instantly insist that because of the enormous size of a manufacturer’s batch, inexpensive grades of paper such as this are produced with untold millions and millions of sheets to a batch.

The eight-and-a-half-by-eleven, twenty-pound paper is no different from what Scarpetta uses in her printer. Ironically, the defense might make a case that she wrote the Chandonne letter and mailed it to herself.

She has been subjected to more ridiculously bizarre accusations than that. She doesn’t fool herself. Once accused, always accused, and she has been accused of too many professional, legal and moral breaches to survive the intense scrutiny of anyone who might wish to destroy her again.

Rose peeks her head into Scarpetta’s office. “If you don’t leave right this minute, you’re going to miss another flight.”

BUYING COFFEE ON THE STREET is an old routine that gives Jaime Berger a temporary escape from mayhem.

She takes her change from Raul, thanks him, and he nods, busy, aware of the long line behind her, and asks if she wants butter, even though she has refused butter for all the years she has patronized his kiosk across Centre Street from the District Attorney’s office. She walks off with her coffee and usual high-carbohydrate lunch of a bagel—this one poppy-seed—and two packets of Philadelphia cream cheese in a white paper bag with a napkin and a plastic knife. The cell phone on her belt vibrates like a stinging insect.

“Yes,” she answers, pausing on the sidewalk across from her granite building downtown, close to Ground Zero, where on September 11, 2001, she was looking out her office window when the second plane crashed into the World Trade Center.

That empty hole along the Hudson has left an empty hole in her, too. Staring at blank air, at what is no longer there, makes her feel older than her forty-eight years, and with every passing era in her life, she has lost a part of herself that can never be resurrected.

“What are you doing?” Lucy asks. “I hear street chaos, so you’re in the midst of cops, lawyers and thugs swarming around the courthouse. How quickly can you get to the Upper East Side, where things are more civilized?”

Typically, Lucy doesn’t give Berger an opportunity to get in a word until it is too late for her to say no.

“You’re not scheduled for court, are you?”

Berger says that she’s not. “I suppose you want me now.”

Realistically speaking, now is more like forty-five minutes, due to sluggish traffic. It is close to one p.m. when Berger is keyed up to the twenty-first floor of Lucy’s building. The elevator doors open to a mahogany reception area with Infosearch Solutions in brass letters on the wall behind the curved glass desk. There is no area for clients to wait, and the desk is flanked by two opaque glass doors. The left one electronically unlocks as the elevator doors shut, an invisible camera in the chandelier broadcasting Berger and every sound she makes on platinum-screen TVs in every interior office.

“You look like holy hell. But what matters is how I look,” she dryly says as Lucy greets her.

“You’re very photogenic,” Lucy replies with a quip she’s used before. “You could have had a brilliant acting career in Hollywood.”

Berger is a dark-haired woman with sharp features and pretty teeth. She is always dressed impeccably in power suits accented by expensive accessories, and although she might not think of herself as an actor, any good prosecutor is theatrical during interviews and certainly in the courtroom. Berger looks around at a wall of closed mahogany doors. One opens, and Zach Manham walks out, holding a stack of CDs.

“Step into my parlor,” Lucy says to Berger. “A spider’s turned up.”

“A tarantula,” Manham gravely adds. “How’ya doin, Boss?” He shakes Berger’s hand.

“Still miss the good ol’ days?” Berger smiles at him, but her eyes belie her light demeanor.

Losing Manham from the DA’s detective squad, or from her A Team, as she calls it, still hurts, even though it is for the best and she continues to work with him at times such as this one.

Another era passed.

“Step this way,” Manham says.

Berger follows him and Lucy inside what is simply referred to as the lab. The room is large and soundproof, like a professional recording studio. Overhead shelves are stacked with sophisticated audio, video and global-positioning and various tracking systems that defy Berger’s expertise and never cease to amaze her when she comes to Lucy’s office. Everywhere, lights blink and video screens flash from one image to another, some of them the interior of the building, others monitoring locations that make no sense to Berger.

She notices what looks like a bundle of tiny microphones on top of a desk crowded with modems and monitors.

“What’s this latest contraption?” she asks.

“Your latest piece of jewelry. An ultramicro transmitter,” Lucy replies, picking up the bundle and pulling loose one of the transmitters, no bigger than a quarter and attached to a long, thin cord. “It goes with this.” She taps what looks like a black box with jacks and an LCD. “We can disappear this baby in the hem of one of your Armani jackets, and if you get snatched, the quasi-Doppler direction finder can locate your exact position by VHF and UHF signals.

“Frequency range, twenty-seven to five hundred megahertz. Channels selected on a simple keyboard, and this other thing you’re looking at”—she pats the black box—“is a tracking system we can use to monitor wherever the hell you are in your car, on your motorcycle, your bicycle. Nothing more than a crystal oscillator powered by a nicad battery. Can monitor up to ten targets at a time, supposing your husband’s screwing around on you with multiple women.”

Berger doesn’t react to a subtlety that is anything but subtle.

“Water-resistant,” Lucy goes on. “A nice carrying case with a shoulder strap; could probably get Gurkha or Hermès to design a special one—perhaps in ostrich or kangaroo—just for you. Aircraft antenna available if you want to feel secure when you fly on a Learjet, a Gulf Stream, however you get about, woman-on-the-go that you are.”

“Another time,” Berger says. “I hope you didn’t bring me uptown to show me what happens if I get lost or kidnaped.”

“Actually, I didn’t.”

Lucy sits before a large monitor. Her fingers rapidly tap on the keyboard as she flies through windows, moving deeper into a forensic scientific software application that Berger doesn’t recognize.

“You get this from NASA?” she asks.

“Maybe,” Lucy replies, pointing the cursor at a folder labeled with a number that, again, is meaningless to Berger. “NASA does a lot more than bring home moon rocks. Put it this way”—Lucy pauses, hovering over a key, staring intensely at the screen—“I’ve got rocket-scientist buddies at the Langley Research Center.” She rolls the mouse around. “Lot of nice people there who don’t get the credit they deserve”—tap-tap-tap. “We’ve got some pretty amazing projects going on. Okay.” She clicks on a file labeled with an accession number and today’s date.

“Here we go.” She looks up at Berger. “Listen.”

“Good afternoon. May I ask who’s calling?” The male voice on the tape is Zach Manham’s.

“When Mademoiselle Farinelli returns, tell her Baton Rouge.”

BERGER PULLS UP A CHAIR and sits down, riveted to the computer screen.

Frozen on it are two voiceprints or spectrograms—2.5-second digital cuts—of a taped human voice converted into electrical frequencies. The resulting patterns are black and white vertical and horizontal bands that, like Rorschach inkblots, evoke different imaginative associations, depending on who is looking at them. In this case, the voiceprints remind Lucy of a black-and-white abstract painting of tornadoes.

She mentions this to Berger and adds, “That figures, doesn’t it? What I’ve done here—or, should I say, what the computer’s done here—is find Chandonne’s speech sounds from another source. In this case, your videotaped interview of him after his arrest in Richmond. The computer looked for matching words.

“Of course, the bastard didn’t make that easy when you look at the words used in the call we got. Nowhere in his interview with you,” Lucy goes on, “does he say Baton Rouge, for example. Nor does he ever mention me—Lucy Farinelli—by name. That leaves when, returns and tell her. Nowhere near as many sounds as I’d like for comparison. We’d like at least twenty matching speech sounds for a positive match. However, what we’ve got is a significant similarity. The darkest areas on the known and questioned voiceprints correspond to the intensity of the frequencies.” She points out black areas of the voiceprints on the computer screen.

“Looks the same to me,” Berger remarks.

“Definitely. In the four words when, returns and tell her, yes, I agree.”

“Hey, I’m convinced,” Manham says. “But in court, we’d have a hard time, for the reason Lucy said. We don’t have enough matching sounds to convince a jury.”

“Forget court for the moment,” says New York’s most respected prosecutor.

Lucy strikes other keys and activates a second file.

“I begin to touch her breasts and unhook her bra,” says Jean-Baptiste’s voice—that soft, polite voice.

Then Lucy says, “Here we go, three other fragments of an interview that contains words for comparison.”

“I was a bit confused at first when I tried to touch her and couldn’t pull out her top.”

Next is, “But I can tell you are pretty,” Jean-Baptiste Chandonne says.

“More,” says Lucy: “It was a return ticket, coach, to New York.”

Lucy explains: “Our four words, Jaime, close enough. As I indicated, these phrases are from your videotaped interview with him prior to his arraignment, when you were brought in as a special prosecutor.”

It is difficult for Lucy to hear segments of this interview. Vaguely, she resents Berger for forcing Scarpetta to watch the videotape, although it was necessary, completely necessary, to subject her to hours of what was nothing more than manipulative, violent pornography after he had almost murdered her. Jean-Baptiste lied and enjoyed it. No doubt, he was sexually aroused by the thought that Scarpetta, a victim and key witness, was his audience. For hours, she watched and listened to him fabricate in detail not only what he did in Richmond but his 1997 so-called romantic encounter with Susan Pless, a television meteorologist for CNBC whose savaged dead body was found inside her apartment in New York’s Upper East Side.

She was twenty-eight years old, a beautiful African-American beaten and bitten in the same grotesque fashion as Chandonne’s other victims. Only in her murder, seminal fluid was recovered. In Jean-Baptiste’s more recent slayings, the ones in Richmond, the victims were nude only from the waist up, and no seminal fluid was recovered, only saliva. That fact led to conclusions, based in part on DNA analysis, that the Chandonne web is a tight weave of organized crime for profit and violent aberrance committed for sadistic sport. Jean-Baptiste and Jay Talley enjoy their nonprofit sport. In the sexual slaying of Susan Pless, the two brothers tag-teamed, the debonair Jay seducing and raping Susan, then handing her off to his hideous, impotent twin.

Lucy, Berger and Manham look at the sound spectrograms on the computer screen. Although voice analysis is not an exact science, the three of them are convinced that the man who left the message and Jean-Baptiste Chandonne are one and the same.

“As if I needed this.” Berger swipes her finger across the video screen, leaving a faint trail. “I’d know the fucker’s voice anywhere. Tornado. You got it. That’s the damn truth. The way he tears through lives, and damn if it doesn’t look like he’s doing it again.”

Lucy explained the satellite tracking that pointed to the immediate area around her building while caller ID showed that the call was made from across the country, at the Polunsky Unit in Texas. “How do we make sense of this?”

Berger shakes her head. “Unless there’s some sort of technical glitch or some other explanation that eludes me, at least, at the moment.”

“Most important, I want to know for a fact that Jean-Baptiste Chandonne is still on death row in Texas and is scheduled to get the needle on May seventh,” Lucy says.

“No kidding,” Manham mutters, repeatedly clicking a pen, a nervous habit that annoys all who know him.

“Zach?” Berger cocks an eyebrow, staring at the pen.

“Sorry.” He slides it into the breast pocket of his starched white shirt. “Unless you two need me, I’ve got some calls to make.” He looks at both of them.

“We’re fine. Will fill you in later,” Lucy says. “And if anybody calls looking for me, the word is that nobody knows where I am.”

“Not ready to come up for air?” Manham smiles.

“No.”

He leaves, the muffled sound of the heavily padded door barely audible.

“And Rudy?” Berger asks. “Hopefully in his apartment, taking a shower or a nap? Looks like you should be doing the same.”

“Nope. We’re both working. He’s in his office down the hall, lost in cyberspace. Rudy the Internet junkie, which is a good thing. He has more search engines running all over the universe than England has tubes.”

“For me to get a search warrant to have Chandonne swabbed for DNA,” Berger says, “I have to show probable cause, Lucy. And a taped phone call not only isn’t going to do it, but I’m not sure how much you want leaked outside this office. Especially since we really don’t know what the phone call means . . .”

“Nothing,” Lucy interrupts. “You know that’s all I ever want leaking outside this office. Absolutely nothing.”

“The unforgivable sin.” Berger smiles, her eyes touched by a gentle sadness as she looks at Lucy’s stern, determined face, a face still smooth and bright with youth, a face with sensuously full lips the hue of dark red earth.

If it is true that people begin to die the day they are born, then Lucy seems an exception. She is an exception to all things human, it often seems to Berger, and for this reason alone, she fears that Lucy will not live long. She envisions her compelling young face and strong body on top of a stainless-steel autopsy table, a bullet through her brain, and no matter how she struggles to strike that image from her imagination, she can’t.

“Disloyalty, even born of weakness, is the unforgivable sin,” Lucy agrees, puzzled and unsettled by the way Berger is looking at her. “What’s the matter, Jaime? You think we’ve got a leak? Jesus, it’s what I have nightmares about. The nightmare I live with. I fear it more than death.” She is getting riled up. “I catch anybody betraying . . . well, one Judas in this organization, and we’re all cooked. And so I have to be hard.”

“Yes, you’re hard, Lucy.” Berger gets up, barely glancing at Chandonne’s captured voice patterns on the monitor. “We have an active unsolved case here in New York: Susan Pless.”

Lucy gets up, too, her eyes intense on Berger’s, anticipating what she’s about to say next.

“Chandonne is charged with her murder, and you know all the reasons why I gave in, folded up my tent, decided not to prosecute and let Texas have him instead.”

“Because of the death penalty,” Lucy says.

THE TWO OF THEM PAUSE by the soundproof door, monitors glowing, images from closed-circuit cameras flashing from one to the next, and small, bright lights winking white, green and red, as if Lucy and Berger are in the cockpit of a spacecraft.

“I knew he’d be sentenced to death in Texas, and he was. May seventh,” Berger mutters. “But no death penalty for him here, never in New York.”

She stuffs her legal pad inside her briefcase and snaps it shut. “One of these days the DA might allow the needle, but probably not during my tenure. But I suppose the question now, Lucy, is do we want Chandonne to die? And more to the point, do we want whoever’s in his cell in Polunsky to be executed when we can’t be certain who that person is, now that we’ve gotten these communications from the infamous Loup-Garou?”

Berger says we, although she has gotten no communication from Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. As far as Lucy knows, only she, Marino and Scarpetta have: letters, and now a phone call that seems to have been made from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, unless technology has failed or human programmers have.

“No judge is going to grant me a court order to get his DNA,” Berger says again in her usual, calm, self-assured tone. “Not without probable cause for a search warrant. I get it, and I’ll try to extradite him to New York and put him on trial for the murder of Susan Pless. Based on the DNA from his saliva, we’ll get a conviction even if we know that the seminal fluid in her vagina wasn’t his, was in fact Jay Talley’s, his twin brother’s. Chandonne’s attorney, Rocco Caggiano, is going to throw in every dirty trick he can think of if we bring this case back to life—so to speak.”

Lucy avoids the subject of Rocco Caggiano. Her expression registers nothing. Waves of nausea roll through her again. She wills them to pass. I will not get sick, she silently orders herself.

“I certainly would introduce Talley’s seminal fluid into evidence, and there the case gets dicey. The defense will argue that Jay Talley, now a fugitive, raped and murdered Susan, and all I can prove without a doubt is that Chandonne sank his teeth into her. In summary,” she is in courtroom mode, “hopefully, the donor of the seminal fluid will be of no consequence to jurors, who will be horrified that saliva found in bite marks virtually all over Susan’s upper body will prove that Chandonne tortured her. But I can’t prove he murdered her or that she was even alive when he started biting her.”

“Shit,” Lucy says.

“Maybe he gets convicted. Maybe the jurors believe she suffered extreme physical pain, that the murder was vicious and wanton. It’s possible he would get the death penalty, but it’s never carried out in New York. So, if convicted, he’d probably get life without possibility of parole, and then we have to live with him until he dies in prison.”

Lucy places her hand on the doorknob and leans against thick acoustic foam rubber padding. “I’ve always wanted him dead.”

“And I was glad he ended up in Texas,” Berger replies. “But I also want his DNA so we know for a fact that he isn’t roaming the streets somewhere, his eyes on his next victim . . .”

“Which could be one of us,” Lucy says.

“Let me make some calls. The first step is for me to tell a judge I intend to reopen Susan Pless’s murder and want a court order for Chandonne’s DNA. Then I’ll contact the governor of Texas. Without his sanction, Chandonne’s not going anywhere. I know enough about Governor Corley to expect serious obstinance on his part, but at least I think he’ll listen to me. It does his state proud to free the Earth of murderers. I’ll have to make a deal with him.”

“Nothing like justice to help them out at election time,” Lucy says cynically as she opens the door.

MID-MORNING IN POLAND, a maintenance worker named George Skrzypek is sent to room 513 of the Radisson Hotel to fix a stuck drain in a bathtub that is causing an unpleasant odor.

He knocks on the door and calls out “maintenance” several times. When no one answers, he lets himself in, noticing right away that the guests have checked out, leaving a bed of tangled sheets spotted with seminal fluid and numerous empty wine bottles and ashtrays filthy with cigarette butts on the bedside tables.

The closet door is open, coat hangers on the floor, and when he walks into the bathroom with his box of tools, he discovers the usual mess of toothpaste crusted on the sink and splattered on the mirror. The toilet isn’t flushed, the tub filled with scummy water, and large flies crawl on a plate of partially eaten chocolates set on the counter next to the sink. Flies drone and butt against the light over the mirror and dive-bomb Skrzypek’s head.

Pigs.

So many people are pigs.

He pulls on large rubber gloves and dips his hands into the cold, greasy bathwater, feeling for the drain. It is clogged with clumps of long black hair.

Pigs.

Water begins to drain from the tub. He tosses the wet, matted hair into the toilet and waves flies away from his face, disgusted as he watches them moil over the plate of chocolates. Taking off his rubber gloves, he flaps them at the fat, black, filthy pests.

Of course, flies are not exotic insects to him, and he sees them on the job, but never this many in a room and not this time of year when the weather is cool. He moves past the bed and notes the open window, a typical sight, even in the winter, because so many guests smoke. As he reaches to shut it, he notices another fly crawling on the sill. It lifts up like a dirigible and buzzes past him into the room. An odor seeps in with the outside air, a very faint odor that reminds him of sour milk or rotten meat. He sticks his head out the window. The stench is coming from the room directly to the right. Room 511.

THE CAR IS PARKED AT a meter on East 114th Street in Harlem, within a block of Rao’s.

In Benton’s former life, he could get a coveted table at Rao’s because he was FBI and had special status with the family who has owned the famous, if not notorious, Italian restaurant for a hundred years. It was a hangout for the mob, and there is no telling who dines there now. Celebrities frequent its few checked cloth–covered tables. Cops love the place. The mayor of New York stays away. Parked on East 114th, in a beat-up black Cadillac that Benton bought for $2,500 cash, is probably as close to Rao’s as he will ever get again.

He plugs a cell phone into the cigarette lighter, engine and air-conditioning running, doors locked, his scan never leaving the mirrors as he eyes rough people who have nothing better to do than walk the streets, looking for trouble. The billing address of this phone is the P.O. Box number of a woman in Washington who does not exist. The satellite location of where Benton’s call is made is of no consequence, and within two minutes, he hears U.S. Senator Frank Lord talking to a staff member who is unaware that the senator has activated mode two of his international cell phone and will now receive calls and actually transmit his conversation without any alert that can be detected by anyone other than himself.

While the senator was testifying on live TV, he checked his watch and suddenly called for a break. Without touching the phone clipped on his belt, the caller—in this case, Benton—can hear everything the senator says.

He hears muffled footsteps and voices.

“. . . World’s greatest obstructionist body. If that isn’t the truth,” says Senator Lord, who is always reserved, but as tough as they come. “Damn Stevens.”

“He’s raised filibuster to an art form, that’s certain,” another male voice sounds in Benton’s earpiece.

When Benton left a text message on the Senator’s cell phone with the exact time he would make this call, it was the first time Benton had made any contact with him in almost a year. Senator Lord knows Benton is listening, unless he has forgotten or didn’t get the message. Doubts wrestle with Benton’s confidence. He tries to envision the senator, dressed as always in a crisp conservative suit, his posture as straight as a four-star general’s.

But the remote one-sided meeting must be on track. The senator walked out of a hearing that was probably being aired live on C-SPAN. He wouldn’t do that without a good reason, and it would be coincidental, to say the least, if he just happened to step out at the precise time Benton let him know he would call the number in mode two.

Also, it occurs to Benton with relief, the senator obviously has set his phone on mode two. Otherwise, Benton could not overhear his conversation. Don’t be stupid and so damn jumpy, he silently tells himself. You are not stupid. Senator Lord is not stupid. Think clearly.

He is reminded of how much he misses seeing his old friends and acquaintances in the flesh. Hearing the voice of Senator Lord, Scarpetta’s trusted friend, a man who would do anything for her, tightens Benton’s throat. He clenches his hands, gripping his phone so tightly that his knuckles blanch.

The man, probably a staff member, asks, “Can I get you something to drink?”

“Not now,” Senator Lord says.

Benton notices a muscular, bare-chested youth casually moving closer to his rusting, dented Cadillac, a hunk of junk so caked with Bondo, the car looks as if it has pigment disorder. Benton stares him down, a universal warning, and the youth veers off in another direction.

“He’s not going to get appointed, sir,” the staff member replies, oblivious that every word he says is being broadcast to a Nokia cell phone in Harlem.

“I’m always more optimistic than you are, Jeff. Things can turn around, surprise you,” says Senator Lord, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee and the most powerful politician in federal law enforcement, because he controls funding, and everything is about funding, even solving the most heinous crimes.

“I want you to leave and call Sabat.” Senator Lord refers to Don Sabat, the director of the FBI. “Assure him he’ll get what he needs for his new cyber-crime unit.”

“Yes, sir.” The staff member sounds surprised. “Well, you’ll make his day.”

“He’s done all the right things and needs my help.”

“I’m not sure I agree with you, Chairman, in the sense that we have some other pretty big issues, and this is going to set off a lot of . . .”

“Thank you for taking care of it,” Senator Lord cuts him off. “I’ve got to get back in there and make these idiots think about people instead of damn political power games.”

“And punishment. There are those who aren’t too fond of you.”

The senator laughs. “Means I’m doing something right. Give Sabat my regards, tell him things are moving along well now, are in the works. Reassure him, I know he’s been unsettled. But we’ve really got to be diligent now, more than ever.”

The line goes dead. Within hours, money will be wired into various accounts at The Bank of New York at Madison and 63rd, and Benton can begin withdrawals with bank cards issued in other fictitious names.

INSIDE LUCY’S OFFICE, a light begins to flash on a computer. The news has hit the wire service. The infamous trial lawyer Rocco Caggiano appears to have committed suicide in a hotel in Poland, his body discovered by a maintenance worker who noticed a foul odor coming from one of the rooms.

“How in the hell . . . ?” Lucy strikes a key to deactivate the flashing light. She clicks the mouse on Print.

Search engines are her specialty, and a posse of them have been dedicated to finding any information that might be related to Rocco Caggiano. There is plenty. Rocco loved to read about himself, was a news hog, and every time Lucy has scanned some article about him or a client he represented, she has felt an uneasiness she has never experienced before. She can’t muster enough self-control to stop imagining Rudy helping Rocco shoot himself in the head.

Pointed up.

The barrel should be pointed up.

A tip she learned from her Aunt Kay, whose reaction Lucy can’t imagine were she to find out what her precious niece and Rudy have done.

“Not even forty-eight hours?” Rudy leans over her shoulder, his breath on her neck smelling like the cinnamon gum he has a habit of smacking away on when he’s not in public.

“Sounds like our luck has continued to turn bad in Szczecin. Thanks to a maintenance worker and a stuck drain.” Lucy continues reading an AP report.

Rudy sits next to her and leans an elbow on the desk, his chin in his hand. He reminds her of a boy who has just lost his first Little League baseball game.

“After all that planning. Fuck. Now what? You pulled up the medical examiner’s report? Christ, don’t tell me it’s in Polish.”

“Hold on. Let me jump out of this . . .” She clicks the mouse. “Into something else . . . I love Interpol . . .”

The Last Precinct is a very select client, one of those entities considered part of Interpol’s massive international web. For the privilege, Lucy must pass security clearance, of course, and pay the same yearly subscription fee as a small country. She executes a search, and Rocco Caggiano’s death records are on the screen in seconds. Police and autopsy reports have been translated from Polish into French.

“Oh, no,” Lucy says with a sigh as she swivels around in the chair and looks up at Rudy. “How’s your French?”

“You know how my French is. Limited to my tongue.”

“You’re so vulgar. Just a single-tasking computer. You boys. One thing on the mind.”

“I don’t always think about only one thing.”

“You’re right. I apologize. You think about the one thing, except you do it two, three, a million times a day.”

“And you, Mam-ouzelle Farinelli?”

“Oh, God, your French is bad.”

She glances at her watch, this one a formidable titanium Breitling that includes an Emergency Locator Transmitter, or ELT.

“I thought you weren’t supposed to wear that thing unless you’re flying.” Rudy taps her watch.

“Don’t touch it. You’ll set it off,” she teases him.

He holds on to her arm, studying the watch, frowning at the bright blue face, tilting his head this way and that, pretending he’s stupid. Lucy starts laughing.

“One of these days I’m gonna unscrew this big knob right here”—he taps her watch again, still holding on to her arm—“and pull the antenna all the way out. And then run like hell . . .”

Lucy’s cell phone vibrates, and she slips it out of the case on her belt.

“And laugh my ass off when the Coast Guard, the F-15s come roaring in . . .”

“Yes,” she bluntly answers the phone.

“You have such a sweet manner with people,” Rudy whispers in her ear. “If I die, will you marry me?”

Static on the other end is bad. “Who is this?” she asks, loudly. “I can’t hear you.” The static gets worse. Lucy shrugs and ends the call. “Don’t recognize the number, do you?”

She holds up her phone, showing Rudy the number that someone just used to call her.

“Nope. Nine-three-six . . . ? What area code is that?”

“Easy enough to find out.”

It doesn’t require special search engines or Interpol to type in a telephone number and find out whose it is. Lucy logs on to Google. The name that comes up on the computer screen is the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Polunsky Unit. Included is a map.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Rudy says, still flirting but completely cognizant of the importance of a call from Polunsky.

“Why would I marry you if you’re dead?” she mutters, scarcely listening to him.

“Because you can’t live without me.”

“I can’t believe this.” She stares at the screen. “What the hell is going on? Get Zach to call my aunt, make sure she is safe. Have him tell her it’s possible Chandonne might be out. Goddamn it! He’s fucking with us!”

“Why don’t you call her yourself?” Rudy puzzles.

“That piece of shit is fucking with us!” Her eyes blaze.

“Why don’t you call Scarpetta?” Rudy asks again.

Lucy instantly becomes somber.

“I can’t talk to her right now. I just can’t.” She looks at him. “How are you doing?”

“Awful,” he says.

BENTON DID NOT CALL on a landline, because he did not want the inaudible conversation taped.

The technical tools that Lucy most likely has and can’t live without would not include a cell phone that automatically tapes a live conversation, especially since very few people have her cell phone number, and those who do are not the sort she would secretly tape. This ploy was far simpler than the last one, and there is no risk that Lucy can try voice analysis to decipher what Jean-Baptiste’s nonsensical taped voice had to say, which was nothing.

Benton simply spliced fragments of Jean-Baptiste’s taped voice with static, to give the impression of an attempt to talk when one is in a very bad cell. Already she will have traced the call—just as she did the last one—to Polunsky. She will have no satellite capabilities, because the garbled call is gone, lost in space—again, because Benton did not call any of her office lines.

She will be angry. When she gets sufficiently irritated, nothing can stop her. Jean-Baptiste Chandonne is fucking with her. This is what she will think, and Benton knows Lucy well enough to be certain she has made the mistake of hating Chandonne. Hate interferes with clear thinking. She will wonder how Chandonne can be calling her from Polunsky and from New York, if her satellite technology is to be trusted.

In the end, Lucy always trusts her technology.

A second call from Polunsky, and now she will begin to believe, seriously believe, that Chandonne must have a phone with a Texas Department of Criminal Justice billing address. She is no more than a breath away from believing that Jean-Baptiste Chandonne has escaped.

Scarpetta will decide she must encounter him face-to-face, behind protective glass, inside the Polunsky Unit. Chandonne will refuse to see anybody else, and that is his right.

Yes, Kay, yes. It’s for you, it’s for you. Please. Face him before it’s too late. Let him talk!

Benton is getting frantic.

Baton Rouge, Lucy!

Chandonne said Baton Rouge, Lucy!

Are you listening to me, Lucy?

A
RADIO WITH A DIPOLE antenna is not required for Jean-Baptiste Chandonne to know the breaking news.

“Hey, Hair Ball!” Beast yells. “You heard? Guess not, since you don’t got no fucking radio, like I do. Guess what? Guess what I just heard? Your lawyer ate his gun in Poland.”

Jean-Baptiste carefully moves his pen with the skilled hand of a surgeon, tracing over the words on death row and on the front row of life. He brushes his fingertips over the indentations on white paper as he composes a letter to Scarpetta that will be forwarded to her by his lawyer, who now Jean-Baptiste learns is supposedly dead. If Rocco is dead, Jean-Baptiste has no emotions about it, but he is curious to know whether the death is significant or simply a random suicidal whim that carried Rocco away.

The news of the suicide creates an uproar of the usual obscenities, cruel remarks and questions.

Information.

On death row, information is precious. Anything new to hear is devoured. The men are starved for rumors, gossip, information, information. So this is a big day for them. None of the inmates ever met Rocco Caggiano, but whenever Jean-Baptiste’s name has been mentioned on the news, Rocco has been mentioned too, and vice versa. A simple deduction is enough for Jean-Baptiste to accept that Rocco’s death is of interest to the press only because he represents the notorious Jean-Baptiste, alias Le Loup-Garou, alias Hair Ball, Mini-Me Dick and Wolfman and oh . . . What was the newest appellation that Beast—the ever-clever Beast—conjured up earlier today?

PUBIC Enemy Number One.

He wrote it on a folded note that was slid under Jean-Baptiste’s door, complete with a pubic hair, Beast’s pubic hair. Jean-Baptiste ate the note, tasting the words, and blew the pubic hair out his barred window. It drifted to the floor outside his cell.

“If I was Wolfman’s lawyer, I’d eat my gun, too!” Beast calls out.

Laughter, and the bang, bang of inmates kicking their steel doors.

“Shut up! What the hell’s going on in here?”

The mayhem doesn’t last long. Corrections officers restore order to the pod immediately, and a pair of brown eyes appear in the barred window of Jean-Baptiste’s door.

Jean-Baptiste feels the low energy of the stare. He never stares back.

YOU NEED TO MAKE a phone call, Chandonne?” the voice belonging to the eyes asks. “Your lawyer’s dead, committed suicide. They found his body in a hotel room in some Polish city I can’t pronounce. Looks like he’d been dead a while. Killed himself because he was a fugitive. Figures that you’d be represented by a criminal. That’s all I know.”

Jean-Baptiste sits on his bunk, tracing over words on white paper. “Who are you?”

“Officer Duck.”

“Monsieur Canard? Coin-coin. That is French for quack-quack, Monsieur Duck.”

“You want to make a phone call or not?”

“No, merci.”

Officer Duck is never sure how to describe or define the subtleties that ignite his temper every time Jean-Baptiste speaks, but the result is belittlement and powerlessness, as if the mutant murderer is superior and indifferent to death row and those who have complete control of him. The Wolfman manages to make Officer Duck feel as though he is nothing but a shadow in a uniform. He looks forward to Jean-Baptiste’s execution and wishes it could be painful.

“Got that right. No mercy’s what your ass is gonna get in ten short days,” Officer Duck mouths off. “Sorry about your lawyer’s blowing his brains out and rotting inside a hotel room. I can tell you feel real bad about it.”

“Lies,” Jean-Baptiste replies as he gets up from his bunk and moves to the door, wrapping fingers with their swirls of pale, downy hair around the iron bars in the tiny window.

His Halloween face fills the space and startles Officer Duck, who almost panics at the close proximity of his inch-long filthy thumbnail—the only nail that, for some reason, Jean-Baptiste never cuts.

“Lies,” Jean-Baptiste repeats.

It is never easy to know where his asymmetrical eyes are directed or how much they see, and the hair covering his forehead and neck and protruding in tufts from his ears overwhelms Officer Duck with fright.

“Move back. Goddamn, you stink worse than a dog that’s been rolling around in the juice of something dead. We’re gonna cut that fucking thumbnail of yours.”

“It’s my legal right to grow my nails and my hair,” Jean-Baptiste replies softly, with a gaping smile that reminds the officer of a widemouthed fish.

He imagines those widely spaced, pointed baby teeth ripping into female flesh, biting breasts like a frenzied shark while hairy fists pound beautiful faces to pulp. Chandonne targeted only gorgeous, successful women with sexy bodies. He has a fetish for large breasts and nipples that, according to a forensic psychologist who is in and out of the pod, denotes an obsession with a body part that compels Jean-Baptiste to annihilate it.

“For some offenders, it’s shoes and feet,” the forensic psychologist explained over coffee, perhaps a month ago.

“Yeah, I know about the shoe thing. These wackos break into houses and steal some lady’s shoes.”

“It happens more than you might expect. The shoe itself is sexually arousing to the offender. Frequently, he then feels the need to kill the woman wearing the fetish or whose body part is the fetish. Many serial killers got their starts as fetish burglars, going into homes, stealing shoes, underwear, other objects that mean something to them sexually.”

“So Wolfman was probably stealing bras when he was a hairy little kid.”

“Could very well have been. He certainly enters homes with ease, and that is consistent with a serial burglar who has progressed to a serial murderer. The problem with fetish burglary is often the victim has no clue that her home has been entered and that anything was taken. How many women who can’t find a shoe or even several shoes, or lingerie, would assume a burglar has been inside her home?”

Officer Duck shrugged. “Hell, my wife can’t find nothing half the time she looks. You ought to see her closet. If anybody’s got a shoe fetish, Sally does. But it’s not like some guy can break in to a lady’s home and walk off with a breast. Well, I guess some of them are into the dismemberment thing.”

“It’s like hair color, eye color or anything else. An offender has a fetish about whatever triggers sexual arousal that in some cases gives rise to a sadistic need to destroy that fetish. Which, in this instance, is the woman with the size and shape of breasts that are a fetish to Jean-Baptiste Chandonne.”

Officer Duck understands in a limited way. He likes breasts, too. He is perversely, shamefully aroused by images, even violent ones.

THE RINGING OF the officer’s feet on the catwalk fades.

Jean-Baptiste resettles on his bunk, a stack of clean white paper on his lap. He taps his pen and composes another poetic phrase, unfurling it from his unique mind like a brilliant red flag that waves in rhythm with his pen. His soul brims with poetry. Molding words into images and profundities that roll together in perfect rhythm is effortless, so effortless.

Roll together in perfect rhythm. He traces his graceful calligraphy again and again, bearing down hard with the ballpoint pen.

Roiling together in perfect rhythm.

That is better, he thinks, tapping the pen on the paper again, in rhythm with his inner rhythm.

Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap.

He can slow it down or make it faster or faint or strong, depending on the music of blood he remembers from each kill.

“Rolling,” he starts again. “Mais non.”

It all roils together in perfect rhythm.

“Mais non.”

Tap, tap of the pen.

“Dear Rocco,” Jean-Baptiste decides to write. “You did not dare to mention Poland to the wrong person, of this I can be sure. You are too much of a coward.”

Tap, tap, tap.

“But who? Maybe Jean-Paul,” he writes to his dead lawyer.

Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap . . .

“Hey, Hair Ball! I got my radio tuned in,” Beast yells. “Ohhhh, too bad you can’t hear it. Guess what? They’re talking about your lawyer again. Another itty-bitty little news flash. He left a note, see? It said having you for a client just killed him. Get it?”

“Shut up, Beast.”

“Get a life, Beast.”

“Your jokes suck, man.”

“I wanna smoke! Why the fuck don’t they let me smoke!”

“Bad for your health, man.”

“Smokin’ will kill ya, dumb shit. Says so right on the pack.”

THE ATKINS DIET WORKS FINE for Lucy because she has never been keen on sweets and doesn’t mind forgoing pasta and bread. Her most dangerous indulgence is beer and wine, and she abstains from both at Jaime Berger’s penthouse apartment on Central Park West.

“I won’t force you,” Berger says, returning the bottle of Pinot Grigio to the top shelf of the refrigerator inside her beautiful kitchen of wormy chestnut cupboards and granite countertops. “I’m better off without it myself. I can hardly remember anything anymore, as it is.”

“I’d be better off if you would forget things now and then,” Lucy says. “I’d be a lot better off if I would, too.”

The last time she visited Berger’s penthouse was at least three months ago. Berger’s husband got drunk, and soon enough he and Lucy went at each other until Berger asked Lucy to please leave.

“It’s forgotten,” Berger says with a smile.

“He’s not here, right?” Lucy makes sure. “You promised it was okay for me to come over.”

“Would I lie to you?

“Well . . .” Lucy kids her.

For the moment, their light exchange belies the horror of that event. Never has Berger witnessed such a display in what was supposed to be civilized socializing. She truly worried that Lucy and her husband would resort to blows. Lucy would win.

“He hates me,” Lucy says, pulling a packet of folded paper out of the back pocket of her cutoff jeans.

Berger doesn’t reply as she pours sparkling water into two tall beer glasses and goes back into the refrigerator for a bowl of freshly cut wedges of lime. Even when she is casual in a soft white cotton warm-up suit and socks, as she is now, she is anything but easygoing.

Lucy begins to fidget, stuffs the papers back into her pocket. “Do you think we can ever relax around each other, Jaime? It hasn’t been the same . . . .”

“It really can’t be the same, now can it?”

Berger makes pennies as a prosecutor. Her husband is a real estate thief, maybe one notch more highly evolved than Rocco Caggiano, in Lucy’s opinion.

“Seriously. When will he be home? Because if it’s soon, I’m leaving,” Lucy says, staring at her.

“You wouldn’t be here right now if he was coming home soon. He’s attending a meeting in Scottsdale. Scottsdale, Arizona. In the desert.”

“With reptiles and cactus. Where he belongs.”

“Stop it, Lucy,” Berger says. “My bad marriage is not somehow related to all the awful men your mother chose over you when you were growing up. We’ve been through this before.”

“I just don’t understand why . . .”

“Please don’t go there. The past is past.” Berger sighs, returning the bottle of San Pellegrino to the refrigerator. “How many times do I have to tell you?”

“Yes, the past is past. So let’s get on to what does matter.”

“I never said it didn’t—doesn’t matter.” Berger carries their drinks into the living room. “Come on now. You’re here. I’m glad you’re here. So let’s make it all right, shall we?”

The view overlooks the Hudson, a side of the building considered less attractive than the front of it, which has the view of the park. But Berger loves water. She loves to watch the cruise ships docking. If she wanted trees, she has told Lucy many times, she wouldn’t bother living in New York. If she wanted water, Lucy usually replies, she shouldn’t have bothered living in New York.

“Nice view. Not bad for the cheap side of the building,” Lucy says.

“You’re impossible.”

“That I know,” Lucy replies.

“How does poor Rudy put up with you?”

“That I don’t know. I guess he loves his job.”

Lucy sprawls on an ostrich-skin couch, her bare legs crossed, her muscles speaking their own language, responding to movements and nerves while she lives on with little awareness of how she looks. Her workouts are an addictive release from demons.

JEAN-BAPTISTE STRETCHES OUT on the thin wool blanket he soaks with sweat each night.

He leans against the hard, cold wall. He has decided that Rocco isn’t dead. Jean-Baptiste does not fall for yet another manipulation, although he is not certain what the purpose of this manipulation might be. Ah, of course, fear. His father must lurk behind this lie. He is warning Jean-Baptiste that suffering and death are the reward for betrayal, even if the traitor is the mighty Monsieur Chandonne’s son.

A warning.

Jean-Baptiste had better not talk now that he is about to die.

Ha.

Every hour of every day, the enemy attempts to make Jean-Baptiste suffer and die.

Don’t talk.

I will if I want. Ha! It is me, Jean-Baptiste, who rules death.

He could kill himself easily. In minutes he could twist a sheet and tie it around his neck and a leg of the steel bed. People are misinformed about hangings. No height is necessary, only a position—such as sitting cross-legged on the floor and leaning forward with all his weight, thus putting pressure on the blood vessels. Unconsciousness happens in seconds, then death. Fear would not touch him, and were he to end his biological life, he would transcend it first, and his soul would direct all that he would do from that point on.

Jean-Baptiste would not end his biological life in this manner. He has too much to look forward to, and he joyfully leaves his small death row cell and transports his soul into the future, where he sits behind Plexiglas and stares at the lady doctor Scarpetta, hungrily takes in her entire being, relives his brilliance at tricking his way into her lovely château and raising his hammer to crush her head. She denied herself the ecstasy. She denied Jean-Baptiste by depriving him of her blood. Now she will come to him in humility and love, realizing what she did, the foolishness of it, the joy she denied herself when she further maimed him and burned his eyes with formalin, the chemical of the dead. Scarpetta dashed it into Jean-Baptiste’s face. The evil fluid demagnitized him briefly, and ever so briefly, pain forced him to suffer the hell of living only in his body.

Madame Scarpetta will spend eternity worshipping his higher state. His higher being will direct its superiority over other humans throughout the universe, as Poe wrote under the guise of a Philadelphia Gentleman. Of course, the anonymous author is Poe. The invisible agent that is the transcendent Poe came to Jean-Baptiste in a delirium as he was restrained in the Richmond Hospital. Richmond was where Poe grew up. His soul remains there.

Poe told Jean-Baptiste, “Read my inspired words and you will be independent of an intellect you will no longer need, my friend. You will be animated by the force and no longer distracted by pain and internal sensations.”

Pages 56 and 57. The end of Jean-Baptiste’s limited march of reasoning powers. No more diseases or peculiar complaints. The internal voice and glorious luminosity.

Who’s there?

Jean-Baptiste’s hairy hand moves faster beneath the blanket. A stronger stench rises from his profuse perspiration, and he screams in furious frustration.

LUCY SLIPS THE FOLDED PAPERS out of her back pocket as Berger sits next to her on the couch.

“Police reports, autopsy reports,” Lucy tells her.

Berger takes the computer printouts from her and goes through them carefully but quickly. “Wealthy American lawyer, frequently in Szczecin on business, frequently stayed at the Radisson. Apparently shot himself in the right temple with a small-caliber pistol. Clothed, had defecated on himself, a STAT alcohol of point-two-six.” She glances up at Lucy.

“For a boozer like him,” Lucy says, “that was probably nothing.”

Berger reads some more. The reports are detailed, noting the feces-stained cashmere pants, briefs and towels, the empty champagne bottle, the half-empty bottle of vodka.

“It appears he was sick. Let’s see,” Berger continues, “twenty-four hundred dollars in American cash inside a sock in the bottom drawer of a dresser. A gold watch, gold ring, a gold chain. No evidence of robbery. No one heard a gunshot, or at least never reported hearing one.

“Evidence of a meal. Steak, a baked potato, shrimp cocktail, chocolate cake, vodka. Someone—can’t pronounce the name—working in the kitchen seems to think, but isn’t sure, that Rocco had room service around eight p.m., the night of the twenty-sixth. Origin of a champagne bottle is unknown but is a brand the hotel carries. No fingerprints on the bottle except Rocco Caggiano’s . . . Room was checked for prints, one cartridge case recovered—it and the pistol checked for prints. Again, Rocco’s. His hands checked positive for gunshot residue, yada yada yada. They were thorough.” She looks up at Lucy. “We’re not even halfway through the police report.”

“What about witnesses?” Lucy asks. “Anybody suspicious . . .”

“No.” Berger slides one page behind another. “Autopsy stuff . . . uh . . . heart and liver disease, why am I not surprised? Atherosclerosis, et cetera, et cetera. Gunshot wound, contact with charred lacerated margins and no stippling. Instantly fatal—that would make your aunt crazy. You know how she hates it when someone says that a person died instantly. Nobody dies instantly, right Lucy?” Berger peers over the top of her reading glasses and meets Lucy’s eyes. “You think Rocco died in seconds, minutes, maybe an hour?”

Lucy doesn’t answer her.

“His body was found at nine-fifteen a.m., April twenty-eighth . . .” Berger looks quizzically at her. “By then he’d been dead less than forty hours. Not even two days.” She frowns. “Body found by . . . I can’t pronounce his name, a maintenance guy. Body badly decomposed.” She pauses. “Infested with maggots.” She glances up. “That’s a very advanced stage of decomposition for someone who’s been dead such a short time in what sounds to me like a relatively cool room.”

“Cool? The room temperature’s in there?” Lucy cranes her neck to look at a printout she can’t translate.

“Says the window was slightly opened, temperature in the room sixty-eight degrees, even though thermostat set on seventy-four degrees, but the weather was cool, temperature low sixties during the day, mid-fifties at night. Rain . . .” She is frowning. “My French is getting rusty. Ummm. No suspicion of foul play. Nothing unusual happened inside the hotel the night Rocco Caggiano ordered room service, the alleged night, if the room service guy has the date right. Ummm.” She scans. “A prostitute made a scene in the lobby. There’s a description. That’s interesting. I’d love to depose her.”

Berger looks up. Her eyes linger on Lucy’s.

“Well,” she says in a way that unsettles Lucy, “we all know how confusing time of death can be. And it appears that the police aren’t sure of the time and date of Rocco’s last meal, so to speak. Apparently, the hotel doesn’t log room service orders on a computer.”

She leans forward in her chair, a look on her face Lucy has seen before. It terrifies her.

“Shall I call your aunt about time of death? Want me to call our good detective friend Marino and ask his opinion about the disruptive prostitute in the lobby? The description in this report sounds a little bit like you. Only she was foreign. Maybe Russian.”

Berger gets up from the couch and moves close to the windows, looking out. She starts shaking her head and running her fingers through her hair. When she turns around, her eyes are veiled with the protective curtain she keeps drawn virtually every hour of her every day.

The prosecutorial interview has begun.

LUCY MAY AS WELL BE shut off in a conference room on the fourth floor of the New York District Attorney’s Office, looking out dusty windows at old downtown buildings pressing in from all sides, while Berger sips her black coffee from her paper cup with the Greek key trim around the lip, just like she has done in every interview Lucy has ever watched.

And she has observed many of them for many different reasons. She knows the noise and feel of Berger’s shifting gears. She is intimately familiar with the modulations and revolutions of Berger’s engine as she pursues, outruns or hits the perpetrator or lying witness head-on. Now the mighty machinery is directed at Lucy, and she is both relieved and petrified.

“You were just in Berlin, where you rented a black Mercedes sedan,” Berger says. “Rudy was with you on the return flight to New York—at least I assume Frederick Mullins, supposedly your husband, was Rudy sitting next to you on Lufthansa and then British Air? Are you going to ask me how I know this, Mrs. Mullins?”

“An awful alias. One of the worst.” Lucy feels herself breaking down. “Well, in terms of names. I mean . . .” She laughs inappropriately.

“Answer my question. Tell me about this Mrs. Mullins. Why she went to Berlin.” Berger’s face is metallic, her eyes reflecting anger born of fear. “I have a feeling that the story I’m about to hear is anything but funny.”

Lucy stares at her sweating glass, at the lime sinking at the bottom of it, at bubbles.

“Your return ticket stubs and the rental car receipt were in your briefcase, and your briefcase—as usual—was wide open on top of your desk,” Berger says.

Lucy’s face remains expressionless. She knows damn well that Berger misses nothing and wanders at will in places she doesn’t belong.

“Maybe you wanted me to see it.”

“I don’t know. I never thought I wanted you to see it,” Lucy quietly replies.

Berger stares out at a cruise ship slowly being hauled in by a tugboat.

Lucy recrosses her legs nervously.

“So Rocco Caggiano committed suicide. I don’t suppose you coincidentally happened to see him while you were in Europe? Not saying you happened to be in Szczecin, but I do know that most people traveling to that part of northern Poland would be quite likely to fly into Berlin, just like you and Rudy did.”

“You’d make a great prosecutor,” Lucy says drolly, still not looking up. “I would never have a chance under your direct or cross.”

“A scenario I don’t want to imagine. Jesus. Mr. Caggiano—Mr. Jean-Baptiste Chandonne’s lawyer—former lawyer. Dead. A bullet in his head. I suppose that pleases you.”

“He was going to kill Marino.”

“Who told you that? Rocco or Marino?”

“Rocco,” Lucy barely says.

She’s in too deep. It’s too late. She desperately needs to purge herself.

“Inside his hotel room,” she adds.

“God,” Berger mutters.

“We had to, Jaime. It’s no different than, than what the soldiers did in Iraq, you get it?”

“No, I don’t get it.” Berger is shaking her head again. “How the hell you could do something like this.”

“He wanted to die.”

LUCY STANDS ON THE MOST beautiful Persian rug she has ever seen, one she has stood on many, many times during better moments with Jaime Berger.

They are far apart from each other in the living room.

“It’s hard for me to imagine you dressed as a prostitute and getting into an altercation with a drunk,” Berger goes on. “That was sloppy work on your part.”

“I made a mistake.”

“I’ll say you did.”

“I had to go back. For my tactical baton,” Lucy tells her.

“Which one of you pulled the trigger?”

The question shocks Lucy. She doesn’t want to remember.

“Rocco was planning on killing Marino, his own father,” Lucy says again. “Next time Marino went on one of his fishing trips, Rocco was going to take him out. Rocco wanted to die. He did kill himself, sort of.”

Berger looks out at the city, her hands tightly clasped. “He sort of killed himself. You sort of murdered him. Sort of dead. Sort of being pregnant. Sort of committing perjury.”

“We had to.”

Berger doesn’t want to hear this. She has no choice.

“We did, I swear.”

Berger remains silent.

“He was a Red Notice. He was going to die. The Chandonnes would have taken him out, and not in a nice way.”

“Now the defense is mercy killing,” Berger finally speaks.

“How is it different from what our soldiers did in Iraq?”

“Now the defense is world peace.”

“Rocco’s life was over, anyway.”

“Now the defense is he was already dead.”

“Please don’t make fun of me, Jaime!”

“I’m supposed to congratulate you?” Berger goes on. “And now you’ve fucked me, too, because I know about it. I know about it.” Berger repeats each word slowly. “Am I stupid or what? Jesus! I sat right there”—she whirls around and jabs a finger at Lucy—“and translated those goddamn reports for you.

“You may as well have walked into my office and confessed to a murder, and had me say, Don’t worry about it, Lucy. We all make mistakes. Or It happened in Poland, so it’s not my jurisdiction. It doesn’t count. Or Tell me all about it if it will make you feel better. See, I’m not a real district attorney when I’m with you. When we’re alone, when we’re inside my apartment, it’s not professional.”

T
HE FLUID WHITE as light and brilliant with sparks. Page forty-seven! Who’s there!”

“Jesus Christ!” Eyes flash in the barred window, different eyes this time.

Jean-Baptiste feels the heat of the eyes. They are nothing more than small, weak embers.

“Chandonne, shut up, goddamn it! Shut up with this page-number shit. Goddamn, I’m sick and tired of this page-number shit. You hiding some book in there?” The eyes dart around the cell like sparks scattered by the wind. “And get your filthy hand out of your pants, Mini-Me Dick!”

That familiar hateful laughter. “Mini-Dick, Mini-Dick! Mini-Dick, Mini-Dick . . . !” Beast’s is a voice from hell.

Jean-Baptiste has been within twenty feet of Beast. That’s how far away the barred window in Jean-Baptiste’s door is from the indoor recreation area one floor below him.

There is nothing to do during the one hour a death row inmate with privileges is allowed to spend on the rectangular wooden floor that is securely enclosed by thick wire mesh, like a cage at the zoo. Shooting hoops is popular, or simply walking a mile, which by Jean-Baptiste’s calculations requires approximately seventy laps that no one but he is motivated to do. If Jean-Baptiste runs the laps, which is his habit during the one hour per week he is allowed recreation, he doesn’t mind the other men on his cell block who leer out at him, their eyes small hot spots from sun shining through a magnifying glass. They make their usual insolent remarks. The recreation hour is the only opportunity inmates have to chat with and see one another from a distance. Many of these conversations are friendly and even funny. Jean-Baptiste is beyond caring that no one is friendly with him, and that all fun is at his expense.

He is familiar with every detail about Beast, who is not considered a model prisoner but, unlike Jean-Baptiste, has privileges, including daily recreation and, of course, his radio. The first time Jean-Baptiste experienced every detail of Beast’s presence was when two guards escorted Beast to the indoor recreation area, where he directed his diseased energy up to Jean-Baptiste’s cell door.

Jean-Baptiste’s hairy face looked out the bars of his window. It was time to see. One day, Beast might be useful.

“Watch this, No Nuts!” Beast yelled at him, pulling off his shirt and flexing bulging muscles that, like his thick forearms, are almost black with tattoos. He dropped to the concrete floor and fell into one-arm push-ups. Jean-Baptiste’s face disappeared from the barred window, but not before he studied Beast carefully. He is smooth-skinned with a blaze of light brown hair that runs from his muscular chest down his belly and disappears into his groin. He is handsome, cruelly so, rather much like a swashbuckler, with a strong jaw, large, bright teeth, a straight nose and intensely cold hazel eyes.

He keeps his hair shorn close to his scalp, and although he appears quite capable of rough sex and beating his woman, one wouldn’t be likely to suspect that his preference is abducting young girls, torturing them to death and committing acts of necrophilia on their dead bodies, in some instances returning to the shallow graves where he buried them and digging them up for further acts of perversion until they are too decomposed for even him to stand it.

Beast is called Beast not because he looks like a beast, but because he digs up carrion like a beast and is rumored to have cannibalized some of his victims, too. Necrophilia, cannibalism and pedophilia are transgressions that are repugnant to the typical violent offender on death row, who might have raped, strangled, slashed, dismembered or chained his victims in a basement (to mention but a few examples), but violating children or dead bodies and eating people are serious enough offenses that a number of the inmates on Beast’s cell block would like nothing better than to kill him.

Jean-Baptiste doesn’t bide his time imagining creative ways to smash Beast’s bones or crush his windpipe—idle fantasies for those who can’t get closer than ten feet to Beast. The necessity of keeping inmates separated is obvious. When people are sentenced to die, they obviously have nothing to lose by killing again, although in Jean-Baptiste’s way of thinking, he has never had anything to lose, and with nothing to lose, there is nothing to gain, and life does not exist. References to those damned at birth are descriptive and dehumanizing and, in Jean-Baptiste’s case, trace back as far as his earliest memories.

Let’s see.

He thinks from his magnetizing metal toilet seat. He remembers being three. He remembers his mother roughly ushering him into the bathroom, where he could see the Seine from the window, and inevitably at a very young age connecting the river to bathing. He remembers his mother lathering his frail body with perfumed soap and ordering him to sit as still as a stone while she scraped baby-fine hair from his face, arms, neck, back, legs, feet and on and on with his father’s sterling silver–handled straight razor.

Sometimes she would scream at Jean-Baptiste if she accidentally nicked his finger or, occasionally, several fingers, as if her clumsiness was his fault. Knuckles, in particular, are very difficult. Madame Chandonne’s tremors and drunken rages put an end to shaving her ugly son when she almost sliced off Jean-Baptiste’s left nipple, and his father had to summon the family physician, Monsieur Raynaud, who coaxed Jean-Baptiste to be un grand garçon as the little boy shrieked each time the needle flashed in and out of bloody flesh, reattaching the pale nipple, which dangled by a thread of tissue from Jean-Baptiste’s downy breast.

His drunken mother wept and wrung her hands and blamed le petit monstre vilain for not sitting still. A servant mopped up the little monster’s blood while the little monster’s father smoked French cigarettes and complained about the burden of having a son who was born wearing un costume de singe—a monkey suit.

Monsieur Chandonne could talk, joke and complain freely with Monsieur Raynaud, the only physician allowed contact with Jean-Baptiste when he, the little monster, une espèce d’imbecile, born in a monkey suit, lived in the family hôtel particulier, where his bedroom was in the basement. No medical records, including a birth certificate, exist. Monsieur Raynaud made sure of this and ministered to Jean-Baptiste only in emergencies, which did not include the usual illnesses or injuries, such as severe earaches, high fevers, burns, sprained ankles or wrists, a stepped-on nail and other medical misfortunes that send most children to the family doctor. Now Monsieur Raynaud is an old man. He will not dare speak of Jean-Baptiste, even if the press will pay large fees for secrets about his notorious former patient.

SHAME AND FEAR overwhelm Lucy.

She has told Berger in detail what happened in room 511 at the Radisson Hotel, but not who actually shot Rocco.

“Who pulled the trigger, Lucy?” Berger insists on knowing.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Since you won’t answer the question, I’ll assume you did!”

Lucy says nothing.

Berger doesn’t move as she looks out at dazzling city lights that give way to the darkness of the Hudson and become the flickering bright urban plains of New Jersey. The space between her and Lucy could not seem more impossible, as if Berger is on the other side of the expansive glass.

Lucy quietly steps closer, wanting to touch the curve of Berger’s shoulder, terrified that should she dare, Berger might fall from reach forever, as if she is supported by nothing but air forty-five floors above the streets.

“Marino can’t know. Not ever,” Lucy says. “My aunt can’t know. Not ever.”

“I should hate you,” Berger says.

She smells faintly of perfume, a strong scent, lightly applied, and it touches Lucy’s thoughts that Berger didn’t wear perfume for her husband. He isn’t here.

“Call it what you want,” Berger continues. “You and Rudy committed murder.”

“Words,” Lucy replies. “The casualties of war. Self-defense. Judicial homicide. Home protection. We have words, legal excuses for committing acts that should be inexcusable, Jaime. I promise you, there was no joy in it, no delicious flavor of revenge. He was a pitiful coward, blubbering and sorry about only one thing in his entire cruel, worthless life: that it was his turn to pay the price. How could Marino have a son like that? What markers in the human genome came together to spew out Rocco?”

“Who else knows?”

“Rudy. Now you . . .”

“Anyone else? Were you given instructions?” Berger presses on.

Lucy thinks about Benton’s staged murder, about many events and conversations that she can never tell Berger. A tyrant of anguish and rage has ruled Lucy for years.

“There are others involved, indirectly involved. I can’t talk about it. Really,” Lucy says.

Berger doesn’t know that Benton isn’t dead.

“Oh, fuck. What others?”

“I said indirectly. I can’t tell you anything else. I won’t.”

“People who give secret orders tend to vanish in the light of exposure. Are these your others? People who have given secret orders?”

“Not directly about Rocco.” She thinks about Senator Lord, about the Chandonne cartel. “Let me just say that there are people who wanted Rocco dead. I just never had enough information to do anything about it until now. When Chandonne wrote to me, he told me what I needed to know.”

“I see. And Jean-Baptiste Chandonne is credible. Of course, all psychopaths are. Whoever else is indirectly involved has already vanished. You can count on that.”

“I don’t know. There are instructions about the Chandonne cartel. Oh, yes. There have been for a long time. Years. I did what I could while I was ATF, down in Miami. But it wasn’t working. Rules.”

“That’s right. You and rules,” Berger says coldly.

“Until Rocco, I have been ineffective.”

“Well, you certainly were effective this time. Tell me something, Lucy. Do you think you’ll get away with it?”

“Yes.”

“You and Rudy made mistakes,” Berger says. “You left your tactical baton and had to go back to get it, and you were seen by several people. Never good, never good. And you staged the death scene—quite expertly, quite cleverly. Maybe too expertly, too cleverly. I would wonder about a room, a gun, a champagne bottle, et cetera, so clean that only Rocco’s fingerprints are on them. I would wonder about advanced decomposition that seems to conflict with time of death. And flies, so damn many flies. Blow flies aren’t terribly fond of cool weather.”

“In Europe, they are more accustomed to cooler weather. As low as forty-eight degrees. The common bluebottle variety, blow fly. Of course, warmer temperatures are better.”

“You must have learned that from your aunt Kay. She would be proud of you.”

“You would wonder.” Lucy gets back to mistakes. “You wonder about everything. That’s why you’re who you are.”

“Don’t underestimate the Polish authorities and medical experts, Lucy. You may not have heard the last of this. And if anything points back to you, I can’t help you. I have to consider this conversation privileged. Right now, I am your lawyer. Not a prosecutor. It’s a lie. But I will somehow live with it.

“But whoever has given you directives, I don’t care how long ago, will not return your secret phone calls now, won’t even know your name, will frown and shrug in some cabinet meeting or over drinks at the Palm, or worse, laugh it off. The story of some overzealous private investigator.”

“It won’t happen like that.”

Berger slowly turns around and grabs Lucy’s wrists. “Are you so goddamn sure of yourself that you’re stupid? How can anyone so smart be so stupid?”

The blood rises to Lucy’s cheeks.

“The world is full of users. They’ll seduce you into the most outrageous acts for the sake of liberty and justice for all, and then they dissolve like mist. Prove to be fantasies. You begin to wonder if they were ever real, and as you rot away in a federal prison somewhere or, God forbid, are extradited to a foreign country, you will slowly but surely believe it was all a delusion, because everybody else believes you are delusional, some nutcase who committed murder because she was on some secret mission for the CIA, the FBI, the fucking Pentagon, Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the Easter Bunny.”

“Stop it,” Lucy exclaims. “It’s not like that.”

Berger’s hands move up to Lucy’s shoulders. “For the first time in your life, listen to someone!”

Lucy blinks back tears.

“Who?” Berger demands to know. “Who sent you on this goddamn horrific mission? Is it someone I know?”

“Please stop it! I can’t and won’t ever tell you! There’s so much . . . Jaime, you’re better off not knowing. Please trust me.”

“Jesus!” Berger’s grip lightens, but she doesn’t let go of her. “Jesus, Lucy. Look at you. You’re shaking like a leaf.”

“You can’t do this.” Lucy angrily steps away. “I’m not a child. When you touch me . . .” She steps back some more. “When you touch me, it means something different. It still does. So don’t. Don’t.”

“I know what it means,” Berger says. “I’m sorry.”

AT TEN P.M., SCARPETTA climbs out of a taxi in front of Jaime Berger’s building.

Still unable to reach her niece, Scarpetta is pricked by anxiety that has worsened with each call she has made. Lucy doesn’t answer her apartment or her cell phone. One of her associates at her office said he doesn’t know where she is. Scarpetta begins to think about her reckless, fire-breathing niece and contemplates the worst. Her ambivalence about Lucy’s new career has not abated. Hers is an unregimented, dangerous and highly secretive life that may suit her personality, but it frustrates Scarpetta and frightens her. She can be impossible to get hold of, and Scarpetta rarely knows what Lucy is doing.

Inside Jaime Berger’s luxurious high-rise, a doorman greets Scarpetta.

“May I help you, ma’am?”

“Jaime Berger,” Scarpetta replies. “The penthouse.”

LUCY IS TEMPTED TO DASH from the building when she realizes that her aunt is headed up in the elevator.

“Calm down,” Berger says.

“She doesn’t know I’m here,” Lucy says, upset. “I don’t want her to know I’m here. I can’t see her right now.”

“You’re going to have to see her at some point. May as well be now.”

“But she doesn’t know I’m here,” Lucy repeats herself. “What am I going to tell her?”

Berger gives her an odd look as they hover near the door, waiting for the sound of the elevator.

“Is the truth such a bad thing?” Berger replies angrily. “You could tell her that. Now and then, telling the truth is very therapeutic.”

“I’m not a liar,” Lucy says. “That’s one thing I’m not, unless it is for the sake of work, especially the undercover work.”

“The problem is when the boundaries merge,” Berger says as the elevator arrives. “Go sit in the living room.” As if Lucy is a child. “Let me talk to her first.”

Berger’s foyer is marble, a table centered with fresh flowers across from the spotless brass elevator. She hasn’t seen Scarpetta in several years and is dismayed when she walks out of the elevator. Kay Scarpetta looks exhausted, her suit badly wrinkled, her eyes anxious.

“Does anybody on Earth answer the phone anymore?” she says first thing. “I’ve tried Marino, Lucy, you. In your case, your line was busy and has been busy for an hour. So at least I assumed someone was home.”

“I had it off the hook . . . . I wanted no interruptions.”

This makes no sense to Scarpetta. “I’m so sorry to barge in on you like this. I’m frantic, Jaime.”

“I can tell. Before you come in, I want you to know that Lucy is here.” She states this matter-of-factly. “I didn’t want to shock you. But I expect you are relieved.”

“Not entirely. Her office stonewalled me, meaning Lucy did.”

“Kay, please come in,” Berger says.

They walk into the living room.

“Hi.” Lucy hugs her aunt.

Her response is stiff. “Why are you treating me like this?” she asks, not caring if Berger hears.

“Treating you like what?” Lucy returns to the living room and sits on the couch. “Come on.” She motions for Scarpetta to join her. “You, too, Jaime.”

“Not unless you’re going to tell her,” Berger says. “Otherwise, I want no part in the conversation.”

“Tell me what?” Scarpetta sits next to Lucy. “Tell me what, Lucy?”

“I guess you’ve heard that Rocco Caggiano allegedly committed suicide in Poland,” Berger tells her.

“I haven’t heard any news today about anything,” Scarpetta replies. “Was either on the phone or in a plane, then a taxi. Now I’m here. What do you mean allegedly?”

Lucy stares down at her feet and says nothing. Berger stands at the edge of the living room and is silent.

“You disappeared for days. No one would tell me where you were,” Scarpetta begins quietly. “Were you in Poland?”

A long pause, then Lucy lifts her eyes. “Yes, I was.”

“Dear God,” Scarpetta mutters. “Alleged suicide,” she repeats.

Lucy explains the tip about the murdered journalists that Chandonne divulged to her in a letter. She explains further information from him about Rocco’s whereabouts. Then she tells her aunt about the Red Notice.

“So Rudy and I found him, found him in the hotel he always stays in when he does his dirty business in Szczecin. We told him about the Red Notice, and he knew that was it. The end. Because, apprehended or not, the Chandonnes would make sure he didn’t live very long.”

“So he killed himself,” Scarpetta says, looking straight into Lucy’s eyes, searching them.

Lucy doesn’t reply. Berger walks out of the room.

“Interpol has posted the information,” Lucy then says, somewhat inanely. “The police say his death is a suicide.”

This appeases Scarpetta temporarily, only because she doesn’t have the strength to probe further.

She opens her briefcase and shows Lucy the letter from Chandonne, and then Lucy goes into Berger’s office.

“Please come,” Lucy starts to say.

“No,” Berger replies, the look in her eyes one of disappointment, of judgment. “How can you lie to her?”

“I didn’t and I haven’t.”

“By omission. The whole truth, Lucy.”

“I’ll get there. When it’s time. Chandonne wrote her. You’ve got to see it. There’s something really bizarre going on.”

“There sure is.” Berger gets up from her desk.

They return to the living room and look at the letter and envelopes through their protective plastic.

“That’s not like the letter I got,” Lucy says immediately. “It was block printing. It wasn’t mailed regular post. I guess Rocco mailed it for him. Rocco mailed a lot of things for him. Why would Chandonne write Marino and me in block printing?”

“What did the paper look like?” Scarpetta asks.

“Notebook paper. Lined paper.”

“The paper in the prison commissary is plain white, twenty-pound cheap stock. The same thing most of us use in our printers.”

“If he didn’t send those letters to Marino and me, then who did?” Lucy feels sluggish, her system overloaded.

Based on the information in the letter to her, she orchestrated Rocco Caggiano’s death. When she and Rudy held him hostage in the hotel room, Rocco never actually admitted to murdering the journalists. Lucy recalls him rolling his eyes toward the ceiling—his only response. She can’t know as fact what he really meant by that gesture. She can’t know as fact that the information she sent to Interpol is correct. What she offered was enough for an arrest, but not necessarily a conviction because, in fact, Lucy doesn’t know the facts. Did Rocco really meet with the two journalists mere hours before their murders? Even if he did, was he the one who shot them?

Lucy is responsible for the Red Notice. The Red Notice is why Rocco knew his life was over, no matter what he confessed or didn’t confess. He became a fugitive, and if Lucy and Rudy hadn’t brought about his death, the Chandonnes would have. He should be dead. He needed to be dead. Lucy tells herself the world is better off because Rocco isn’t in it.

“Who wrote me that goddamn letter?” Lucy says. “Who wrote the one to Marino and the first one to you?” She looks at Scarpetta. “The ones that came in those National Academy of Justice postage-paid envelopes? They sound like they were written by Chandonne.”

“I agree with that,” Scarpetta says. “And the coroner in Baton Rouge got one, too.”

“Maybe Chandonne changed his handwriting and paper when he wrote this one.” Lucy indicates the letter with its beautiful calligraphy. “Maybe the bastard’s not in prison at all.”

“I heard about the phone calls to your office. Zach got hold of me on my cell phone. I think we can’t assume at all that Chandonne is still in prison,” Scarpetta replies.

“Seems to me,” Berger says, “that he wouldn’t have access to lined paper or National Academy of Justice envelopes if he’s still in prison. How hard do you suppose it would it be to create facsimiles of those postage-paid envelopes on a computer?”

“God, I feel so stupid,” Lucy says. “I can’t tell you what I feel. Of course it could be done. Just scan in an envelope, then type in the address you want, and print it on the same type of envelope. I could do it in five minutes.”

Berger looks at her for a long time. “Did you, Lucy?”

She is stunned. “Me do it? Why would I do it?”

“You just admitted that you could,” Berger somberly says. “It appears you’re quite capable of doing a lot of things, Lucy. And it’s convenient that information in the letter to you resulted in your going to Poland to find Rocco, who is now dead. I’m leaving the room. The prosecutor in me doesn’t want to hear any further lies or confessions. If you and your aunt want to talk for a while, please help yourselves. I have to put the phone back on the hook. I have calls to make.”

“I haven’t lied,” Lucy says.

SIT DOWN,” SCARPETTA SAYS, as if Lucy is no longer a grown-up.

The lights are out in the living room, and the New York skyline surrounds them with its brilliant possibilities and soaring power. Scarpetta could stare at it for hours, the way she does the sea. Lucy sits next to her on Berger’s couch.

“This is a good place to be,” Scarpetta says, gazing out at millions of lights.

She looks for the moon but can’t find it behind buildings. Lucy is quietly crying.

“I’ve often wondered, Lucy, what would have happened had I been your real mother. Would you have adopted such a dangerous world and stormed through it so brazenly, so outrageously, so stunningly? Or would you be married with children?”

“I think you know the answer to that,” Lucy mutters, wiping her eyes.

“Maybe you would have been a Rhodes scholar, gone to Oxford and become a famous poet.”

Lucy looks at her to see if she’s joking. She’s not.

“A gentler life,” her aunt says softly. “I raised you, or, better stated, I attended to you as best I could and can’t imagine loving any child more than I did—and do—love you. But through my eyes, you found the ugliness in the world.”

“Through your eyes I found decency, humanity and justice,” Lucy replies. “I wouldn’t change anything.”

“Then why are you crying?” She picks out distant planes glowing like small planets.

“I don’t know.”

Scarpetta smiles. “That’s what you used to say when you were a little girl. Whenever you were sad and I’d ask you why, you’d say I don’t know. Therefore, my very astute diagnosis is that you are sad.”

Lucy wipes more tears from her face.

“I don’t know exactly what happened in Poland,” her aunt then says.

Shifting her position on the couch, Scarpetta arranges pillows behind her back, as if inviting a long story. She continues to look past Lucy, out windows into the glittering night, because it is harder for people to have difficult conversations while they are looking at each other.

“I don’t need you to tell me. But I think you need to tell me, Lucy.”

Her niece stares out at the city crowded around them. She thinks of dark, high seas and ships lit up. Ships mean ports, and ports mean the Chandonnes. Ports are the arteries for their criminal commerce. Rocco may have been only one vessel, but his connection to Scarpetta, to all of them, had to be severed.

Yes. It had to be.

Please forgive me, Aunt Kay. Please say it’s all right. Please don’t lose your respect for me and think I’ve become one of them.

“Ever since Benton died, you’ve been a Fury, a spirit of punishment, and there isn’t enough power in this entire city to satisfy your hunger for it,” Scarpetta talks on, still gently. “This is a good place for you to be,” she says, as both of them stare out at the lights of the most powerful city on Earth. “Because one of these days when you’re glutted with power, maybe you’ll realize that too much of it is unbearable.”

“You say that to explain yourself,” Lucy comments with no trace of rancor. “You were the most powerful medical examiner in the country, perhaps in the world. You were the Chief. Maybe it was unbearable, that power and admiration.”

Lucy’s beautiful face is not quite as sad now.

“So much has seemed unbearable,” Scarpetta replies. “So much. But no. I didn’t find my power unbearable when I was the Chief. I have found losing my power unbearable. You and I feel differently about power. I am not proving anything. You are always proving something when it is so unnecessary.”

“You haven’t lost it,” Lucy tells her. “Your removal from power was an illusion. Politics. Your true power has never been imposed by the outside world, and it follows that the outside world can’t take it away from you.”

“What has Benton done to us?”

Her question startles Lucy, as if Scarpetta somehow knows the truth.

“Since he died . . . I still can scarcely bring myself to say that word. Died.” She pauses. “Since then it seems the rest of us have gone to ruin. Like a country under seige. One city falling after another. You, Marino, me. Mostly you.”

“Yes, I am a Fury.” Lucy gets up, moves to the window and sits cross-legged on Jaime Berger’s splendid antique rug. “I am the avenger. I admit it. I feel the world is safer, that you are safer, all of us are safer with Rocco dead.”

“But you can’t play God. You’re not even a sworn law-enforcement officer anymore, Lucy. The Last Precinct is private.”

“Not exactly. We are a satellite of international law enforcement, work with them, usually behind the curtain of Interpol. We are empowered by other high authorities I can’t talk to you about.”

“A high authority that empowered you to legally rid the world of Rocco Caggiano?” Scarpetta asks. “Did you pull the trigger, Lucy? I need to know that. At least that.”

Lucy shakes her head. No, she didn’t pull the trigger. Only because Rudy insisted on firing that round and having gunpowder and tiny drops of Rocco’s blood blow back on his hands, not hers. Rocco’s blood on Rudy’s hands. That wasn’t fair, Lucy tells her aunt.

“I shouldn’t have allowed Rudy to put himself through that. I take equal responsibility for Rocco’s death. Actually, I take full responsibility, because it was by my instigation that Rudy went on the mission to Poland.”

They talk until late, and when Lucy has relayed all that happened in Szczecin, she awaits her aunt’s condemnation. The worst punishment would be exile from Scarpetta’s life, just as Benton has been exiled from it.

“I’m relieved that Rocco’s dead,” Scarpetta says. “What’s done is done,” she adds. “At some point, Marino will want to know what really happened to his son.”

DR. LANIER SOUNDS AS IF he is on the mend, but he is as taut as a cocked catapult.

“You got a safe place for me to stay down there?” Scarpetta asks him over the phone inside her single room at the Melrose Hotel at 63rd and Lexington.

She opted not to spend the night with Lucy, resisting her niece’s persistent urging. Staying with her would make it impossible for Scarpetta to leave for the airport in the morning without Lucy’s knowing.

“The safest place in Louisiana. My guest house. It’s small. Why? Now you know I can’t afford consultants . . . .”

“Listen,” she cuts him off. “I’ve got to go to Houston first.” She avoids being specific. “I can’t get down your way for at least another day.”

“I’ll pick you up. Just tell me when.”

“If you could arrange a rental car for me, that’s what would work best. I have no idea about anything right now. I’m too tired. But I’d rather take care of myself and not inconvenience you. I just need directions to your house.”

She writes them down. They seem simple enough.

“Any particular kind of car?”

“A safe one.”

“I know all about that,” the coroner replies. “I’ve peeled enough people out of unsafe cars. I’ll get my secretary on it first thing.”

TRIXIE LEANS AGAINST THE COUNTER, smoking a menthol cigarette and glumly watching Marino pack a large ice chest with beer, luncheon meats, bottles of mustard and mayonnaise, and whatever his huge hands grab out of the refrigerator.

“It’s way past midnight,” Trixie complains, fumbling for a bottle of Corona in a longneck bottle that she clogged by stuffing in too large a slice of lime. “Come on to bed and then you can leave, can’t you? Don’t that make more sense than zooming out of here, half-lit and all upset, in the middle of the night?”

Marino has been drunk since he returned from Boston, sitting in front of the TV, refusing to answer the phone, refusing to talk to anyone, not even to Lucy or Scarpetta. About an hour ago, he was kicked hard by a message on his cell phone from Lucy’s office. That sobered him enough to pry him out of his reclining chair.

Trixie holds the bottle straight up and tries to push the lime away with her tongue. She succeeds, and beer gushes into her mouth and over her chin. Not so long ago, Marino would have found this hilarious. Now nothing will make him smile. He jerks open the freezer door, pulling out the container of ice cubes and dumping them into the chest. Trixie, whose real name is Teresa, is thirty years old and not even a year ago moved into Marino’s small house in its blue-collar neighborhood, right off Midlothian Turnpike on the wrong side of the James River in Richmond.

He lights a cigarette and looks at her, at her face, puffy from booze, the mascara so chronically smeared under her eyes that it looks tattooed on. Her platinum hair has been scalded by so many treatments that Marino hates to touch it, told her once while he was drunk that it felt like insulation. Some of her hurt feelings are permanently crippled, and when Marino catches a glimpse of them hobbling out of her eyes or mouth, he leaves the room, either with his thoughts or his feet.

“Please don’t go.” Trixie sucks hard on a cigarette and shoots the smoke out of the side of her mouth, barely inhaling. “I know what you’re doing. You ain’t coming back, that’s what. I saw what you’ve been packing in your truck. Guns, your bowling ball, even your trophies and fishing poles. Not to mention your usual clothes, nothing nice like those suits that have been hanging in the closet since Jesus wrote the Ten Commandments.”

She steps in front of him and grabs his arm as he rearranges ice in the chest, smoke making him squint.

“I’ll call ya. I’ve got to get to Louisiana, and you know it. The Doc’s down there, or is about to be down there. I know her. I know damn well what she’s gonna do. She don’t have to tell me. You don’t want her dead, Trixie.”

“I’m so fucking tired of the Doc this and the Doc that!” Her face darkens, and she shoves Marino’s hand away, as if touching had been his idea, not hers. “Ever since I’ve known you, it’s been the Doc this and the Doc that. She’s the only woman in your life, if you’re honest about it. I’m just the second-draft choice in your basketball game of life.”

Marino winces. He can’t stand Trixie’s colorful near-miss expressions, which remind him of a piano out of tune.

“I’m just the girl who sits out the dance in the prom that is your life,” she continues the drama, and by now that’s all it is.

A drama. Like a bad soap opera.

Their fights are by rote, for the most part, and although Marino has a special aversion to psychology, not even he can avoid an insight as big as a mountain. He and Trixie fight about everything because they fight about nothing.

Her fat bare feet with their chipped red-painted nails pat across the kitchen as she paces, wildly waving her plump arms, cigarette ashes snowing down on the stained linoleum floor. “Well, you just go on to Louisiana and get with the Doc this and that, and by the time you come back—if you ever do—maybe someone else will be living in this dump of yours and I’ll be gone. Gone. Gone. Gone.”

Half an hour ago, Marino asked her to put his house on the market. She can live in it until it sells.

Her flower-printed acetate robe flutters around her feet as she paces, her breasts sagging over the sash she keeps tightening around her thick waist. Marino feels pangs of anger and guilt. When Trixie nags him about Scarpetta, he flies out of control like a pissed-off bird out of a knothole, with no place to go, no way to defend himself, no way to counterattack, not really.

His wounded ego can’t be assuaged by implying indiscretions with Scarpetta that unfortunately have never occurred. So the arrows of the jealous Trixies in his life find their spot and draw their blood. Marino isn’t bothered that he’s lost every woman he’s ever had. He’s bothered by the one he never got, and Trixie’s tantrum is mounting dangerously close to the necessary crescendo that will bring about the necessary coda.

“You’re so crazy for her it’s disgusting,” Trixie yells. “You’re nothing but a big redneck to her. That’s all you’ll ever be. A big, fat, stupid redneck!” she shrieks. “And I don’t care if she ends up dead! Dead is all she knows anyhow!”

Marino picks up the ice chest as if it weighs nothing and walks through his shabby, cluttered living room and stops at the front door. He looks around at the thirty-six-inch color TV—not a new one, but a Sony and plenty nice. He stares sadly at his favorite reclining chair, where it seems he has spent most of his life, and he feels an ache so deep it’s a cramp in his bowels. He imagines how many hours he has spent half-drunk, watching football and wasting his time and efforts on the likes of Trixie.

She’s not a bad woman. She’s not evil. None of them have been. They’re simply pitiful, and he is even more pitiful than any of them because he has never insisted on more for himself, and he could have.

“I won’t be calling you after all,” Marino tells her. “I don’t even give a rat’s ass what happens to the house. Sell it. Rent it. Live in it.”

“You don’t mean that, baby.” Trixie begins to cry. “I love you.”

“You don’t know me,” Marino says from the door, and he feels too tired to leave and too depressed to stay.

“ ’Course I do, baby.” She crushes out a cigarette in the sink and rummages in the refrigerator for another beer. “And you’re going to miss me.” Her face twists as she smiles, crying at the same time. “And you’ll get your ass back here. I was just mad when I said you wouldn’t. You will.” She pops off the bottle cap. “One reason I know you’ll be back is, what?” She points coyly at him. “Can you guess what Detective Trixie noticed, huh? You’re leaving without your Christmas decorations.

“All those millions of plastic Santas, reindeer, snowmen, jalapeno pepper lights and the rest of what you been collecting for a century? And you’re gonna drive off and just leave ’em in the basement? Naw-uh. No way, naw-uh.”

She talks herself into believing she’s right. Marino wouldn’t leave for good and not pack up his beloved Christmas decorations.

“Rocco’s dead,” he says.

“Who?” Trixie’s face goes blank.

“See, that’s what I mean. You don’t know me,” he says. “It’s all right. It ain’t your fault.”

He shuts the door on her, shuts the door on Richmond for good.

THE MISSING WOMAN’S name is Katherine Bruce.

She is now considered abducted, the latest victim of the serial killer, presumed dead. Her husband, a former Air Force pilot now employed by Continental, was out of town, and after trying to reach his wife for two days with no success, he became concerned. He sent a friend to the house. Katherine wasn’t there, nor was her car, which was discovered parked at the Wal-Mart near LSU where it did not draw attention to itself, since the lot has cars in it twenty-four hours a day. Her keys were in the ignition, her doors unlocked, her purse and wallet gone.

The morning is barely materializing, as if its molecules are slowly gathering into a sky that promises to be clear and bright blue. Nic knew nothing about the abduction until yesterday’s six o’clock news. She still can’t believe it. Katherine Bruce’s friend, according to what has been released to the media, called the Baton Rouge police immediately yesterday morning. The information should have been released immediately and nationally. What did the idiot task force do? Give the friend, whose identity has not been disclosed, a damn polygraph to make sure Katherine really is missing? Were they digging up the backyard to make sure the pilot husband didn’t kill and bury his wife before flying out of town?

The killer got an extra eight hours. The public lost eight hours. Katherine lost eight hours. She might still have been alive, assuming she’s not alive now. Someone might have spotted her and the killer. You never know. Nic obsessively walks the Wal-Mart parking lot, looking for any detail that might speak to her. The huge crime scene is mute, Katherine Bruce’s car long gone, impounded somewhere. Nothing but bits of trash, chewing gum and millions of cigarette butts out here.

It’s 7:16 when she makes her only find thus far, one that would have thrilled her as a child: two quarters. Both of them heads. That’s always luckier than tails, and right now she’ll nurture any fantasy of luck she can. After she heard the news last night, Nic rushed here right away. If the coins were on the tarmac at that time, her flashlight didn’t pick them up. And she didn’t see the coins first thing this morning, when she returned and it was still dark. She takes photographs with thirty-five-millimeter and Polaroid cameras and memorizes the coins’ location, making notes, just as she was taught at the forensic academy. She pulls on surgical gloves and secures the coins in a paper evidence envelope, then trots into the store.

“I need to see the manager,” she tells a checkout clerk who is busy ringing up a cartful of children’s clothing while a tired-looking young woman—maybe a mother—pulls out a MasterCard.

Nic thinks of Buddy’s overalls and feels terrible.

“That way.” The clerk points to an office behind a swinging wooden door.

Thank God he’s in.

Nic shows him her badge as she says, “I need to see the exact location where Katherine Bruce’s car was found.”

The manager is young and friendly. He is clearly upset.

“Glad to show you. I sure know where it is. The police were out here for hours, poking around, and then they towed it. This is really awful.”

“It’s awful, all right,” Nic agrees as they leave the store and the sun begins to show its bright face in the east.

The location of Katherine Bruce’s 1999 black Maxima was approximately twenty feet from where Nic found the quarters.

“You’re sure this is where it was?”

“Oh, I’m sure, yes ma’am. Parked right here five rows away. A lot of women who shop after dark park relatively close to the front door.”

In her case, that didn’t help. But she must have been at least somewhat security-conscious. Well, maybe not. Most people want to park as close to a store entrance as possible, unless they drive an expensive car and don’t want anyone dinging the doors. Usually, it’s men who worry about that. Nic has never understood why so many women don’t seem to have much interest in cars or their upkeep. If she had a daughter, she’d make sure her little girl knew the name of every exotic car, and Nic would tell her if she works hard, maybe she’ll drive a Lamborghini someday—the same thing she tells Buddy, who has numerous models of sports cars that he loves to roll into walls.

“Did anyone notice any unusual activity the night she drove her car into this lot? Did anyone spot Katherine Bruce? Did anyone see anything at all?” Nic asks the manager, both of them standing in the same spot and looking around.

“No. I don’t think she ever made it inside the store,” he says.

THE BELL 407 HAS THE most beautiful paint job Lucy has ever seen.

It should. It’s her helicopter, and she designed its every detail, excluding those that came with it green, or straight out of the plant. Its four blades, smooth ride and maximum speed of 140 knots (damn good for non-military) and computerized fuel control are just a few of the basics. Added to that are leather seats, pop-out floats in case of an engine failure over water, which is very unlikely to occur, a wire strike for scud-running into power lines (Lucy’s too safe a pilot for that), an auxiliary fuel tank, storm scope, traffic scope and GPS—all her instrumentation the best, of course.

The 34th Street heliport is on the Hudson, midway between the Statue of Liberty and the Intrepid. Out on pad 2, Lucy walks around her bird for the fourth time, having already checked inside the cowling and sight glasses for oil levels, oil drips, pop-out buttons on filters or hydraulic leaks that always remind her of dark red blood. One of many reasons she is fanatical about lifting weights in the gym is if she ever lost her hydraulics in flight, she’d have to muscle the controls. A weak woman would have a hard time with that.

She runs her hand lovingly along the tail boom, squatting again to check antennas on the underside. Then she climbs into the pilot’s seat and wishes Rudy would hurry up. Her wish is granted as the door to the FBO swings open and Rudy appears with a duffel bag and trots to the helicopter, a hint of disappointment crossing his face when he spots the empty left seat and, as usual, finds himself the copilot. Dressed in cargo pants and a polo shirt, he is the typical handsome hunk.

“You know what?” he says, clicking on his four-point harness as Lucy goes through a quick but thorough preflight, starting with circuit breakers and switches, working her way down to the instruments and the throttle. “You’re damn greedy,” he says. “A helicopter hog.”

“That’s because it’s my helicopter, big guy.” She switches on the battery. “Twenty-six amps. Plenty of juice. Don’t forget, I’ve got more hours than you—more certifications, too.”

“Shut up,” he says good-naturedly, always in a genial mood when the two of them fly. “Clear on the left.”

“Clear on the right.”

FLYING IS AS CLOSE AS he’ll ever get to experiencing euphoria with her.

Lucy never finishes what she rarely starts. Rudy might have felt used after they drove away from the Radisson in Szczecin, were it not for his understanding of what happened. Near-death experiences or anything else that is terribly traumatic cause a simple reaction in most people. They crave the warmth of human flesh. Sex is a reassurance that one is alive. He wonders if this is why he constantly thinks about sex.

He’s not in love with Lucy. He would never allow that to happen. The first time he saw her God knows how many years ago, he had no intention of being interested in her. She was climbing out of a monster Bell 412, having gone through the usual show-and-tell maneuvers that the FBI expects when an important personage, especially a politician, is touring the Academy. Rudy supposed, since Lucy was the only woman on the Hostage Rescue Team, it was politically correct for the Attorney General or whoever he was to see a young, good-looking woman at the stick.

Rudy stared at her as she shut down the formidable twin-engine machine and climbed out, wearing a dark blue Battle Dress Uniform and soft black ankle-high boots. Rudy was surprised by her fiery beauty as he watched the way she walked with confidence and grace and not a trace of masculinity. He began entertaining the possibility that what he had heard about her wasn’t true. Her body intrigued him as she moved. She seemed to ripple like an exotic animal, a tiger, he thought as she walked straight to the Attorney General, or whoever it was on that show-and-tell day, and politely shook his hand.

Lucy is athletic but definitely feminine and very pleasing to touch. Rudy has learned not to love her too much. He knows when to back away.

In minutes, the helicopter is up to full power, avionics and headsets on, the loud, fast beating of blades the music she and Rudy dance to and adore. He feels Lucy’s spirits joyfully lift as the helicopter does.

“We’re on the go,” she says into her mike. “Hudson traffic, helicopter four-zero-seven Tango, Lima, Papa is southbound at thirty-fourth.”

Hovering is what she likes most, and she can hold the chopper perfectly still, even in a stiff tailwind. Nosing around to the water, she pulls in power and takes off.

SCARPETTA CAUGHT THE EARLIEST FLIGHT to Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport and, factoring in the hour time difference, landed at 10:15 a.m.

From there, the drive almost due north to Livingston was a tense hour and forty minutes. She had no interest in renting a car and finding her way to the prison. That was a wise decision. Although she hasn’t counted, the route has taken numerous turns, the longest stretch of US-59 that rolls on forever. Scarpetta’s thoughts are clipped, as if she is a new recruit taking orders.

She is in her most dispassionate mode, a persona she steps into when she testifies in court as defense attorneys poise themselves like carnivores, waiting for the first scent of her blood. Rarely is she wounded. Never fatally. Deep inside the refuge of her analytical mind, she has remained silent throughout the trip. She hasn’t spoken to the driver, except to give her instructions. The driver is the sort who wants to be chatty, and Scarpetta told her as she was climbing into the black Lincoln at the beginning of the trip that she didn’t want to talk. She had work to do.

“You got it,” said the woman, who is dressed in a black livery suit that includes a cap and tie.

“You can take your cap off,” Scarpetta told her.

“Why, thank you,” the driver said with relief, taking it off immediately. “I can’t tell you how much I hate this thing, but most of my passengers want me to look like a proper chauffeur.”

“I’d rather you didn’t,” Scarpetta said.

The prison looms ahead, a modern fortress that looks like a monstrous freighter built of concrete with a hatchmark of windows running below the flat roof, where two workmen are busy talking and gesturing and looking around. Surrounding the expansive grass grounds are thick coils of razorwire that shine like fine sterling in the sun. Guards high up in their towers scan with binoculars.

“Schweeeew,” the driver mutters. “I have to admit this makes me a little bit nervous.”

“You’ll be fine,” Scarpetta assures her. “They’ll show you where to park, and you’ll stay in the car. I don’t recommend you walk around at all.”

“What if I have to use the ladies’ room?” she worries, slowing at a guard booth that signals the beginning of maximum security and perhaps the most dreaded task Scarpetta has ever undertaken.

“Then I guess you’ll have to ask someone,” she absently replies, rolling her window down and handing a uniformed guard her driver’s license and medical examiner’s credentials, a bright brass shield and identification card inside a black wallet.

When she left her position in Richmond, she was as bad as Marino. She never turned in her badge. No one thought to ask for it. Or maybe no one dared. She may not literally be Chief anymore, but what Lucy said last night is right. No one can strip Scarpetta of who she is and how she performs in the work she still loves. Scarpetta knows how good she is, even if she would never say it.

“Who are you here to see?” the guard asks her, returning her license and credentials.

“Jean-Baptiste Chandonne.” His name almost chokes her.

The guard is rather casual, considering his environment and responsibility. Based on his demeanor and age, he’s probably been working in the prison system for a long time and scarcely notices the foreboding world he enters at the beginning of every shift. He steps back inside his booth and scans a list.

“Ma’am,” he says, reemerging from his booth and pointing toward the glass front of the prison, “just drive up there and someone will tell you where to park. The PIO will meet you outside.”

A Texas flag seems to wave Scarpetta on. The sky is blue glass, the temperature reminding her of autumn. Birds are having a conversation, nature going on, impervious to evil.

LIFE IN POD A does not change.

Condemned inmates come and go, and old names belong to silence. After days, or maybe weeks—Jean-Baptiste often loses track of time—the new ones who come in to await their deaths are the names associated with the cells formerly occupied by the old names of the others who awaited their deaths. Pod A, Cell 25 is Beast, who will be moved to a different holding cell in several hours. Pod A, Cell 30 is Jean-Baptiste. Pod A, cell 31, directly to Jean-Baptiste’s right, is Moth—called thus because the necrophiliac murderer who stirs after lights-out has trembling hands that flutter, and his skin is almost gray. He likes to sleep on the floor, and his prison-issue clothing is always covered with gray dust—like dust on the wings of a moth.

Jean-Baptiste shaves the tops of his hands, long swirls of hair drifting into the stainless-steel sink.

“All right, Hair Ball.” Eyes peer through the tiny window in his door. “Your fifteen minutes are almost up. Two more minutes and I take the razor back.”

“Certainement.” He lathers his other hand with cheap-smelling soap and resumes shaving, careful of his knuckles.

The tufts in his ears are tricky, but he manages.

“Time’s up.”

Jean-Baptiste carefully rinses the razor.

“You shaved.” Moth speaks very quietly, so quietly that the other inmates rarely hear a word he says.

“Oui, mon ami. I look quite beautiful.”

The crank key that looks like a crowbar bangs into a slot at the bottom of the door, and the drawer slides out. The officer backs up, out of reach of pale, hairless fingers depositing the blue plastic razor.

MOTH SITS AND ROLLS a basketball against the wall precisely, so that it always rolls in a straight line back to him.

He is worthless, so feeble that his only pleasure in killing was having sex with dead flesh. Dead flesh has no energy, the blood no longer magnetic. Jean-Baptiste had a very effective method when he released his chosen ones to the ecstasy. A person with severe head injuries can live for a while, long enough for Jean-Baptiste to bite and suck living flesh and blood, thus recharging his magnetism.

“It is a lovely day, isn’t it?” Moth’s quiet comment drifts into Jean-Baptiste’s cell, because he has the ears to hear the barely audible voice. “No clouds, but later there will be a few very high ones that will move south by late afternoon.”

Moth has a radio and obsessively listens to the weather band.

“I see Miss Gittleman has a new car, a cute little silver BMW Roadster.”

Through a slitted window in each cell, a death-row inmate has a view of the parking lot behind the prison, and for lack of anything else to look at from their second-floor solitary confinements, men stare out for the better part of the day. In a sense, this is an act of intimidation. Moth’s mentioning Miss Gittleman’s BMW is the best threat he can muster. Officers most likely will pass this on to other officers, who will pass on to Miss Gittleman, the young and very pretty assistant public information officer, that inmates appreciate her new car. No prison employee is eager for any details of their personal life to be known by offenders so vile that they deserve to die.

Jean-Baptiste is perhaps the only inmate who rarely looks out the slit that is supposed to be a window. After memorizing every vehicle, their colors, makes, models and even certain plate numbers and precisely what their drivers look like, he found no purpose in looking out at a blank blue or stormy sky. Getting up from the toilet without bothering to pull up his pants, he looks out his high window, Moth’s comment having made him curious. He spots the BMW, then sits back down on the toilet, thinking.

He ponders the letter he sent the beautiful Scarpetta. He believes it has changed everything and fantasizes about her reading it and succumbing to his will.

Today, Beast will be allowed four hours to visit with clergy and family. He will leave for the short ride to Huntsville, to the Death House. At 6 p.m., he will die.

This also changes things.

A folded piece of paper quietly slips beneath the right corner of Jean-Baptiste’s door. He rips off toilet paper and, again without bothering to pull up his pants, picks up the note and returns to the toilet.

Beast’s cell is five down from Jean-Baptiste’s, on the left, and he can always tell when a note slid from cell to cell to him is from Beast. The folded paper takes on a certain texture of scraped gray, and the inside is smudged, the paper fiber of the creases weakened by repeated opening and folding, as each inmate along the way reads the note, a few of the men adding their own comments.

Jean-Baptiste crouches on his stainless-steel toilet, the long hair on his back matted with sweat that has turned his white shirt translucent. He is always hot when he is magnetized, and he is in a chronic state of magnetism as his electricity circulates through the metal of his confinement and races to the iron in his blood, and flows out again to complete another circuit, endlessly, endlessly, endlessly.

“Today,” the semiliterate Beast wrote in pencil, “wont you be glad when they drive me away. You will miss me? May be not.”

For once, Beast isn’t insulting, although the kite reads like a taunt to other inmates, of this Jean-Baptiste is certain.

He writes back, “You don’t have to miss me, mon ami.”

Beast will know Jean-Baptiste’s meaning, although he will know nothing more about what Jean-Baptiste will do to save Beast from his appointment with death. Footsteps ring on metal as officers walk by. He tears Beast’s note into small pieces and stuffs them into his mouth.

SHE MUST HAVE PARKED AND been approached by the killer before she even took her keys out of the ignition.

Nic assumes the purse and wallet may have been tossed in the parking lot, and after two days, certainly someone would have picked them up. Unfortunately, finders-keepers appears to have prevailed. As much news coverage as Katherine Bruce’s abduction is getting, whoever found her purse and wallet sure as hell knows that what he or she has is evidence. Some sniveling worm out there who lives according to situational ethics is not going to call the police now and basically admit that he or she intended to keep the purse or wallet or both until discovering they belonged to a murdered woman, assuming that Katherine has been murdered.

If she hasn’t been yet, she will be soon.

Then it occurs to Nic with a jolt that if the purse and wallet were turned in, whoever had them would have called the mighty Baton Rouge task force, which, of course, would find some lame-brain reason for not releasing the information to the press, and certainly not to other brothers and sisters of the badge. Nic can’t stop thinking about Wal-Mart and that she herself was at that very location within hours, perhaps, of when Katherine Bruce was abducted, driven away, probably to the same secret place the killer has taken all his victims.

Nic is haunted by the possibility, not a strong one, that Katherine Bruce might have been inside the Wal-Mart while Nic was there trolling, as she has done at all hours since returning from Knoxville.

Photographs of the pretty blonde victim constantly flash on the TV news and are in every newspaper Nic has picked up. She has no recollection of noticing anyone who looked even remotely similar to her while she was picking out a needlepoint pattern, when she doesn’t know how to do needlepoint, and showing interest in gaudy lingerie she would never wear.

For some reason, the odd woman who fell down in the parking lot because of an injured knee drifts through Nic’s mind every now and then. Something about that woman bothers her.

AT HIGH TIDE, SMALL BOATS can enter creeks and bayous that are usually not possible to enter and almost never ventured into by rational people.

Darren Citron is known to rev up his old Bay Runner and skim the shallow water and just make it over the mudbar into the mouth of whatever waterway he intends to challenge on any given day. Right now, the tide’s a little lower than he’d like, but he speeds full-throttle in Blind River and almost gets caught in the silt, which can be up to six feet deep. The muck can suck one’s shoes off, and although Darren can usually manage to push his boat out, he doesn’t like wading in water that’s full of cottonmouths.

A local boy, he is eighteen years old, perpetually tanned the hue of a burnt peanut, and he lives to fish and find new spots for hunting gators. Because of his latter preoccupation, Darren is not particularly admired. If he goes after big ones that can bring a good price for their hides, meat and heads, it requires a strong rope, a huge steel hook and, of course, bait. The higher the bait dangles over the water, the longer the gator has to be to reach it. The best bait is dogs. Darren gets them from shelters all over the area, his sweet demeanor fooling people. He does what he has to, rationalizing to himself that the animals will be put to sleep anyway. When he’s gator hunting, he thinks about the gator, not the bait or how he got it. Gators bite at night, especially if Darren sits very still in his boat and plays a tape recording of dogs whining. He’s skilled at disassociating from the bait, only thinking about the huge gator that’s going to come out of the water, snap its jaws together and get caught on the hook. Then he moves in quickly and humanely shoots the reptile in the head with a .22 rifle.

He cruises through a waterway lined with lily pads and saw grass, dappled with shadows from cypress dressed in Spanish moss, their roots ropy. Gators go in and out of the water, especially if the female has laid eggs. Their long tails leave trails, and when Darren sees a particular spot with a lot of trails, he marks it on his mental map and comes back there after dark, if the weather and tides are right.

The water is carpeted in duck seed blooms, and a blue heron lifts off up ahead, unhappy about the intrusion of man and motor. Darren scans for trails. He is followed by iridescent dragonflies. Gator eyes remind him of tiny tunnels side by side, just above the surface of the water, before they catch him looking back. Around a bend, he spots a myriad of trails and a yellow nylon rope hanging from a tree. The bait on the huge steel hook is a human arm.

TODAY FOR THE FIRST TIME in more than five years, Benton speaks to Senator Frank Lord, both of them using pay phones.

It strikes Benton as almost comical, as he envisions the ever-immaculately groomed and impeccably dressed Senator Lord driving from his Northern Virginia home, on his way to the Capitol, and pulling off at a gas station to use a pay phone. Benton orchestrated the conversation after receiving a very unexpected e-mail from the senator late last night.

Trouble, it read. Tomorrow 7:15. Leave me a number.

Benton e-mailed back the number of the pay phone he’s using right now, having picked it out in advance last night. Always go for the simplest, most obvious plan, if possible. Certainly, it is beginning to seem that his meticulous and complicated ones are going awry in all directions.

He leans against a wall, watching his beat-up Cadillac, making sure no one goes near it or shows interest in him. Every alarm inside his head is hammering. Senator Lord is telling him about Scarpetta’s letter from Chandonne, the one with the calligraphy.

“How did you find out about this?” Benton asks him.

“Jaime Berger called me last night. At home. Very concerned that Chandonne has set up a trap and Scarpetta’s walking right into it. Berger wants my help, my intervention. People forget that I have my limitations. Well, my enemies don’t forget it.”

The senator wants to send legions of federal agents to Baton Rouge, but not even he can bend the law. The Baton Rouge Task Force has to invite the FBI into the investigation, and for all practical purposes to take it over. In these serial abductions—or murders, because that’s what they are—there is an insurmountable jurisdictional problem with the feds storming in on their own. No federal laws have been broken.

“Damn incompetence,” Senator Lord says. “Damn ignorant fools down there.”

“It’s close,” Benton says into the phone. “The letter means the situation is very close to a possible conclusion. Not the way I wanted it. This is bad, very bad. I’m not worried about me.”

“It can be handled?”

“I’m the only one who knows how. It will require exposure.”

A long pause, then Senator Lord acquiesces. “Yes, I believe it will. But once that happens, there’s no going back. We can’t go through this again. Do you really . . . ?”

“I have to. The letter changes things dramatically, and you know how she is. He is luring her there.”

“She’s there now.”

“Baton Rouge?” Benton is frightened.

“Texas. I mean Texas.”

“Christ. Not good, either. No, no, no. The letter. This one’s real. Texas is no longer safe for her.”

For a moment he contemplates Scarpetta visiting Chandonne. Originally, he had tactical and personal reasons for wanting her to do this. But if he’s honest with himself, he never really thought she would. He really didn’t, despite his best efforts. Now she shouldn’t be there. Christ.

“She’s there even as we speak,” Senator Lord reminds him.

“Frank, he’s going to make a run for it.”

“I don’t see how. Not out of that place. No matter how clever he is. I’ll alert them immediately.”

“He’s more than clever. The point is this: If he’s luring her to Baton Rouge, then he must plan to be there. I know him. I know her. She’ll head to Baton Rouge as soon as she leaves Texas. Unless he intercepts her first, in Texas, if he can work that fast. Hopefully he can’t. But either way, she is in severe danger. Not just because of him, but his allies. They must be in Baton Rouge. His brother must be there. The killings now make sense. He’s doing them. She’s probably helping him. Since she hasn’t been caught yet, my guess is he and Bev Kiffin are together, hiding.”

“Isn’t abducting women taking a tremendous risk for fugitives of their notoriety?”

“He’s bored,” Benton simply says.

OFFICERS IN THE POLUNSKY UNIT wear gray uniforms and black baseball caps.

Handcuffs dangle from the belts of the two officers walking Jean-Baptiste through a series of heavy doors slamming shut so loudly, they sound like large-caliber pistol fire inside a steel room. Every explosion is an empowerment for Jean-Baptiste as he walks freely, only his wrists shackled. All around him, tons of steel magnetize him into solar flares. With each step, the power grows stronger.

“Can’t understand why anybody would want to visit you,” one of the officers says to him. “This is a first, huh?”

His name is Phillip Wilson. He drives a red Mustang with the vanity tag KEYPR.

KEEPER. Jean-Baptiste figured that out the first day he was here.

He says nothing to the officers as he moves through another door in a wave of searing heat.

“Not even one visitor?” replies the second officer, Ron Abrams, white, slender, with thinning brown hair. “Pretty pitiful, aren’t you, Monsieur Chandonne,” he mockingly says.

The turnover rate among corrections officers is very high. Officer Abrams is new, and Jean-Baptiste senses that he wants to walk the infamous Wolfman out to the visitation area. New officers are always curious about Jean-Baptiste. Then they get used to him and then are disgusted. Moth says Officer Abrams drives a black Toyota SUV. Moth knows every car in the parking lot, just as he always knows the latest weather update.

The back of the tiny visitation booth is a heavy wire mesh painted white. Officer Wilson unlocks it and takes off Jean-Baptiste’s cuffs and shuts him inside the booth, which has a chair, a shelf and a black phone attached to a metal cable.

“I’d like a Pepsi and the chocolate cupcakes, please,” Jean-Baptiste says through the screen.

“You got money?”

“I have no money,” Jean-Baptiste quietly replies.

“Okay. This time I do you a favor, since you’ve never had a visitor before and the lady coming in would be stupid to buy you anything, asshole.” It is Officer Abrams who speaks so crudely.

Through the glass, Jean-Baptiste scans the sparkling-clean, spacious room, believing he doesn’t need eyes to see the vending machines and everything in them, and the three visitors talking on phones to three other death-row inmates.

She is not here.

Jean-Baptiste’s electrical current spikes with anger.

AS OFTEN HAPPENS WHEN a situation is urgent, the best efforts are foiled by mundaneness.

Senator Lord has never been the sort to hesitate in making phone calls himself. He has no egotistical insecurities and finds it is quicker to handle a matter than to explain it to someone else. The instant he hangs up at the pay phone, he returns to his car and drives north, talking on his hands-free to his chief counsel.

“Jeff, I need the number of the warden at Polunsky. Now.”

Writing notes while driving in rush hour on I-95 is a special feat the senator was forced to learn years ago.

He enters a bad cell and can’t hear his chief counsel.

Repeatedly calling him back, the senator gets no signal. When he does get through, he is greeted by voicemail, because Jeff is trying to call him back, too.

“Get off the phone!” the senator exclaims to no one who can hear him.

Twenty minutes later, a secretary is still trying to track down the warden.

Senator Lord senses—and this has happened before—that she isn’t sure she believes the person on the other line is really Senator Frank Lord, one of the most powerful and visible politicians in the country. Usually, important people let less important people schedule appointments and make telephone calls.

Senator Lord concentrates on creeping traffic and angry drivers, and has been on hold for minutes. No one with intelligence or, better yet, a certainty of who she is talking to would dare to put him on hold. This is his reward for humility and taking care of himself efficiently, including picking up his own dry cleaning, stopping at the grocery store and even making his own restaurant reservations, despite recurring problems with maître d’s writing nothing down, certain the call is a prank or someone trying to trick him into giving him the best table.

“I’m sorry.” The secretary finally returns. “I can’t seem to locate him. He’s very busy this morning because there’s an execution tonight. Can I take a message?”

“What is your name?”

“Jodi.”

“No, Jodi, you can’t take a message. This is an emergency.”

“Well,” she hesitates, “caller ID doesn’t show you’re calling from Washington. I can’t just yank him out of an important meeting or whatever and then find out it’s not really you.”

“I don’t have time for this. Find him. Or, for God’s sake, does the man have an assistant?”

Again, he enters a bad cell and it takes fifteen minutes before he can get through to the secretary again. She has left her desk. Another young woman answers the phone and he loses her, too.

I’M SICK OF THIS,” Nic tells her father.

She drove to the Baton Rouge Police Department’s old brick building and never got above the first-floor lobby. When she said she had possible evidence about the cases, a plainclothes detective eventually appeared and just stared at the quarters in the envelope. He looked at Polaroid photographs of them on the Wal-Mart parking lot and indifferently listened to Nic’s rendition and theory while he continued to glance at his watch. She receipted the coins to him, and was certain when he returned to the so-called War Room, she became the joke of the day.

“We’re all working the same cases, and those assholes won’t talk to me. I’m sorry.” Sometimes Nic forgets how much her father abhors swearing. “Maybe they know something that could help us with our cases in Zachary. But oh, no. I am welcome to hand over anything I know, but it doesn’t work the same way.”

“You look mighty tired, Nic,” he says as they eat eggs scrambled with cheese and spicy sausage patties.

Buddy is off in make-believe land with his toys and the television.

“How ’bout some more grits?” her father asks.

“I can’t. But you do make the best grits I’ve ever had.”

“You always say that.”

“It’s always true.”

“Be careful. Those boys in Baton Rouge don’t like people like you. Especially women like you.”

“They don’t even know me.”

“They don’t need to know you to hate your guts. They want credit. Now, when I was coming along, credit meant you could buy your groceries at the nearby general store and pay later when you were able. No one went hungry. These days, credit means plain selfishness. Those good ol’ boys in Baton Rouge want credit, credit, credit.”

“Tell me about it.” Nic butters another biscuit. “Every time you cook, I eat too much.”

“People who want credit will lie, cheat and steal,” her father reminds her.

“While women keep dying.” Nic loses her appetite and sets the biscuit back on her plate. “Who’s worse? The man doing it or these men who want credit and don’t care about the victims or anything else?”

“Two wrongs never make a right, Nic,” he says. “I’m glad you don’t work down there. I’d be worried about your safety a lot more than I am now. And not because of this madman on the loose, but because of who your colleagues would be.”

She looks around at the simple kitchen of her childhood. Nothing in the house has been upgraded or remodeled since her mother died. The stove is electric, white with four burners. The refrigerator is white; so are the countertops. Her mother had a French country theme in mind, was going to find old furniture and blue-and-white curtains, maybe some interesting tiles for the walls. But she never got a chance. So the kitchen is white, just plain white. If any of the appliances quit for good, she’s confident her father would refuse to get rid of them. He’d eat takeout food every night, if necessary. It tortures Nic that her father can’t disengage from the past. Silent grieving and anger hold him hostage.

Nic pushes back her chair. She kisses the top of her father’s head, and her eyes fill with tears.

“I love you, Papa. Take good care of Buddy. I promise one of these days I’ll be a good mother.”

“You’re a good enough mother.” He looks at her from his seat at the table as he idly picks at eggs. “It’s not how much time but what that time’s like.”

Nic thinks of her mother. Her time was short, but every minute of it was good. That’s the way it seems now.

“Now you’re crying,” her father says. “You going to tell me what on Earth is going on with you, Nic?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know. I’ll be minding my own business and suddenly burst into tears. I think it’s about Mama, like I told you. All that’s going on down here has reminded me, or just opened some trapdoor in my mind. A door I didn’t even know was there that’s leading into a dark place I’m scared to death of, Papa. Please turn on the light for me. Please.”

He slowly gets up from the table, knowing what she means. He sighs.

“Don’t do this to yourself, Nic,” he grimly says. “I already know what it did to me. I stopped my life. You know I did. When I came home that early evening and saw . . .” He clears his throat, fighting back tears. “I felt something move inside me, as if I pulled a muscle in my heart. Why would you want those images?”

“Because they’re the truth. And maybe the images I have are worse because I can’t see the real ones.”

He nods and sighs again. “Go up in the attic. Under all those rugs piled in a corner, there’s a small blue suitcase. Belonged to her. She got it with Green Stamps.”

“I remember,” Nic whispers, envisioning her mother carrying the blue suitcase out the door one day when she was headed to Nashville to visit her aunt after she’d had eye surgery.

“The lock code was never set because she said she’d never remember it. Zero-zero-zero, just like brand new.” He clears his throat again, staring off. “What you want’s in there. Some things I’m not supposed to have, but I was like you. Just had to know. And I taught the daughter of the police chief, so I got a few favors, I’m ashamed to admit it. Because I promised the chief I’d give her a better grade than she deserved and a recommendation for college that was just one big fat lie.

“My punishment is I got what I asked for,” he continues. “Just don’t bring that stuff down here. I don’t ever want to see it again.”

ASSISTANT PIO JAYNE GITTLEMAN apologizes profusely for making Scarpetta wait.

For fifteen minutes, Scarpetta has stood outside the front door, right below the sign that reads Allan B. Polunsky Unit, the bright sun making her perspire. She feels dirty and disheveled from travel. Her patience is thin, despite her resolve to contain her emotions completely. More than anything right now, she wants to get this over with at last, at long last.

“The media’s calling nonstop because we’ve got an execution tonight,” Miss Gittleman explains.

She hands Scarpetta a visitor’s tag, which she clamps to the lapel of the same suit she’s worn on different planes since she left Florida. The pantsuit is black, and at least she ironed it inside her room at New York’s Melrose Hotel last night after leaving her niece. Lucy does not know where Scarpetta is right now. If Scarpetta had mentioned it, Lucy would have tried to stop her or insisted on going with her. Taking a chance, Scarpetta headed west without an appointment, having no choice but to call the Polunsky Unit when she landed in Houston. Her confidence that Chandonne would see her was rewarded by the additional unpleasantry of learning she is on his visitors list. At least his sick joke proved useful. She is here. And perhaps the less time he has to think about her seeing him, the better.

Officers check Scarpetta’s identification, and Miss Gittleman leads her through a series of loud steel doors, then through a garden with picnic tables under umbrellas, obviously meant for staff. She is cleared through five electronically locking doors, the walk far too short to suit her as she reaches the unnerving conclusion that she should not have come here. Chandonne is manipulating her, and she is going to regret this visit because it gives him what he wants and makes a fool of her.

Inside the visitors lobby, her shoes seem loud, and she is acutely aware of her appearance as she crosses the shiny tile floor. A strong believer in the psychology of dress and demeanor, her entrance is out of character and embarrassing. She would have preferred to be perfectly groomed in a power suit, probably pinstripe, and perhaps a white shirt with cufflinks. Possibly, she considers, power dressing wouldn’t have sent the best message to this bastard who tried to kill her, but it would have made her feel less vulnerable to him.

Her knees weaken at the sight of Jean-Baptiste Chandonne sitting inside Booth 2. Clean-shaven, including his hands and head, he relaxes behind glass, drinking a Pepsi and eating a chocolate cupcake, pretending not to notice her.

She openly stares at him, refusing to play the game he has already begun, and it amazes her to see him shaven and dressed in white. He is ugly but almost looks normal without his long swirls of baby-fine hair that hung from him in a long, filthy fringe last time she saw him. He sips his Pepsi and licks his fingers as Scarpetta sits across from him and picks up the black phone.

His asymmetrical eyes drift, and he gives her his barracuda smile, his skin as pale as parchment. She notices his highly defined, muscular arms and that he has torn the sleeves off his white shirt, and then she sees that long, horrible hair. It peeks out from the armholes and the opening at his neck. Apparently, he has shaven only those areas of his body that are uncovered.

“How nice,” she says coldly into the phone. “You cleaned up for me.”

“But of course. It is lovely for you to come. I knew you would.” His filmy eyes don’t seem to focus when they briefly turn her way.

“Did you shave yourself?”

“Yes. Today. Just for you.”

“Rather hard to do if you can’t see,” she remarks in a steady, strong voice.

“I don’t need my eyes to see.” He touches his tongue to a small, sharp tooth and reaches for his Pepsi. “What did you think about my letter?”

“What did you want me to think about it?”

“That I am an artist, of course.”

“Did you learn your penmanship here in prison?”

“I have always been able to write in a beautiful hand. When my parents kept me locked in the basement as an innocent petit boy, I had endless hours to develop many talents.”

“Who mailed the letter for you?” Scarpetta dominates with her questions.

“My dear dead lawyer.” He clucks his tongue. “I honestly do not know why he committed suicide. But perhaps it is a good thing. He was worthless, you know. It runs in his bloodline.”

Scarpetta bends down and takes a notepad and pen out of her pocketbook. “You told me you have information for me. That’s why I’m here. If you simply want to chat, I’m leaving right now. I have no interest in visiting with you.”

“The other part of the bargain, Madame Scarpetta,” he says as his crooked eyes float, “is my execution. Will you?”

“I have no problem with that.”

He smiles and seems delighted.

“Tell me.” He rests his chin on his hand. “What is it like?”

“Painless. An IV of sodium thiopental, which is the sedative. And pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant. Potassium chloride stops the heart.” She clinically describes as he listens, enraptured. “Fairly inexpensive drugs, ironically and appropriately, considering their purpose. Death occurs in several minutes.”

“And I will not suffer when you do this to me?”

“You will never suffer the way you’ve made others suffer. You’ll instantly go to sleep.”

“Then you promise you will be my doctor in the end?” He begins stroking the can of Pepsi, the hideous long nail on his right thumb caked with what looks like chocolate, probably from his cupcakes.

“I will do as you wish if you are willing to help the police. What is the information?”

He gives her names and locations, none of which mean anything to her. She fills twenty pages in her notepad, becoming increasingly suspicious that he is toying with her. The information is meaningless. Maybe.

At a pause, when he decides to take his time eating a cupcake, she says, “Where are your brother and Bev Kiffin?”

He wipes his hands and mouth on his shirt, sinewy muscles jumping with his every motion. Chandonne is strong and frighteningly fast. Repressing images is becoming increasingly difficult. She tries to shut off memories of that night in her house, when this very man who is separated from her only by glass tried to beat her to death. Then Jay Talley’s face is there, when he fooled her, and later he came after her, too. That the fraternal twin brothers share a murderous obsession for her is incomprehensible. She doesn’t quite believe it, and it surprises her that as she stares at Jean-Baptiste Chandonne, all she feels is a determination to forget past horrors. He is harmless in this place. In days, he will be dead.

She will not come back to administer the lethal injection. Lying to him doesn’t bother her in the least.

He says nothing about Jay Talley and Bev Kiffin.

Instead, he tells her, “Rocco has a small château in Baton Rouge. It is quaint, in a restored neighborhood where many homosexuals live. Near downtown. I have stayed there many times.”

“Have you ever heard of a Baton Rouge woman named Charlotte Dard?”

“Of course. Not beautiful enough for my brother.”

“Did Rocco Caggiano murder her?”

“No.” Chandonne sighs as if he is getting bored. “As I said, and you must listen to me more closely. She was not beautiful enough for my brother. The Red Stick.” He subjects her to his hideous open-mouthed grin as his eyes continue to drift. “Did you know that everything you are is visible in your hands?”

Her hands are in her lap, holding the notepad and the pen. He talks about her hands as if he can see them, yet his eyes float as if he is blind.

Malingerer.

“In the hands of all the sons of men God places marks, that all the sons of men may know their own works. Every working of the mind leaves marks on the hand, forms the hand, which is the measure of intelligence and creativity.”

She listens, wondering if he is on his way to an important point.

“In France, you find mostly artistic hands. Like mine.” He holds up a shaved hand, his long, tapered fingers splayed. “And like yours, Madame Scarpetta. You have the elegant hands of an artist. And now you know why I do not touch the hands. The Psychonomy of the Hand, or The Hand an Index of Mental Development. Monsieur Richard Beamish. A very good book with many tracings of living hands, if you can find it, but alas, it was written in 1865 and not in your local library. There are two tracings that are you. The square hand, elegant but strong. And the artist’s hand, elastic and flexible, again elegant. But more associated with an impulsive personality.”

She does not comment.

“Impulsive. Here you are without notice. Suddenly here. A rather nervous sort. But sanguine.”

He savors the word sanguine, which in medieval medicine meant the blood was the most dominant of the bodily humors. Sanguine people are supposed to be optimistic and cheerful. She is neither at the moment.

“You say you don’t touch the hands. An explanation for why you didn’t bite the hands of the women you slaughtered,” she says blandly.

“The hands are the mind and the soul. I would not harm a manifestation of what I am releasing with my chosen ones. I only lick the hands.”

Now he is moving in to disgust and degrade her, but she isn’t finished with him yet.

“You didn’t bite the bottoms of their feet, either,” she reminds him.

He shrugs, fiddling with the can of Pepsi, which sounded empty the last time he set it down. “Feet are of no interest to me.”

“Where are Jay Talley and Bev Kiffin?” she asks again.

“I am getting tired.”

“Why would you protect your brother after the way he has treated you all of your life?”

“I am my brother,” he weirdly says. “So your finding me makes it unnecessary for you to find him. Now, I am very tired.”

Jean-Baptiste Chandonne begins rubbing his stomach and wincing as his eyes wander. “I think I am getting sick.”

“You have nothing more to tell me? If not, I’m leaving.”

“I am blind.”

“You are a malingerer,” Scarpetta replies.

“You took my physical eyesight, but not before I saw you.” He touches his tongue to his pointed teeth. “Remember your lovely home with the shower in the garage? When you returned from a crime scene at the Richmond port, you went into that garage to change and disinfect, and you showered in there.”

Anger and humiliation tighten her body. She had been examining a putrid, decomposing body inside a cargo container, and, yes, she went through her routine: taking off her protective coveralls and boots and tying them inside a heavy plastic bag that went in the trunk; then she drove home. Once inside her garage, which certainly was not a typical garage, she threw her scene clothes into an industrial-size stainless-steel sink. She stripped and stepped into the shower, because she will not track death into her house.

“The small windows in your garage door. Very much like the small window in my cell,” he goes on. “I saw you.”

Those unfocused eyes and that fishlike smile again.

His tongue is bleeding.

Scarpetta’s hands are cold, her feet getting numb. The hair rises on her arms and the back of her neck.

“Naked.” He savors the word, sucking his tongue. “I watched you undress. I saw you naked. Such a joy, like a fine wine. You were Burgundy then, round and firm, complicated and to be drunk, not sipped. Now you are a Bordeaux, because when you speak, you are heavier, you see. Not physically, I don’t think. I would have to see you naked to make that determination.” He presses a hand against the glass, a hand that has battered human beings to splinters and mush. “A red wine, of course. You are always . . .”

“That’s enough!” Scarpetta yells as her rage crashes out of its camouflage like a wild boar. “Shut up, you worthless piece of shit.” She leans closer to the glass. “I’m not going to listen to your masturbatory talk. It doesn’t bother me. I don’t care if you saw me naked. Do you think it intimidates me to hear you babble on about your voyeurism and what you think of my body? Do you think I care if I blinded you when you were swinging that fucking hammer at me?

“You know what the best part is, Jean-Baptiste Chandonne? You’re in here because of me. So who won? And, no, I won’t be back here to put you to death. A stranger will do that. Just as you were a stranger to those you killed.”

Jean-Baptiste suddenly turns back to the wire-mesh screen behind him.

“Who’s there?” he whispers.

Scarpetta hangs up the black phone. She walks away.

“Who’s there!” he screams.

JEAN-BAPTISTE IS quite fond of handcuffs.

The thick steel bracelets around his wrists are rings of magnetic strength. Power surges through him. He is calm now, even conversational, as Officers Abrams and Wilson escort him along corridors, stopping at every steel door and holding up their ID name tags and showing their faces through the glass windows. The officer on the other side releases the electronic lock, and the journey continues.

“She was very upsetting to me,” he says in his soft voice. “I regret my outburst. She blinded me, you know, and will not say she is sorry.”

“I don’t know why she even came to see a dirtbag like you,” Officer Abrams comments. “If anybody should be upset, it’s her, after what you tried to do. I’ve read about it, know all about your worthless life.”

Officer Abrams is making the big mistake of giving in to his emotions. He hates Jean-Baptiste. He would like to hurt Jean-Baptiste.

“I am quiet inside now,” Jean-Baptiste says meekly. “But I feel sick.”

The officers stop at another door, and Abrams shows his ID in the glass window. They pass through. Jean-Baptiste averts his face, staring down at the floor and looking away from each officer who grants them entrance deeper inside the prison.

“I eat paper,” Jean-Baptiste confesses. “It is a nervousness of mine, and I have been eating a lot of paper today.”

“You writing yourself letters?” Abrams snidely goes on. “No wonder you spend so much time on the toilet.”

“This is very true,” Jean-Baptiste agrees. “But this time it is worse. I feel weak, and my stomach hurts.”

“It will pass, so to speak.”

“Don’t worry. If it doesn’t, we’ll get you to the infirmary.” This time it is Officer Wilson who speaks. “They’ll give you an enema. You’ll probably like that.”

Inside Pod A, the voices of inmates bounce off concrete and steel. The noise is maddening, and the only way Jean-Baptiste has been able to endure it all these months is to decide when he will hear and when he won’t. If this isn’t enough, he leaves, usually for France. But today he will begin his travel to Baton Rouge and be reunited with his brother. He is his brother. This point confuses him.

When he is with his brother, Jean-Baptiste experiences his brother’s existence, which is apart from the existence of Jean-Baptiste.

When the two of them are separated, Jean-Baptiste is his brother, and their roles in their conquests unite in one delicious act. Jean-Baptiste picks up the beautiful woman, and she desires him, possibly desperately. They have sex. Then he releases her to the ecstasy, and when it is finished and she is free, Jean-Baptiste is slippery with her blood, his tongue thrilled by the taste of her salty sweetness and the metallic hint of the iron he needs. Later, his teeth sometimes ache, and he is prone to massaging his gums and washing himself obsessively.

Jean-Baptiste’s cell comes into view, and he glances inside the control booth at the woman who sits there today. She is a difficulty, but not an impossible one. No one can watch all activities at all times, and as Jean-Baptiste walks slowly, very slowly, and holds his stomach, she barely glances at him. The early afternoon belongs to Beast. Now he has his visitors in a special holding cell on the other end of the pod, a much more civilized place to visit relatives and the clergy. Because visitors have been in and out for the past three or four hours, the woman in the console must pay special attention in the event Beast acts out. Why not? He has nothing to lose.

The door of the holding cell is made of bars, allowing the officers to note Beast’s every move inside, ensuring he will not harm the sad, kind people who have come to see him. Beast looks at Jean-Baptiste through the bars, just as the woman in the booth unlocks Jean-Baptiste’s door and Officers Abrams and Wilson remove Jean-Baptiste’s handcuffs.

Beast screams and grabs at the bars of his holding cell, yelling and cursing and jumping up and down. All attention sharply turns in his direction, and Jean-Baptiste grabs Officers Wilson and Abrams by their thick leather belts and jerks so hard that he lifts them off their feet. Their shocked yells blend with the jarring, deafening noise in the pod as Jean-Baptiste slams them into a concrete wall to the left of the massive door, which he shuts just enough so it doesn’t lock. He blinds them with his long, filthy thumbnail, and his magnetized hands crush their windpipes. As their faces turn a dusky blue, their flailing quickly stills. Jean-Baptiste killed them with virtually no bloodshed, just little trickles from their eyes and a cut on Officer Wilson’s head.

Jean-Baptiste removes Officer Abrams’s uniform and puts it on. He does this in seconds, it seems, pulling the black cap low over his face and slipping on the dead man’s glasses. He walks out of the cell and then shuts the door, just one more loud metal clang as Beast struggles with officers far away and gets a faceful of pepper spray, which only makes him scream and resist more, this time sincerely.

One door after another, Jean-Baptiste passes through, holding up Officer Abrams’s identification tag. So sure is he of success, he is completely at ease, even seems a little preoccupied, as officers click him through. Jean-Baptiste’s feet are not on the ground, but in the air as he easily walks out of the prison, a free man, and digs Officer Abrams’s car keys out of a pocket.

INSIDE THE GEORGE BUSH Intercontinental Airport, Scarpetta stands near a wall, out of traffic.

She sips black coffee, knowing it’s the last thing she needs. Her appetite has abandoned her, and when she bought a hamburger less than an hour ago, she couldn’t swallow the first bite. Caffeine makes her hands shake. A hit of Scotch would calm her down, but she won’t dare, and the reprieve would only be temporary. Of all times, she needs to think clearly now, to somehow handle her stress without self-destructive assistance.

Please answer your phone, she silently begs.

Three rings and, “Yeah.”

Marino is driving his loud truck.

“Thank God!” she exclaims, turning her back to passengers walking with purpose or running to their gates. “Where in God’s name have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you for days. I’m so sorry about Rocco . . .”

For Marino’s sake, she is.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he replies, subdued and more unhappy than usual. “Where I’ve been is hell, if you want to know. Maybe broke my all-time record for drinking bourbon and beer and not answering the goddamn phone.”

“Oh, no. Another fight with Trixie. I told you what I think of . . .”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he says again. “No offense, Doc.”

“I’m in Houston,” she tells him.

“Oh, shit.”

“I did it. I took notes. Maybe none of it is true. But he did say that Rocco has a place in some gay district near downtown. In Baton Rouge. Chances are good the house isn’t in his name. But neighbors must know about him. Could be a lot of evidence in that house.”

“On another subject, in case you ain’t been listening to the news, a female arm turned up in one of the creeks down there,” he informs her. “They’re doing DNA. Might be the last lady, Katherine Bruce. If it is, he’s getting frenzied. The location the arm was found in was right off Blind River, which runs into Lake Maurepas. This guy’s got to be familiar with the bayous and so on around there.

“Word is, the creek where the arm was isn’t easily accessible. You’d have to know where it is, and almost nobody goes there. He was using the arm as gator bait, on a hook suspended from a rope.”

“Or he was displaying it for the shock effect.”

“I don’t think that’s it,” he says.

“Whatever the case, you’re right, he’s escalating.”

“Probably looking for another one even as we speak,” he says.

“I’m headed to Baton Rouge,” Scarpetta says.

“Yeah, I figured you would.” Marino’s voice is barely audible over the thrumming of his V-8 engine. “All to help out with some stupid drug overdose that happened eight years ago.”

“This isn’t just about a drug overdose, Marino. And you know it.”

“Whatever it’s about, you ain’t safe down there, which is why I’m heading that way. Been driving since midnight and have to stop every other minute for coffee, then I have to stop again every other minute for a john.”

She reluctantly tells him about Rocco’s connection to the Charlotte Dard case, that he represented a pharmacist, an alleged suspect.

It is as if Marino doesn’t hear her.

“I still got another ten hours on the road. And I gotta sleep at some point. So I probably won’t catch up with you until tomorrow,” he says.

JAY HEARS ABOUT his mutant brother on the radio.

He isn’t sure how he feels about it as he sweats inside the fishing shack, his head bleary, his beauty not quite what it was even a week ago. He faults Bev for this, for everything. The more often she goes to the mainland, the more often the beer supply is replenished. Jay used to go weeks, a month, without a beer. Of late, the refrigerator is never empty.

Resisting alcohol has always been a challenge for him, ever since he began tasting fine wines as a boy in France, wines that are for the gods, his father would say. As a free man with complete mastery of his life, Jay sipped, savored and enjoyed in moderation. Now he is held hostage by cheap beer. Since Bev’s last shopping expedition, he has been drinking a case a day.

“I guess I’m gonna have to make another run,” Bev says, her eyes fixed on his Adam’s apple bobbing as he tilts a can straight up and drains it.

“Yeah, you do that.” Beer trickles down his bare chest.

“Whatever you want.”

“Fuck you. It’s all about what you want.” He steps closer to her, his face menacing. “I’m falling apart!” he yells at her as he crumples a beer can and hurls it across the room. “It’s your fucking fault! How could anybody be holed up in here with a stupid cow like you and not have to drink his fucking brains out!”

He grabs another beer out of the refrigerator and pushes the door shut with his bare foot. Bev doesn’t react. She resists the smile she feels inside. Nothing gives her more satisfaction than to see Jay out of control, confused and headed for hurting himself. At last she has found a way to get him back, and now that his monster brother is on the loose, Jay’s going to get worse and do something, so she needs to keep up her guard. Her self-defense is to keep him drunk. She doesn’t know why she didn’t think of it a long time ago, but beer was scarce when she went to the mainland no more than once every four or six weeks.

Suddenly, his demands became once a month, twice a month, and each time she returned with cases of beer and was amazed by how much more he was drinking. Until lately, she had never seen him drunk. When he is drunk, he doesn’t resist her advances, and she wipes him down with a wet towel as he sinks into unconsciousness. The next morning, he has no memory of what she did, of how she satisfied her own pleasure in creative ways, since he couldn’t perform and wouldn’t have, were he sober.

She watches him fumble with the radio, searching through static for the latest news updates, well on his way to being drunk again. As long as she’s known him, he’s had no body fat, his perfectly defined body a constant source of envy and humiliation for her. This will change quickly. It is inevitable. He’ll get fat around his waist, and his pride will suffocate beneath puffiness and flab no matter how many push-ups and sit-ups and crunches he does. Maybe his perfect face won’t look so good, either. Wouldn’t that be something if he got so ugly—as ugly as he thinks she is—that she didn’t want him anymore.

What was that story in the Bible? Samson—the mighty, beautiful Samson—gave in to what’s-her-name, and she cut off his magical hair, or something. He lost all his strength.

“You stupid bitch!” Jay calls out. “Why are you just standing here, staring? My brother’s on his way here if he isn’t already here. He’d figure out where I’d be. He always has.”

“I hear twins think like that, are real tuned-in to each other.” The word twin is a deliberate scorpion sting. “He won’t hurt you. He won’t hurt me. You forget I’ve met him before. Why, I think he likes me because I can get beyond his looks.”

“He doesn’t like anybody.” Jay gives up on the radio and angrily turns it off. “You don’t live in the real world. I’ve got to find him first before he does something stupid, sees some woman and does her, leaving his damn bite marks all over her and smashing her head.”

“You ever watched him do it?” she casually asks.

“Go get the boat ready, Bev.”

She can’t remember the last time he said her name. It is rich, like melted butter.

Then he spoils the moment by adding, “It’s your goddamn fault about the arm. Wouldn’t have happened if you’d brought me some pups.”

Since she returned from her errand-running on the mainland, all he’s done is complain that she didn’t bring gator bait, not the least bit grateful for what she did bring him.

She stares at the empty mattress by the wall.

“You got plenty of gator bait,” she said the other day. “More than you know what to do with these days.”

She convinced him that baiting a gator hook with human flesh would work just fine, maybe even better. Jay could have his fun with a reptile that was longer than he was tall. He’d watch it thrashing until he got bored, then shoot it in the head. Outlaw hunter that he is, he never keeps what he catches. He’d cut the nylon rope and watch the reptile slide into the water. Then he’d motor back to the shack.

This time it didn’t work that way. All he vaguely remembers is baiting the hook and stringing it up over the thick branch of a cypress tree, and then hearing another boat not far away, someone else hunting gators or maybe gigging frogs. Jay got the hell out of there, the hook still baited and dangling from the yellow nylon line. He should have cut it down. He made a big mistake but won’t admit it. She suspects there was no other hunter out there. Jay was hearing things and he didn’t think straight. Had he, it would have entered his mind that when another hunter found the caught gator, the bait either would have been found hanging out of its jaws or discovered in its guts when the gator was field-dressed.

“Do what I say, damn it. Get the boat ready,” he orders her. “So I can deal with him.”

“And how do you think you’ll do that?” Bev asks calmly, placated and pleased by the craziness in front of her.

“I already told you. He’ll find me,” Jay says, his head beginning to throb. “He can’t live without me. He can’t even die without me.”

LATE AFTERNOON, SCARPETTA SITS fifteen rows back, her legs cramped.

On her left, a young boy, blond and cute, with braces on his teeth, despondently draws Yu-Gi-Oh! cards from a stack on his tray. On her right, an obese man, probably in his fifties, drinks screwdrivers next to the window. He is constantly pushing up wire-rimmed glasses, the oversized curved frames that remind Scarpetta of Elvis. The obese man noisily flips through the Wall Street Journal and periodically glances at Scarpetta, obviously hoping to engage her in conversation. She continues to ignore him.

The boy draws another Yu-Gi-Oh! card and places it faceup on the tray.

“Who’s winning?” Scarpetta asks him with a smile.

“I don’t have anybody to duel with,” the boy replies without looking up.

He is probably ten and is dressed in jeans, a faded Spiderman shirt and tennis shoes. “You have to have at least forty cards to play,” he adds.

“I’m afraid I’m disqualified, then.”

He picks up a card, a colorful one with a menacing ax on it. “See,” he says, “this one’s my favorite. The Axe of Despair. It’s a good weapon for a monster to have, worth a thousand points.” He picks another card, this one called the Axe Raider. “A very strong monster with the ax,” he explains.

She studies the cards and shakes her head. “Sorry. Too complicated for me.”

“You want to learn how to play?”

“I couldn’t possibly,” she replies. “What’s your name?”

“Albert.” He draws more cards from the deck. “Not Al,” he lets her know. “Everybody thinks they can call me Al. But it’s Albert.”

“Nice to meet you, Albert.” She does not offer her name.

Scarpetta’s seatmate next to the window shifts around to face her, his shoulder pressing against her upper arm. “You don’t sound like you’re from Louisiana,” he says.

“I’m not,” she replies, leaning away from him, her sinuses assaulted by the overpowering cologne he must have splashed on when he uprooted her to go to the restroom.

“Don’t have to tell me that. One or two spoken words and I know.” He sips his vodka and orange juice. “Let me guess. Not Texas, either. You don’t exactly look Mexican.” He grins.

She resumes reading a structural biology article in Science magazine and wonders when the man will get the not-so-subtle message to leave her alone.

Rarely is Scarpetta accessible to strangers. If she is, then usually within two minutes they ask where she’s going and why and wander into the restricted airspace of her profession. Telling them she’s a doctor doesn’t stop the quizzing, nor does saying that she’s a lawyer, and should she let on that she is both, the consequences are bad enough. But to go on and explain that she is a forensic pathologist will mean the ruination of her trip.

Next, JonBenet Ramsey, O. J. Simpson and other mysterious cases and miscarriages of justice bubble up, and Scarpetta is trapped, buckled in her seat at an altitude of some thirty thousand feet. Then there are those strangers who don’t care if she works but would rather see her later for dinner, or preferably for a drink in a hotel bar that might lead to a hotel room. They, like the tipsy slob sitting to her right, would rather stare at her body than hear about her résumé.

“Looks like a mighty complicated article you’re reading,” he says. “I’m guessing you’re some sort of schoolteacher.”

She doesn’t respond.

“You see, I’m good at this.” He squints his eyes and snaps his thick fingers, pointing at her face. “A biology teacher. Kids are worthless these days.” He lifts his drink from his tray and rattles the ice in the plastic cup. “I don’t know how you stand being around them, to tell the truth,” he goes on, apparently having decided she is a teacher. “Plus, they don’t think twice about bringing a gun to school.”

She feels his puffy eyes on her as she continues to read.

“You got children? I got three. Teenagers, all of them. Obviously, I got married when I was twelve.” He laughs, and flecks of spittle spray through the air. “How ’bout I get your card from you—in case I need a little tutoring while both of us are in Baton Rouge? You changing planes or going there? I live in the downtown area, the name’s Weldon Winn—with two n’s. Good name for a politician, huh? Guess you can imagine the campaign slogans if I ever run for office.”

“When are we landing?” Albert asks her.

She looks at her watch and forces a smile as the name Weldon Winn shocks her. “Not too much longer,” she says to the boy.

“Yes, ma’am, I can just imagine signs all over Louisiana: It’s Win-Win with Winn. Get it? And Go with the Winner. Maybe I’ll be lucky and have an opponent named Miracle. So Winn Needs No Miracle. How ’bout that? And when Mr. Miracle slides hopelessly downhill in the polls, he’ll be called Miracle-Whipped.” He winks again.

“I suppose there’s no chance you might run against a she,” Scarpetta comments without looking up from her magazine, pretending she doesn’t have a clue that Weldon Winn is the Middle District U.S. Attorney for Louisiana that Nic Robillard complained about.

“Hell. No woman would take me on.”

“I see. So what kind of politician are you?” Scarpetta finally asks him.

“One in spirit only at the moment, pretty lady. I’m the U.S. Attorney for Baton Rouge.”

He pauses to let the importance of his position sink in, finishing his screwdriver and craning his neck in search of a flight attendant. Spotting one, he holds up an arm and snaps his fingers at her.

It can’t be chance that Weldon Winn just happens to be sitting next to her on a plane when she just happens to be on her way to assist in a suspicious death that, according to Dr. Lanier, just happens to have captured Weldon Winn’s interest, after she just happens to have left Jean-Baptiste Chandonne.

She tries to figure out how Winn would have had time to intercept her in Houston. Maybe he was already there. She has no doubt whatsoever that he knows who she is and why she’s on this flight.

“Got a getaway in New Orleans, quite a cozy little palace in the French Quarter. Maybe you can visit while you’re in the area. I’ll be around for just a couple nights, got business with the governor and a few of the boys. I’d be more than happy to give you a personal tour of the capital, show you the bullethole in a pillar where Huey Long was shot.”

Scarpetta knows all about the notorious Huey Long’s assassination. When the case was reopened in the early nineties, the results of the new investigation were discussed at various forensic science academy meetings. She’s had enough of the pompous Weldon Winn.

“For your own edification,” she tells him, “the so-called bullethole in the marble pillar was not caused by a bullet intended for Huey Long or anyone else, but more likely from an imperfection in the stone or a chiseled facsimile of a bullethole to attract tourism. As a matter of fact,” she adds, as Winn’s eyes flatten and his smile freezes, “since the assassination, the Capitol was restored, and that particular pillar’s marble panels were removed and never returned to their original location. I’m surprised you spend a lot of time at the state capital and don’t know all this,” she concludes.

“My aunt’s supposed to pick me up and if I’m late, what if she isn’t there?” Albert asks Scarpetta, as if the two of them are traveling together.

He has lost interest in his trading cards, which are neatly stacked next to a blue cell phone. “Do you know what time it is?” he says.

“Almost six,” Scarpetta says. “If you’re sleepy, take a little nap and I’ll let you know when we’re about to land.”

“I’m not sleepy.”

She recalls noticing him at the gate in Houston, playing with his cards. Because he was sitting next to other adults, she assumed he was accompanied and that his family or whoever he is traveling with were seated elsewhere on the plane. It never occurred to her that any parent or relative would allow a young child to travel alone, especially these days.

“Now isn’t that something. Not too many people are experts on bulletholes,” the U.S. Attorney comments as the flight attendant serves him another drink.

“No, I don’t suppose too many people are.” Scarpetta’s attention is focused on the lost little boy next to her. “You aren’t by yourself, are you?” she asks him. “And why aren’t you in school?”

“It’s spring break. Uncle Walt dropped me off, and a lady at the airport met me. I’m not tired. Sometimes I get to stay up really late, watching movies. We get a thousand channels.” He pauses and shrugs. “Well, maybe not that many, but a lot. Do you have any pets? I used to have a dog named Nestlé because it was brown like chocolate chips.”

“Let’s see,” Scarpetta says. “I don’t have a dog the color of chocolate, but I have an English bulldog who’s white and brown with very big lower teeth. His name is Billy. Do you know what an English bulldog is?”

“Like a pit bull?”

“Not anything like a pit bull.”

Weldon Winn butts into the conversation. “Might I ask where you’re staying while you’re in town?”

“Nestlé used to miss me when I wasn’t home,” Albert wistfully says.

“I’m sure he did,” Scarpetta replies. “I think Billy misses me, too. But my secretary takes good care of him.”

“Nestlé was a girl.”

“What happened to her?”

“I don’t know.”

“My, my, if you aren’t a mysterious little lady,” the U.S. Attorney says, staring at her.

Scarpetta turns to him, catching a cold glint in his eyes.

She leans close to him and whispers in his ear, “I’ve had enough of your bullshit.”

THE LEARJET 35 BELONGS TO Homeland Security, and Benton is the only passenger on it.

Landing at Louisiana Air in Baton Rouge, he hurries down the steps, carrying a soft-sided bag, not looking at all like the Benton his people once knew: facial hair, a black Super Bowl baseball cap and tinted glasses. His black suit is off the rack from Saks, where he blitzed through the men’s department yesterday. Shoes are Prada, black, rubber soles. His belt is also Prada, and he wears a black T-shirt. None of the clothes, except the shoes and T-shirt, are a perfect fit. But he hasn’t owned a suit in years, and it did cross his mind in the dressing room that he missed the soft new wools, cashmere and polished cotton of the past, when tailors made chalk marks on sleeves and cuffs that needed to be hemmed.

He wonders who Scarpetta gave his expensive clothes to after his alleged death. Knowing her as well as he does, aware of her great powers of denial, he suspects that either she didn’t clean out his closets at all and had someone else do it, or she was assisted, possibly by Lucy, who would have had an easier time disposing of his personal effects since she knew he wasn’t dead. Then again, it depends on how much of an actress Lucy felt she should or could be at the time. Pain crushes him as for an instant he feels Scarpetta’s pain, imagines the unimaginable, her grief and how poorly she probably handled it.

Stop! A waste of time and mental energy to speculate. Idle thoughts. Focus.

As he walks briskly across the tarmac, he notices a Bell 407 helicopter, dark blue or black with pop-out floats, a wire strike, and bold, bright stripes. He notes the tail number: 407TLP.

The Last Precinct.

A flight from New York to Baton Rouge is about a thousand miles. Depending on the winds and fuel stops, she could have made it here in ten hours if she was unlucky with a headwind, and much less time than that with a tailwind. In either scenario, if she left early this morning, she should have gotten here by late afternoon. He contemplates what she’s been doing since and wonders whether Marino is with her.

Benton’s car is a dark red Jaguar, rented in New Orleans and delivered here to the parking lot, one of the privileges for those who fly private. At the front desk of the FBO, or fixed base operation, as small private airports with only a unicom are called, he speaks to a young lady. Behind her is a monitor showing the status of other incoming flights. There are few, his listed with the update that it has just landed. Lucy’s helicopter isn’t on the screen, indicating she arrived some time ago.

“I have a rental car that should be here.” Benton knows it will be.

The senator will have made sure that all details have been handled.

The clerk looks through rental car folders. Benton catches the news and turns around to observe pilots watching CNN in a small corner lounge. On the screen is an old photograph of Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. Benton isn’t surprised. Chandonne escaped early this afternoon after disguising himself as one of the two corrections officers he killed.

“God, talk about an ugly bastard,” one of the pilots comments.

“You gotta be kidding me! No human being looks like that.”

The photograph is a mug shot taken in Richmond, Virginia, where Chandonne was arrested three years ago. He was not clean-shaven at the time, and his face, even his forehead, was horrifically covered with baby-fine hair. Showing the old photograph is a shame. Chandonne could not have escaped from prison unless he is clean-shaven. When he is hairy, he is a conspicuous freak. For the public to see this old mug shot isn’t helpful, especially if he wears caps or sunglasses, or employs other means of disguising his grotesquely deformed face.

The clerk is frozen behind the desk, staring with her mouth open at the TV across the room.

“If I saw him, I’d die of a heart attack!” she exclaims. “Is he for real, or is that weirdo hair fake and everything?”

Benton glances at his watch, the successful businessman in a hurry. His protective law-enforcement instincts, however, are impossible to suppress.

“He’s real, I’m afraid,” he tells the clerk. “I remember hearing about his murders a few years back. I guess we’d better be on the lookout with him on the loose.”

“You can say that again!” She hands him the rental envelope. “I guess I need to run your charge card.”

He pulls a platinum American Express card out of his wallet, which also holds two thousand dollars, mostly in hundred-dollar bills. More cash is tucked into various pockets. Not knowing how long he’ll be here, he has come prepared. He initials the rental car form and signs it.

“Thank you, Mr. Andrews. Drive carefully,” the clerk says with a bright smile that goes with the job. “And I hope you enjoy your stay in Baton Rouge.”

SCARPETTA’S TENSION MOUNTS AS SHE and Albert watch baggage go by on the carousel inside Baton Rouge’s main terminal.

The time is almost seven p.m., and she is beginning to entertain real worries that no one has come to meet him. He collects one suitcase and clings to Scarpetta’s side as she reclaims her own bag.

“Looks like you found yourself a new friend.” Weldon Winn is suddenly behind her.

“Come on,” she says to Albert. They walk through automatic glass doors. “I’m sure your aunt will drive up any minute. She’s probably having to circle because cars aren’t allowed to park at the curb.”

Armed soldiers in camouflage patrol inside the baggage area and outside on the sidewalk. Albert seems oblivious to the unsmiling military presence, to their fingers resting on the trigger guards of assault rifles. His face is bright red.

“You and me are going to talk, Dr. Scarpetta,” U.S. Attorney Winn finally says her name and dares to wrap an arm around her shoulder.

“I think it would be a very good idea for you to keep your hands off me,” she quietly warns him.

He removes his arm. “And I think it might be a good idea for you to learn how things are done down here.” He watches cars pull up to the curb. “We’re going to meet, all right. Any information about ongoing investigations is important. And if someone’s an informant . . .”

“I am no informant,” she interrupts his outrageous intimation that if she doesn’t fully cooperate with him, he’ll subpoena her for deposition. “Who told you I was coming to Baton Rouge?”

Albert begins to cry.

“Let me let you in on a little secret, pretty lady. Nothing much happens around here that I don’t know about.”

“Mr. Winn,” she says, “if you have a legitimate need to talk to me at some point, I’ll be happy to do so. But in an appropriate venue—which a sidewalk outside an airport clearly isn’t.”

“And I’ll certainly look forward to that.” He holds up a hand and snaps his fingers, signaling his driver.

She slings her bag over her shoulder and takes Albert’s hand. “Don’t worry. It’s all right,” she tells him. “I’m sure your aunt’s on her way. But if she’s been delayed for some reason, I’m not going to leave you all by yourself, okay?”

“But I don’t know you. I’m not supposed to go anywhere with strangers,” he whines.

“We sat together on the plane, didn’t we?” she replies as Weldon Winn’s white stretch limousine pulls up to the curb. “So you know me a little bit, and I promise you’re safe, perfectly safe.”

Winn climbs into the backseat and shuts the door, disappearing behind dark tinted glass. Cars and taxis stop for pickups, trunks popping open. People hug loved ones. Albert’s wide, runny eyes dart around furtively, his fears quickly broaching hysteria. Scarpetta senses Winn looking out at her as the limousine drives off, and her thoughts are scattered like marbles dashed to the floor. It is hard for her to sort through what she should do next, but she starts with dialing directory assistance on her cell phone and finds out in short order that there is no listing for a Weldon Winn or anyone with the last name of Winn in New Orleans, where he claims to have a place in the French Quarter. His number in Baton Rouge is unlisted.

“Why am I not surprised,” she mutters, and all she can suppose is that someone told the U.S. Attorney she was arriving here in the early evening, and he flew to Houston and made sure he was on her connecting flight and seated next to her.

Added to that disturbing and enigmatic development is her responsibility for a child she doesn’t know, whose family seems to have abandoned him.

“You have your aunt’s phone number, don’t you?” she says to Albert. “Come on, let’s call her. And by the way,” it occurs to her, “you haven’t told me your last name.”

“Dard,” Albert says. “I have my own cell phone, but the battery’s dead.”

“I beg your pardon? What did you say your last name is?”

“Dard.” He hunches a shoulder to wipe his face.

ALBERT DARD STARES DOWN AT the dirty sidewalk, focusing on dried gum, gray and shaped like a small cookie.

“Why were you in Houston?” Scarpetta asks him.

“To change planes.” He begins to sob.

“But where were you first, where did you leave from?”

“Miami,” he replies, increasingly distraught. “I was with my uncle for spring break, and then my aunt said I had to come home right away.”

“When did she say that?” Having given up on his aunt, Scarpetta takes Albert’s hand, and they walk back inside the baggage area, headed for the Hertz rental car desk.

“This morning,” he replies. “I think I did something bad. Uncle Walt walked into my bedroom and woke me up. He said I was going home. I was supposed to be with him another three days.”

Scarpetta squats and looks him in the eyes, gently holding his shoulders. “Albert, where’s your mother?”

He bites his bottom lip. “With the angels,” he says. “My aunt says they’re around us all the time. I’ve never seen even one.”

“And your father?”

“Away. He’s very important.”

“Tell me your home phone number, and let’s find out what’s going on,” she says. “Or maybe you have your aunt’s cell number? And what is her name?”

Albert tells her his aunt’s name and his home number. Scarpetta calls. After several rings, a woman answers.

“Is Mrs. Guidon in, please?” Scarpetta asks as Albert holds her hand tightly.

“May I ask who’s calling?” The woman is polite, her accent French.

“I’m not someone she knows, but I’m with her nephew, Albert. At the airport. It appears there is no one to pick him up.” She hands the phone to Albert. “Here,” she says to him.

“Who is it?” he asks, oddly. After a pause, he says, “Because you’re not here, that’s why. I don’t know her name.” He scowls, his tone snippy.

Scarpetta does not volunteer her name to him. Albert lets go of her hand and balls up his fist. He begins smacking it against his thigh, punching himself.

The woman talks fast, her voice audible but unintelligible. She and Albert are speaking French, and Scarpetta stares at Albert with renewed bewilderment as he angrily ends the call and returns the cell phone to her.

“Where did you learn French?” she asks him.

“My mom,” he gloomily says. “Aunt Eveline makes me talk it a lot.” Tears fill his eyes again.

“I tell you what, let’s get my rental car, and I’ll take you home. You can show me where you live, can’t you?”

He wipes his eyes and nods his head.

BATON ROUGE IS A SKYLINE of black smokestacks of different heights, and a pearly smog hangs in a band across the dark horizon. In the distance, the night is illuminated by the blazing lights of petrochemical plants.

Albert Dard’s mood is improving as his new friend drives along River Road, not far from LSU’s football stadium. Along a graceful bend in the Mississippi, he points to iron gates and old brick pillars up ahead.

“There,” he says. “That’s it.”

Where he lives is an estate set back at least a quarter of a mile from the road, a massive slate roof and several chimneys rising above dense trees. Scarpetta stops the car, and Albert gets out to enter a code on a keypad, and the gates slowly open. They drive slowly to the classical-revival villa with its small, wavy glass windows and massive masonry front porch. Old live oak trees bend over the property as if to protect it. The only car visible is an old white Volvo parked in front on the cobblestone drive.

“Is your father home?” Scarpetta asks as her silver rental Lincoln bumps over pavers.

“No,” Albert glumly replies as they park.

They get out and climb steep brick steps. Albert unlocks the door and deactivates the burglar alarm, and they enter a restored antebellum home with hand-carved molding, dark mahogany, painted panels and antique Oriental rugs that are threadbare and dreary. Wan light filters through windows flanked by heavy damask draperies held back with tasseled cords, and a staircase winds up to a second floor, where someone’s quick footsteps sound against a wooden floor.

“That’s my aunt,” Albert says as a woman with bones like a bird’s and unsmiling dark eyes descends the stairs, her hand gliding along the smooth, gleaming wooden banister.

“I am Mrs. Guidon.” She walks with light, quick steps to the entrance hallway.

With her sensuous mouth and delicate nostrils, Mrs. Guidon would be pretty, were her face not hard and her dress so severe. A high collar is fastened with a gold brooch, and she wears a long black skirt and clumsy lace-up black shoes, and her black hair is tightly pinned back. She appears to be in her forties, but her age is hard to determine. Her skin is unlined and so pale it is almost translucent, as if she has never seen the sun.

“May I offer you a cup of tea?” Mrs. Guidon’s smile is as chilly as the stale, still air.

“Yes!” Albert grabs Scarpetta’s hand. “Please come have tea. And cookies, too. You’re my new friend!”

“There will be no tea for you,” Mrs. Guidon tells him. “Go up to your room right this minute. Take your suitcase with you. I will let you know when you can come down.”

“Don’t leave,” Albert begs Scarpetta. “I hate you,” he says to Mrs. Guidon.

She ignores him, obviously having heard this before. “Such a funny little boy who is very tired and cranky because it is very late. Now say good-bye. I’m afraid you won’t see this nice lady again.”

Scarpetta is kind to him as she says good-bye.

He trudges angrily up the stairs, looking back at her several times, his face painfully touching her heart. When she hears his footsteps on the wooden floor upstairs, she looks hard at her unpleasant and peculiar hostess.

“How cold you are to a little boy, Mrs. Guidon,” she says. “What kind of people are you and his father, that you would hope a stranger would bring him home?”

“I am disappointed.” Her imperious demeanor doesn’t waver. “I thought a scientist of your renown would investigate before making assumptions.”

LUCY AND MARINO connect by cell phone.

“Where’s she staying?” she asks from her parked black Lincoln Navigator SUV.

She and Rudy figured out that the best way to be inconspicuous was to pull into the Radisson parking lot and sit with the engine and lights off.

“The coroner. I’m glad she ain’t by herself in no hotel.”

“None of us need to be in a hotel,” Lucy says. “Damn, could you drive a louder truck?”

“If I had one.”

“How does he check out? What’s his name?”

“Sam Lanier. His background’s clean as a whistle. When he called to check out the Doc, I got the impression he’s an okay guy.”

“Well, if he isn’t, she’ll be all right. Because he’s about to have three other houseguests,” Lucy says.

A
FRAGILE WEDGEWOOD TEACUP lightly clinks against a saucer.

Mrs. Guidon and Scarpetta sit at a kitchen table made of a centuries-old butcher block that Scarpetta finds repulsive. She can’t help but imagine how many chickens and other animals were slaughtered and chopped up on the worn, sloping wood with its hack marks, cracks and discoloration. It is an unpleasant by-product of her profession that she knows too much, and it is almost impossible to kill bacteria on porous materials such as wood.

“How many times must I demand to know why I’m here and how you managed to get me here?” Scarpetta’s eyes are intense.

“I find it charming that Albert seems to have decided you are his friend,” Mrs. Guidon remarks. “I try very hard to encourage him. He wants nothing to do with school sports or any other activities that might expose him to children his own age. He thinks he belongs right here at this table”—she taps the butcher block with her small, milky white knuckles—“talking to you and me as if he is our peer.”

After years of dealing with people who refuse to answer questions or can’t or are in denial, Scarpetta is skilled at catching truths as they subtly show themselves. “Why doesn’t he associate with children his own age?” she inquires.

“Who knows? It is a mystery. He has always been odd, really, preferring to stay home and do homework, entertaining himself with those peculiar games children play these days. Cards with those awful creatures on them. Cards and computers, cards and more cards.” Her gestures are dramatic, her French accent heavy, her English stilted and faltering. “He has been more this way as he gets older. Isolated and playing the card games. Often, he is home, stays in his room with the door shut and will not come out.” Suddenly, she softens and seems caring.

Every detail Scarpetta observes is conflicting and disturbing, the kitchen an argument of anachronisms that seem a metaphor for this house and the people who live in it. Behind her is a cavernous fireplace, with formidable hand-forged andirons capable of bearing a load of wood large enough to heat up a room three times this size. A door leads outside, and next to it is a complicated alarm system keypad and an Aiphone with a video screen for the cameras that no doubt guard every entrance. Another keypad, this one much larger, indicates the old mansion is a smart house with multiple modems that allow the occupants to remotely control heating, cooling, lights, entertainment centers and gas fireplaces, and even turn appliances off and on. Yet the appliances and thermostats Scarpetta has seen so far have not been upgraded for what she estimates is at least thirty years.

A knife holder on the granite countertop is empty, and there are no knives in the porcelain sink, not a knife anywhere in sight. Yet hanging over the fireplace is a rack of nineteenth-century swords, and on the heavy chestnut mantel is a revolver with rubber grips, most likely a .38, in a black leather holster.

Mrs. Guidon follows Scarpetta’s eyes, and for an instant, her face registers anger. She has made an oversight, a telling mistake. Leaving the revolver in plain view was not intentional. “I’m sure it hasn’t escaped your notice that Mr. Dard is very security-conscious.” She sighs, shrugging, as if taking her guest into her confidence and hinting that Mr. Dard is ridiculously cautious and paranoid. “Baton Rouge is high-crime. I’m sure you know that. Living in a house like this and having wealth causes concerns, although I’m not the type to be looking over my shoulder all the time.”

Scarpetta hides how much she dislikes Mrs. Guidon and is infuriated about what Albert’s life must be like. She wonders how far she can go to pry loose the secrets that haunt this very old estate.

“Albert seems very unhappy and misses his dog,” she says. “Perhaps you should get him another one. Especially if he’s lonely and has no friends.”

“With him, I believe it is genetics. His mother—my sister—wasn’t well.” Mrs. Guidon pauses, then adds, “Of course, you know that.”

“Why don’t you tell me what I’m supposed to know. You seem to know so much about me.”

“Now, you are perceptive,” Mrs. Guidon replies with a touch of condescension. “But not as cautious as I would have guessed. Albert called me on your cell phone, remember? That was careless for someone of your reputation.”

“What do you know of my reputation?”

“Caller ID came back to your name, and I am aware you haven’t suddenly arrived in Baton Rouge for a little vacation. Charlotte’s case is complicated. No one seems to have any idea what happened to her or why she went to a horrible motel frequented by truck drivers and the dregs of society. So Dr. Lanier has solicited your assistance, no? But I, at least, am relieved and grateful, and let’s just say it was planned that you would sit next to Albert and drive him home, and here you are.” She lifts her teacup. “All things happen for a reason, as you must know.”

“How could you possibly have orchestrated all this?” Scarpetta pushes her, warns her, making it clear that she has had enough. “I don’t suppose U.S. Attorney Weldon Winn is involved with your scheming, since he just happened to sit next to me, too.”

“There is much you don’t know. Mr. Winn is a close family friend.”

“What family? Albert’s father didn’t show up at the airport. Albert doesn’t seem to even know where he is. What did any of you suppose would happen to a young boy traveling alone?”

“He wasn’t alone. He was with you. And now you are here. I wanted to meet you. Perfect.”

“Family friend?” Scarpetta repeats. “Then why did Albert not know Weldon Winn, if he is such a good family friend?”

“Albert has never met him.”

“That makes no sense.”

“That’s not for you to say.”

“I’ll say whatever I want, since you seemed to have assigned Albert to me and were certain he would be safe with me—a perfect stranger—and that I would bring him home. How could you be sure I would take it upon myself to look after him or that I’m trustworthy?” Scarpetta pushes back her chair and gets up, and it scrapes loudly against heart-of-pine flooring. “He lost his mother, who the hell knows about the father, and he’s lost his dog, and next he’s abandoned and frightened. In my business, this is called child neglect, child abuse.” Her anger flashes.

“I am Charlotte’s sister.” Mrs. Guidon gets up, too.

“All you’ve done is manipulate me. Or try to. I’m leaving now.”

“Please let me show you around first,” Mrs. Guidon says. “Particularly
le cave.”

“How could you possibly have a wine cellar in an area where the water table is so high that plantation houses have to be built on pillars?” Scarpetta asks.

“So you are not always observant. This house is on an elevation, built in 1793. The original owner found the perfect location for what he had in mind. He was a Frenchman, a wine connoisseur who often traveled back to France. Slaves constructed a wine cellar, like the ones he knew in France, and I doubt there is another one like it in this country.” She walks to the door leading outside and opens it. “You simply must see it. Baton Rouge’s best-kept secret.”

Scarpetta stands where she is. “No.”

Mrs. Guidon lowers her voice and is almost gentle when she explains, “You are wrong about Albert. I was circling the airport. I saw the two of you on the sidewalk. Had you left him, I would have picked him up, but based on what I know about you, you would not leave him. You are too caring, too decent. And you are wary about the evils in this world.” She states this not with feeling but as fact.

“How could you have been circling the airport? I called you at home . . .”

“Programmed to roll over to my cell phone. I actually was looking at you when you called me.” This amuses her. “I got to the house no more than fifteen minutes before you did, Dr. Scarpetta. I don’t blame you for being angry and confused, but I wanted to talk to you when Jason wasn’t here. Albert’s father. Believe me, you are very fortunate that he isn’t here.” She hesitates, holding the kitchen door open wide. “When he’s around, there is no such thing as privacy. Please come.” She motions to her.

Scarpetta looks at the keypads by the kitchen door. Outside, shadows fall in a black curtain from trees lush with new leaves. The woods are damp and earthy beneath a waning moon.

“I will let you out this way, then. The driveway is just to the side. But you must promise to come back and see the cave,” she says.

“I’ll go out the front.” Scarpetta starts walking that way.

BENTON DROVE AROUND for a while, then checked into the Radisson under the assumed name of Tony Wilson.

Inside his suite, he sits on the bed, his door secured with the dead-bolt lock and burglar chain. He requested a block on his telephone, not that he is expecting calls. The clerks at reception seemed to understand. He is a wealthy man from Los Angeles and wants privacy. The hotel is the finest one in Baton Rouge, its staff accustomed to accommodating a lot of people from all over who don’t use the valets, preferring to come and go discreetly. They don’t want to be bothered and rarely stay long.

Benton connects his laptop to the modem line in his room. He enters his code to release the lock of the new black briefcase he deliberately scuffed by scraping it against furniture and sliding it across the floor. He takes off his ankle holster and places his .357 magnum Smith & Wesson 340PD on the bed. It is double-action, loaded with five rounds of Speer Gold Dot 125-grain.

From the briefcase he removes two pistols: a pocket-friendly .40-cal- iber Glock 27, capacity ten rounds, including one in the chamber. The ammunition is Hydra-Shok: 135-grain, center-post hollow-point with a notched jacket, velocity 1,190 feet per second, high-energy and with efficient stopping power, punches into the enemy and splays like a razor-sharp flower.

His second and most important pistol is the P 226 SL Sig Sauer nine-millimeter, capacity sixteen rounds, including one in the chamber. The ammunition is also Hydra-Shok: 124-grain, center-post hollow-point with notched jacket, velocity 1,120 feet per second, deep penetration and stopping power.

It is conceivable he can carry the three guns at once. He’s done it before, the .357 Smith & Wesson in his ankle holster, the .40-caliber Glock in a shoulder holster, and the nine-millimeter Sig Sauer in the waistband at the small of his back.

Extra magazines for the pistols and extra cartridges for the .357 magnum go in a designer leather butt pack. Benton dresses in a loose-fitting London Fog jacket and baggy jeans that are slightly too long, a cap, tinted glasses and the rubber-soled Prada shoes. He could be a tourist. He could work in Baton Rouge and barely merit notice in this city of transients, where hundreds of professors, some of them eccentric, and thousands of oblivious students and preoccupied visiting scholars of all ages and nationalities abound. He could be straight. He could be gay. He could be both.

THE NEXT MORNING, muddy, sluggish water carries Scarpetta’s eye to a riverboat casino, to the USS Kidd battleship and on to the distant Old Mississippi Bridge, then back to Dr. Sam Lanier.

In the few minutes she spent with him last night when she finally arrived at his door and he quickly escorted her to his guest house in back without walking her through the main house because he didn’t want to awaken his wife, she decided she liked him. She worries that she shouldn’t.

“In Charlotte Dard’s case,” she says, “how involved did you and your office get with the family in terms of trying to counsel or question them?”

“Not as much as I would have liked. I tried.” The light in his eyes dims, and his mouth tightens. “I did talk to the sister, Mrs. Guidon. Briefly. She’s an odd one. Anyway, orientation time. Let me show you where you are.”

His abrupt change of subject strikes her as paranoid, as if he worries that someone might be listening. Swiveling around in his chair, he points west out the window.

“People are always jumping from the Old Mississippi Bridge. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve fished bodies out of the river because some poor soul takes a leap—takes his time, too, while the police try to talk him down and people in their cars start yelling ‘Go ahead and jump!’ because he’s slowing up traffic. Can you believe that?

“Now, down there straight ahead, I had a guy dressed in a shower curtain with an AK-47, tried to get on the USS Kidd to kill all the Russians. He got intercepted,” he drolly adds. “Death and mental health are part of the same department, and we do all the pickups—commit about three thousand cases a year.”

“And that works how, exactly?” Scarpetta inquires. “A family member requests an order of protective custody?”

“Almost always. But the police can request it. And if the coroner—in this case, me—believes the person is gravely disabled and acutely dangerous to himself or others and is unwilling or unable to seek medical attention, deputies are sent in.”

“The coroner is elected. It helps if he’s on good terms with the mayor, the police, the sheriff, LSU, Southern University, the district attorney, judges, the U.S. Attorney, not to mention influential members of the community.” She pauses. “People in power can certainly influence the public on how to cast its votes. So the police recommend someone should be removed to a psychiatric hospital, and the local coroner agrees. In my world, that’s called a conflict of interest.”

“It’s worse than that. The coroner also determines competency to stand trial.”

“So you oversee the autopsy of a murder victim, determine cause and manner of death, then, if the alleged killer is caught, you decide if he’s competent to stand trial.”

“Do the DNA swab in the exam room. Then sits right here in my office, a cop on either side, attorney present. And I interview him. Or her.”

“Dr. Lanier, you have the most bizarre coroner system I’ve ever heard of, and it doesn’t sound to me as if you have any protection, should the powers that be decide they can’t control you.”

“Welcome to Louisiana. And if the powers that be try to tell me how to do my job, I tell them to kiss my ass.”

“And your crime rate? I know it’s bad.”

“Worse than bad. Terrible,” he replies. “By far, Baton Rouge has the highest rate of unsolved homicides in the entire country.”

“Why?”

“Clearly, Baton Rouge is a very violent city. I’m not sure why.”

“And the police?”

“Listen, I have a lot of respect for street cops. Most of them try very hard. But then you’ve got the people in charge who squash the good guys and encourage the assholes. Politics.” His chair creaks as he leans back in it. “We’ve got a serial murderer running around down here. Have probably had more than one running around down here over the decades.” He shrugs in a manner that is anything but easygoing or accepting. “Politics. How many times do I need to say the word?”

“Organized crime?”

“Fifth largest port in the country, the second largest petrochemical industry, and Louisiana produces some sixteen percent of the nation’s oil. Come on.” He gets up from his desk. “Lunch. Everybody’s got to eat, and I have a feeling you haven’t done much of that lately. You look pretty damn beat-up, and your suit’s hanging a little loose around the waist.”

Scarpetta can’t begin to tell him how much she has grown to hate her black suit.

Three clerks glance up as Scarpetta and Dr. Lanier walk out of his office.

“You coming back?” an overweight woman with gray hair asks her boss, a cool steel edge to her voice.

Scarpetta is fairly sure this is the clerk Dr. Lanier has complained about.

“Who knows?” he responds in what Scarpetta would call the flat affect of an expert witness testifying in court.

She can tell he doesn’t like her. Old, ugly specters hover between them. He seems relieved when the outer office door opens and a tall, good-looking man in navy range pants and a dark blue coroner’s jacket walks in. His presence is a high energy that is several steps ahead of him, and the overweight clerk’s eyes fasten on his face like dark, angry wasps.

Eric Murphy, the chief death investigator, welcomes Scarpetta to Luysiana. “Where are we going to lunch?” he asks.

“No matter what, you have to eat,” Dr. Lanier says at the elevator. “I insist, and this is the place to do it. Like I said, I can’t get rid of her.”

He absently stabs the button for the parking garage.

“Hell, she’s been working in this office longer than I have. Sort of an inherited sinkhole that gets passed on from one coroner to the next.”

The elevator doors open inside a large parking garage. Car doors shut in muffled counterpoint as people head out to lunch, and Dr. Lanier points his key at what he calls his unit, a black Chevrolet Caprice with a blue light in the dash, a two-way radio, a police scanner and a special turbo-charged V-8 engine that is “required for all high-speed chases,” he boasts, as Scarpetta helps herself to a backseat door and slides into the seat.

“You can’t be sitting in back. It doesn’t look right,” Eric complains, holding open the front passenger door. “You’re our guest, ma’am.”

“Oh, please don’t call me ma’am. I’m Kay. And my legs are shorter, which means I sit in the back.”

“Call me anything you like,” Eric cheerfully replies. “Everybody else does.”

“From now on, I’m Sam. No more of this doctor shit.”

“Don’t be calling me doctor, either,” Eric says. “For the good reason that I’m not one.”

He gets inside the car, giving up on telling Scarpetta where to sit.

“Hell, the only time you were a doctor was when you were, what?” Dr. Lanier starts the engine. “Ten, maybe twelve years old, and molesting all the little girls in your neighborhood? Jesus God, I hate parking between concrete damn pillars.”

“They have a way of moving in on you, don’t they, Sam?” Eric turns around and winks at Scarpetta. “They grab at his ve-hicle on a regular basis. Look over there.” He points at a concrete support gouged and streaked with black paint. “If you were working that crime scene, what would you conclude?” He peels cellophane off a pack of Dentyne chewing gum. “Let me give you a clue. That used to be the coroner’s parking place, but not so long ago, the coroner—guess which one, and there’s only one—complained it was way too narrow, and he’d be goddamned if he was parking there.”

“Now, don’t tell all my secrets.” Dr. Lanier slowly creeps out of his spot. “Besides, it was my wife who did that bit of damage. She’s a worse driver than I am, for the record.”

“She’s a death investigator, too.” Eric turns around again. “Works for nothing, which is pretty much what the rest of us do.”

“Shit.” Dr. Lanier accelerates his high-speed-chase unit more than necessary inside a parking deck. “You get paid a hell of a lot more than you deserve.”

“Can we talk now?” Scarpetta asks.

“I’m pretty sure we can. Maybe people get into my office, hell if I know. But nobody touches my car, or my Harley,” Dr. Lanier replies.

In a firm, even voice, Scarpetta confronts him. “I happened to fly here with the Dards’ young son sitting on one side of me and your U.S. Attorney, Weldon Winn, on the other. In fact, I ended up having to drive Albert Dard home. You want to tell me what that’s about?”

“Scares the hell out of me.”

“The boy just happens to be in Miami, is suddenly whisked to the airport yesterday morning and routed through Houston and just happens to be on my flight to Baton Rouge. Just as Winn happens to be on my flight. And by the way, you don’t strike me as the sort who gets scared.”

“Two things. One, you don’t know me. Two, you don’t know here.”

“Where was Albert eight years ago when his mother died in that motel room?” Scarpetta asks. “Where was his father, and why is this mysterious father, quote, gone all the time, as the boy put it?”

“That I don’t know. What I can tell you is I’m familiar with Albert. Last year, I had to examine the kid in the ER, was given a heads-up, in other words, especially in light of his wealthy family and the mysterious death of his mother. He was committed to a private psychiatric hospital in New Orleans.”

“What on Earth for?” Scarpetta asks, adding, “A psychiatric history, and his family lets him travel alone?”

“But then he wasn’t alone, according to what you’ve told me. His uncle put him in the hands of airline attendants, who also, no doubt, saw to it that he got to his proper gate in Houston. Then, best of all, you took care of him the rest of the time. He’s not psychotic.

“The story is, three years ago last October, his aunt called nine-one-one and said her nephew—he was seven at the time, I believe—was bleeding badly and claimed to have been assaulted when he was out riding his bicycle. Story is, he was hysterical, scared out of his mind. Well, nobody assaulted that poor little kid, Kay. You said I could call you that. There was no evidence whatsoever of that. In fact, he’s a cutter. Into self-mutilation. Apparently, that started up again with him not long before I examined him in the ER. Which was a pretty damn awful experience.”

Scarpetta recalls the absence of knives in the Dard kitchen.

“You’re absolutely certain his injuries were self-inflicted?” she asks.

“I try not to be absolutely certain of anything. I don’t know of much that’s an absolute certainty except death,” Dr. Lanier replies. “But I found a lot of hesitation cuts. Just scratches, really. That’s significant for someone getting started in this unfortunate pattern of self-destruction. His cuts were minor, all in places within reach but not readily visible to others. Stomach. Thighs. Buttocks.”

“That would explain why I saw no scars when I was sitting next to him on the plane,” Scarpetta remarks. “I would have noticed.”

“What really disturbs me is the obvious,” he says. “Somebody wants you here in Baton Rouge. Why?”

“You tell me. You tell me who leaked my travel plans, because it seems the most likely suspect is you—or whoever else in your office knew I was coming.”

“I can see why you’d think that. No question about it. I knew enough to arrange the whole damn scenario, assuming I’m on friendly terms with Weldon Winn. And I’m not, can’t stand the son of a bitch. He’s dirtier than a landfill and got a lot of money. His explanation is he grew up with money. Well, guess what, he’s from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. His father managed a golf course, and his mother worked like a dog as a nurse’s aid. The son of a bitch isn’t from shit.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Ask Eric.”

The death investigator turns around and smiles. “I started out with the FBI. Now and then, I can find my way out of a paper bag and look for things.”

“Point is, Weldon Winn is involved, deeply involved, with illegal activities,” Dr. Lanier continues. “Now, how anyone will ever prove that, or even care, is another matter. What is a fact is that a number of people arrested here over the years have somehow managed to escape Project Exile, didn’t get the automatic five years in federal prison added to their sentences for possession of a firearm while committing a crime. Our U.S. Attorney somehow overlooked those cases, as did the committee that’s supposed to track them.

“One of the reasons I’m given so much grief in my lovely city is because I won’t kowtow to the politicians. I’m up for reelection next year, and I’ve got a whole Noah’s ark full of assholes who would love for me not to be coroner anymore. I’m not appreciated by any of the bad guys, don’t socialize with them. I consider that a compliment.”

Scarpetta says, “You and I talked on the phone. Your office arranged my rental car.”

“A mistake. Damn stupid as hell of me. I should have done it myself, away from the office. My secretary is trustworthy. That certain clerk you just met may have overheard, snooped, I don’t know.”

They drive through a rather unremarkable area of Baton Rouge, at the edge of the university that dominates the town. Swamp Mama’s on 3rd Street is a popular hangout for students. Dr. Lanier parks in a tow-away zone and tosses an Officer of the Coroner’s red metal plate on the dash, as if lunch has suddenly turned into a crime scene.

MARINO TURNS INTO THE LOUISIANA AIR parking lot and stops cop-style, driver’s window to driver’s window, with Lucy’s SUV.

“Good man. You got rid of the truck,” Lucy commends him without saying hello. “Don’t need a monster-garage truck with Virginia plates around here.”

“Hey. I’m not stupid. Even if this is a piece of shit.”

His rental truck is a six-cylinder Toyota. It doesn’t even have mud flaps.

“Where’d you ditch it?” Lucy asks.

“The regular airport, long-term parking. Hope nobody breaks in to it. Everything I own’s in there. Even if it ain’t much.”

“Let’s go.”

They park, but not near each other.

“Where’s your boyfriend?” Marino asks as they walk toward the FBO.

“Prowling. Seeing if he can find Rocco’s place in Spanish Town, the historic district where Rocco kept a place.”

She stops briefly at the desk. “The Bell four-oh-seven,” she says, not giving the tail number.

It isn’t necessary. Her helicopter is the only one on the tarmac at the moment. The woman at the desk pushes a button that unlocks the door. A Gulf Stream is starting its engines, the roar painfully loud, and Lucy and Marino cover their ears, making sure they don’t walk around the back of the plane and get blasted with exhaust, a good way to smell like jet fuel, which is sure to give one a headache when confined to a small cockpit. They hurry to the helipad, which is at the outer edge of the tarmac, far away from planes, because people ignorant of helicopters assume their rotor wash will kick up rocks and sand and scour the paint right off fixed-wing aircraft.

Marino is ignorant of helicopters and doesn’t like them. He can barely force his massive body into the left seat, which doesn’t adjust. He can’t slide it back.

“Goddamn son of a bitch,” is all he says, loosening his harness as far as it will go.

Lucy has already done her usual thorough preflight, checks breakers and switches and throttle one last time and turns on the battery. She waits for automatic checks to go through their routines and she goes through hers, flipping on the generator. Headset on, she eases the throttle up to 100 RPMs. This is a time when the GPS will be of no value, nor will any other navigational instruments. A flight chart isn’t going to be of much use, either, so she spreads open a Baton Rouge map on her lap and runs her finger southeast, along Route 408, also known as Hooper Road.

“Where we’re going is off the map,” she says into her mike. “Lake Maurepas. We keep going in this direction, towards New Orleans, and hopefully don’t end up at Lake Pontchartrain. We’re not going that far, but if we do, we’ve overflown Lake Maurepas, and Blind River and Dutch Bayou. I don’t think that will happen.”

“Fly fast,” Marino says. “I hate helicopters, including yours.”

“On the go,” she announces and stabilizes into a hover, taking off into the wind.

SWAMP MAMA’S IS A BAR that smells like beer, with old vinyl booths and a stained, unvarnished wooden floor.

While an LSU student waiter takes drink orders, Eric and Dr. Lanier disappear into the men’s room.

“I tell you,” Eric says as they push through the restroom’s door. “I’d take her home with me any time. What about tonight?”

“She’s not interested in you,” Dr. Lanier says in a cadence that rises in pitch at the end of each sentence, causing his comments to sound like questions when they aren’t. “Come on now.”

“She’s not married.”

“Don’t be messing with my consultants, especially this one. She’ll eat you alive.”

“Oh, please, God. Let her.”

“Every time you get dumped by your latest girlfriend, you turn into a mental case.”

They are conducting this conversation at the urinals, one of the few places on the planet where they don’t mind having their backs to the door.

“I’m trying to figure out how to describe her,” Eric says. “Not pretty like your wife. Stronger-featured than that, and to me there’s nothing sexier than a really great body in a suit or maybe a uniform.”

“You’re goofy as a shit-eating fly. Don’t go buzzing around her geography, Eric.”

“I like those little glasses she wears, too. I wonder if she’s dating anybody. That suit doesn’t hide what’s important, you notice?”

“No, I didn’t notice.” Dr. Lanier vigorously scrubs his hands in the sink, as if he’s about to perform a heart transplant. “I’m blind. Don’t forget to wash up.”

Eric laughs as he moves to the sink, blasts on the hot water and pumps globs of pink soap into his palms. “No kidding, what if I ask her out, Boss? What harm could there be in that?”

“Maybe you should try her niece. She’s closer to your age. Very attractive and smart as hell. She might be too much of a handful for you. She’s also with a guy. But they didn’t sleep in the same room.”

“When do I meet her? Maybe tonight? You cook? Maybe we can go to Boutin’s?”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“I ate oysters last night.”

Dr. Lanier snatches paper towels out of a metal dispenser on the wall. He places a short stack of them on the edge of Eric’s sink. Walking out of the men’s room, he watches Scarpetta, noticing that every detail of her is unusual, even the way she reaches for her coffee, slowly, with deliberation, exuding confidence and power that has absolutely nothing to do with drinking coffee. She is scanning notes in a diary that has a black leather slipcover so she can refill it as often as needed. He suspects she is constantly refilling that diary. She’s the sort who would record any detail or conversation that in her mind might prove important. Her meticulousness goes beyond her training. He slides in next to her.

“I recommend the gumbo,” he says as his cell phone plays a thin, mechanical version of Beethoven’s Fifth.

“Wish you’d set your ringer on something else,” Eric comments.

“Lanier,” he answers. He listens for a minute, frowning, his eyes fixing on Eric. “I’m leaving right now.”

He gets up from the booth and tosses his napkin on the table.

“Come on,” he says. “We got a bad one.”

THE TERRAIN BETWEEN the Baton Rouge airport and Lake Maurepas is a series of swamps, waterways and creeks that make Lucy nervous.

Even with pop-out floats, she would worry about a forced landing. How anyone would get to them is a valid question, and she doesn’t want to imagine the reptiles that lurk in those dark waters, on mucky shores and in the shadows of moss-draped trees. In the baggage compartment, she always carries an emergency kit that includes handheld radios, water, protein bars and insect repellent.

Camouflaged in thick trees are duck blinds and an occasional fishing shack. She flies lower and slower but sees no signs of human occupation. In some areas, only a very small boat, perhaps an airboat, could work its way through narrow waterways that from the air look like veins reticulating through saw grass.

“See any gators down there?” she asks Marino.

“I ain’t looking for gators. And there ain’t nothing down there.”

As creeks move into rivers and Lucy spots a faint blue line on the horizon, they begin to reach civilization. The day is balmy and partly cloudy, good weather for being on the water. A lot of boats are out, and fishermen and people on pleasure crafts stare up at the helicopter. Lucy is careful not to fly too low, avoiding any appearance of surveillance. She’s just a pilot heading somewhere. Banking east, she starts looking for Blind River. She tells Marino to do the same.

“Why do you think they call it Blind River?” he says. “ ’Cause you can’t see it, that’s why.”

The farther east they go, the more fishing camps they see, most of them well cared for, with boats docked in front. Lucy spots a canal, turns around and follows its convolutions south as it gets wider and turns into a river that empties into the lake. Numerous foreboding canals branch out from the river, and she circles, getting lower, finding not a single fishing shack.

“If Talley baited that hook with the arm,” Lucy says, “then I have a feeling he’s hiding out not too far from here.”

“Well, if you’re right and keep circling, he damn well is going to see us,” Marino replies.

They head back, keeping up their scan, mostly concentrating on antennas and careful not to overfly petrochemical plants and find themselves intercepted. Lucy has spotted several bright orange Dauphine helicopters, the sort usually flown by the Coast Guard, which is now part of homeland security and constantly on alert for terrorists. Flying over a petrochemical plant is not a wise move these days. Flying into a thousand-foot antenna is worse. Lucy has pushed back the airspeed to ninety knots, in no hurry to return to the airport as she debates if now is the time to tell Marino the truth.

She won’t be able to look at him while airborne and keeping alert to avoid coming anywhere near obstacles. Her stomach tightens and her pulse speeds up.

“I don’t know how to say this,” she begins.

“You don’t have to say nothing,” he replies. “I already know.”

“How?” She is baffled and scared.

“I’m a detective, remember? Chandonne sent two sealed letters, one to you, one to me, both of them inside NAJ envelopes. You never let me read yours. Said it was a lot of deranged crap. I could’ve pushed, but something told me not to. Then next thing, you’ve disappeared, you and Rudy, and a couple days later I find out Rocco’s dead. All I ask is if Chandonne told you where to find him and gave you enough info to get Rocco pinned with a Red Notice.”

“Yes. I didn’t show you the letter. I was afraid you’d go to Poland yourself.”

“And do what?”

“What do you think? If you found him inside that hotel room and finally confronted him, saw him up close for what he was, what would you have done?”

“Probably the same thing you and Rudy did,” Marino says.

“I can tell you all the details.”

“I don’t want to know.”

“Maybe you really couldn’t have done it yourself, Marino. Thank God you didn’t. He was your son,” she tells him. “And in some very hidden part of your heart, you loved him.”

“What hurts worse than him being dead is I never did,” he says.

THE FIRST BLOOD IS THREE feet inside the front door, a single drop the size of a dime, perfectly round with a stellate margin reminiscent of a buzzsaw blade.

Ninety-degree angle, Scarpetta thinks. A drop of blood moving through the air assumes an almost perfect spherical shape that is maintained on impact if the blood falls straight down, at a ninety-degree angle.

“She was upright, or someone was,” Scarpetta says.

She stands very still, her eyes moving from one drop to the next on the terra-cotta tile floor. At the edge of the rug in front of the couch is a bloody area that appears to have been smeared by a foot, as if the person who stepped on the blood-spotted tile slipped. Scarpetta moves in for a closer inspection, staring at the dry, dark red stain, then turning her head and meeting Dr. Lanier’s eyes. He comes over, and she points out an almost indiscernible partial footwear impression of a heel with a small undulating tread pattern that reminds Scarpetta of a child’s drawing of ocean waves.

Eric begins taking photographs.

From the couch, the signs of the struggle continue around a glass and wrought-iron coffee table that is askew, the rug rumpled beneath it, and just beyond, a head was slammed against the wall.

“Hair swipes.” Scarpetta points out a bloody pattern feathering over the pale pink paint.

The front door opens and in walks a plainclothes cop, young, with dark, receding hair. He looks back and forth between Dr. Lanier and Eric, and fixes on Scarpetta.

“Who’s she?” he asks.

“Let’s start with who you are,” Dr. Lanier says to him.

The cop seems threatening because he is frantic, his eyes darting back in the direction of an area of the house they can’t see. “Detective Clark, with Zachary.” He swats at a fly, the black hair on top of his fingers showing through translucent latex gloves stretched over his big hands. “I just got transferred into investigations last month,” he adds. “So I don’t know her.” He nods again at Scarpetta, who hasn’t moved from her spot by the wall.

“A visiting consultant,” Dr. Lanier replies. “If you haven’t heard of her, you will. Now tell me what happened here. Where’s the body, and who’s with it?”

“In a front bedroom—a guest room, it looks like. Robillard’s in there, taking pictures and everything.”

Scarpetta glances up at the mention of Nic Robillard’s name.

“Good,” she says.

“You know her?” Now Detective Clark seems very confused. He irritably swats at another fly. “Damn, I hate those things.”

Scarpetta follows tiny spatters of blood on the wall and floor, some no bigger than a pinpoint, the tapered ends pointing in the direction of flight. The victim was down on the floor by the baseboard and managed to struggle back to her feet. Small, elongated drops on the wall are not the usual cast-off blood that Scarpetta is accustomed to seeing when a victim has been repeatedly beaten or stabbed and blood has flown off the weapon as it is swung through the air.

The point of origin is what appears to be a violent struggle in the living room, and Scarpetta envisions punching, grabbing, feet sliding and perhaps kicking and clawing, resulting in a bloody mess—but not thousands of drops of blood cast great distances from the swings of a weapon. Possibly, there was no weapon, Scarpetta ponders, at least not at this stage of the assault. Maybe early on, after the assailant came through the front door, the only weapon was a fist. Possibly, the assailant did not assume he would need a weapon, and then he lost control of the situation quickly.

Dr. Lanier glances toward the back of the house. “Eric, go on and make sure everything’s secure. We’ll be right in.”

“What do you know about the victim?” Scarpetta asks Detective Clark. “What do you know about any of this?”

“Not much.” He flips back several pages in a notepad. “Name’s Rebecca Milton, thirty-six-year-old white female. All we really know at this time is she rents this house, and her boyfriend stopped by around twelve-thirty to take her to lunch. She doesn’t answer the door, so he lets himself in and finds her.”

“Door unlocked?” Dr. Lanier asks.

“Yes. He finds her body and calls the police.”

“Then he identified her,” Scarpetta says, getting up from her squatting position, her knees aching.

Clark hesitates.

“How good a look did he get?” Scarpetta doesn’t trust visual identifications, and one should never assume that a victim found inside a residence is the person who lived there.

“Not sure,” Clark replies. “My guess is he didn’t stay in that bedroom long. You’ll see when you get there. She’s in bad shape, real bad shape. But Robillard seems to think the victim’s Rebecca Milton, the lady who lives here.”

Dr. Lanier frowns. “How the hell would Robillard know?”

“She lives two houses down.”

“Who does?” Scarpetta asks, panning the living room like a camera.

“Robillard lives right over there.” Detective Clark points toward the street. “Two houses down.”

“Jesus God,” Dr. Lanier says. “How weird is that? And she didn’t hear anything, see anything?”

“It’s the middle of the day. She was out on the street like the rest of us.”

The house is that of a neat person with a reasonably good income and expensive tastes, Scarpetta notes. Oriental rugs are machine-made but handsome, and to the left of the front door is a cherry entertainment center with an elaborate sound system and large-screen television. Bright Cajun paintings hanging on the walls are joyous in their loud, primary colors and primitive depictions of fish, people, water and trees. Rebecca Milton, if she is the victim, loved art and life. In whimsical frames are photographs of a tan woman with shiny black hair, a bright smile and a slim body. In several other photographs she is in a boat or standing on a pier with another woman, also with dark hair, who looks enough like her to be her sister.

“We’re sure she lived alone?” Scarpetta asks.

“It appears she was alone when she got attacked,” Clark says, scanning pages in his notepad.

“But we don’t know that for a fact.”

He shrugs. “No ma’am. We don’t know much of anything for a fact at the moment.”

“I’m just wondering, because many of these pictures are of two women—two women who seem to have a close relationship. And a number of the photographs were taken inside this house or in what appears to be on the front porch or perhaps in the backyard.” She points out the hair swipes near the baseboard and interprets them. “Right here, she went down, or someone did, and whoever it was, the person was bleeding sufficiently for her hair to be bloody . . .”

“Yeah, well, she’s got a big-time head injury. I mean, her face is smashed up bad,” Clark offers.

Straight ahead is the dining room, with a centered antique walnut table and six matching chairs. The hutch is old, and behind its glass doors are dishes with gold around the rims. Beyond, through an open doorway, is the kitchen, and it does not appear that the killer or the victim moved in this direction, but off to the right of the living room, the pursuit continuing through a blue-carpeted hallway and ending in a bedroom that faces the front yard.

Blood is everywhere. It has dried a dark red, but some areas of the carpet are so soaked that the blood is still damp. Scarpetta pauses at the end of the hallway and examines blood droplets on the paneled wall. One drop is round, very light red inside and very dark around the rim. Surrounding it is a spray of other droplets, some almost too small to see.

“Do we know if she was stabbed?” Scarpetta turns around and asks Clark, who is hanging back at the beginning of the hallway, busy with a video camera.

Dr. Lanier has already walked inside the bedroom. He appears in the doorway and looks grimly at her. “She’s been stabbed, all right,” he replies in a hard voice. “About thirty or forty times.”

“Along the wall here are sneeze or cough patterns of blood,” Dr. Scarpetta tells him. “You can tell because the dark-rimmed drops here, here, and here”—she points them out—“indicate bubbles. Sometimes you see that when a person’s bled into the airway or lungs. Or she may just have had blood in her mouth.”

Scarpetta walks to the left edge of the bedroom door, where there is only a small amount of blood. Her eyes follow finger smears of whoever grabbed the door frame, and more drips on the carpet that continue through the doorway onto the hardwood floor. Her view of the body is blocked by Dr. Lanier, Eric and Nic Robillard. Scarpetta walks in and shuts the door behind her without touching any bloody surface, including the knob.

Nic sits on the back of her heels, a thirty-five-millimeter camera gripped in her gloved hands, her forearms resting on her knees.

If she’s happy to see Scarpetta, she makes no sign of it. Sweat rolls down her neck, disappearing into the dark green Zachary Police Department polo shirt tucked in khaki cargo pants. Nic gets up and moves to one side so Scarpetta can approach the dead body.

“She’s got really weird stab wounds,” Nic comments. “The temperature of the room when I got here was seventy degrees.”

Dr. Lanier inserts a long chemical thermometer under the body’s arm. He leans close to the body, his eyes moving up and down it, taking his time. Scarpetta vaguely recognizes the woman as one she saw in some of the photographs scattered throughout the living room.

It isn’t easy to tell. Her hair is matted with dried blood, her face swollen and deformed by contusions, cuts and smashed bones, the degree of tissue reaction to injuries consistent with her having survived for a while. Scarpetta touches an arm. The body is warm as in life. Rigor mortis hasn’t begun, nor has livor mortis—or the settling of the blood due to gravity once circulation stops.

Dr. Lanier removes the thermometer, reads it and says, “Body temp’s ninety-six.”

“She’s not been dead long at all,” Scarpetta says. “Yet the condition of the blood in the living room, hallway and even some in here suggests the attack occurred hours ago.”

“Probably the head injury is what got her, but it took a little while,” Dr. Lanier says, gently palpating the back of the head. “Fractures. You get the back of your head smashed against a masonry plaster wall, and you’re talking serious injuries.”

Scarpetta isn’t ready to comment on the cause of death, but she does agree that the victim suffered severe blunt-force trauma to her head. If the stab wounds cut or completely severed a major artery, such as the carotid, death would have occurred in minutes. This is unlikely—impossible, really—since it appears the woman survived for a while. Scarpetta sees no arterial spatter pattern. The woman may still have been barely alive when her boyfriend found her at 12:30 p.m. and was dead by the time the rescue squad arrived.

It is several minutes past 1:30 now.

The victim is dressed in pale blue satin pajamas, the bottoms intact, the top ripped open. Her belly, breasts, chest and neck are clustered with stab wounds that measure sixteen millimeters—or approximately three-quarters of an inch—with both ends blunt, one end slightly narrower than the other. Those injuries that are superficial indicate she wasn’t stabbed with an ordinary knife. Almost in the center of those shallow wounds is an area of tissue bridging that indicates the weapon had some type of gap at the tip, or perhaps was a tool that had two stabbing surfaces, each of them a slightly different thickness and length.

“Now that’s strange as hell,” Dr. Lanier says, his head bent close to the body as he moves a magnifying lens over wounds. “Not any normal knife I’ve ever seen. How about you?” He looks at Scarpetta.

“No.”

The wounds were made at various angles, some of them V- or Y-shaped due to twisting of the blade, which is common in stab injuries. Some wounds gape, others are button-hole-like slits, depending on whether the incisions are in line with the elastic fibers of the skin or cut across them.

Scarpetta’s gloved fingers gently separate the margins of a wound. Again, she puzzles over the area of uncut skin stretching almost across the middle. She looks closely through a lens, trying to imagine what sort of weapon was used. Gently gathering the pajama top together, she lines up holes in the satin with wounds, trying to get some idea where the clothing was when the woman was stabbed. Three buttons are missing from the torn pajama top. Scarpetta spots them on the floor. Two buttons dangle by threads.

When she arranges the pajama top neatly over the chest, the way it would be were the victim standing, of course the holes don’t line up with the stab wounds at all, and there are more holes in the satin than there are wounds. She counts thirty-eight holes and twenty-two wounds. Overkill, to say the least—overkill that is typical in lust murders, but also typical when the assailant and victim know each other.

“Anything?” Dr. Lanier asks her.

Scarpetta is still lining up holes and is getting somewhere. “It appears that her top was bunched up above her breasts when she was stabbed. See?” She moves up the top, which is so stained with blood, very little of the satin looks blue. “Some of the holes go through three layers of fabric. That’s why there are more holes than wounds.”

“So he shoved up her top before he stabbed her or while he was stabbing her? And then tore it open?”

“I’m not sure,” Dr. Scarpetta replies. It’s always so difficult to reconstruct, and a much more precise job will require uninterrupted hours under a good light in the morgue. “Let’s turn her just a bit and check her back.”

She and Dr. Lanier reach across the body and hold it by the left arm. They pull her over, but not all the way, and blood runs out of wounds. There are at least six stab wounds on her upper back and a long cut to the side of her neck.

“So she’s running and he’s stabbing. She’s in front of him, at least at some point.” It is Eric who deduces this as he and Nic return with several lamps and plug them in.

“Maybe,” is all Scarpetta has to say about it.

“One smear on a wall in the hallway looks like she may have been pushed up or knocked up against it. About midway in the hallway. Maybe he shoved her against it and stabbed her in the back, and then she got away and ran in here,” Nic proposes.

“Maybe,” Scarpetta says again, and she and Dr. Lanier gently lower the body to the floor. “This much I can tell you: Her pajama top was in disarray when some of these stab wounds to her chest and belly were inflicted.”

“The pushed-up top suggests a sexual motive,” Eric says.

“This is a sexual murder with tremendous rage,” Scarpetta replies. “Even if she wasn’t raped.”

“She might not have been.” Dr. Lanier bends close to the body, collecting trace evidence with forceps. “Fibers,” he comments. “Could be from the pajamas. Despite what people think, rape isn’t always involved. Some of these bastards can’t do it, can’t get it up. Or they’d rather masturbate.”

Scarpetta asks Nic, “She was your neighbor. You’re sure this is Rebecca and not the other woman in the photographs? The two women are very similar in appearance.”

“It’s Rebecca. The other woman is her sister.”

“Lives with her?” Dr. Lanier asks.

“No. Rebecca lived alone.”

“For now, that will be a pending identification until we can be sure with dental records or some other means,” Dr. Lanier remarks as Eric takes photographs, using a six-inch plastic ruler as a scale, arranging it next to whatever he shoots.

“I’ll get on it.” Nic stares without blinking at the dead woman’s battered, bloody face, the eyes dully staring out from swollen lids. “We weren’t friends at all, never socialized, but I saw her on the street, doing yardwork, walking her dog . . .”

“What dog?” Scarpetta looks sharply at her.

“She has a yellow lab, a puppy, maybe eight months old. I’m not sure, but he’s not fully grown and was a Christmas present. I think from her boyfriend.”

“Tell Detective Clark to make sure the police go out and look for her dog,” Dr. Lanier says. “And while you’re at it, tell him to make sure they send everybody they’ve got to keep this place secure. We’re going to be here a while.”

Dr. Lanier hands Scarpetta a packet of cotton-tipped swabs, a small bottle of sterile water and a sterile tube. She unscrews the caps of both the bottle and the tube. Dipping a swab in the sterile water, she swabs the breasts for saliva, the cotton tips turning red with blood. Swabs of her vagina, rectum, of every orifice can wait until the body’s at the morgue. She begins to collect trace evidence.

“I’m going outside,” Nic says.

“Someone needs to set up more lights in here,” Dr. Lanier’s voice rises.

“Best I can do is bring in lamps, whatever else is around the house,” Eric replies.

“That would help. Photograph them in situ before you move them, Eric, or some goddamn defense attorney will say the killer carried lamps into the bedroom . . .”

“A lot of hairs, dog hairs maybe, maybe from her dog . . .” Scarpetta is saying as she gently shakes forceps inside a transparent plastic evidence bag. “What? A yellow lab?”

Nic is gone.

“That’s what she said. A yellow lab puppy,” Dr. Lanier replies, the two of them alone with the body.

“The dog has to be found for a number of reasons, not the least is out of decency, to make sure the poor thing is all right,” Scarpetta says. “But also for hair comparison. I can’t be sure, but now I think I’m seeing quite a variety of animal hairs.”

“So am I. Sticking to blood, mostly here.” He points a bloodstained gloved finger at the woman’s naked upper body. “Not on her hands or in her hair, though, which is where you might expect to find animal hairs if the origin of them is the floor, the carpet, here inside her residence.”

Scarpetta is silent. She secures another hair in the forceps and shakes it loose inside a bag that must have at least twenty hairs in it now, the origin of all of them the dried blood on the belly.

Out on the street, someone has started whistling loudly. Voices are calling, “Here, Basil! Come, Basil!”

The front door opens and shuts repeatedly, the sounds of feet moving in the living room, the dining room, cops talking, and then a woman’s voice, a woman crying and screaming.

“No! No! No! That can’t be!”

“Ma’am, just show us in one of these pictures.”

Scarpetta recognizes Detective Clark’s voice. He is loud and trying not to sound upset, but the more the woman screams, the louder he gets.

“I’m sorry, but you can’t go in there.”

“She’s my sister!”

“I’m really sorry.”

“Oh, God, oh, God.”

Then the voices are quiet, and conversation recedes into a background murmur. A few flies begin to stray into the house, drawn by the scent of death, the high-pitched droning straining Scarpetta’s nerves.

“Tell them to stop opening the goddamn door!” She looks up from her kneeling position, sweat rolling down her face, her knees in terrible pain.

“Jesus. What’s going on out there?” Dr. Lanier is angry, too.

“Heeerrrre, Basil! Come on, boy!”

Whistling.

“Yo! Basil! Where are you?”

The front door opens and shuts again.

“That’s it!” Dr. Lanier gets to his feet.

He walks out of the bedroom, yanking off his bloody gloves. Scarpetta removes another animal hair, this one black, and places it inside an evidence bag. The hairs adhered to the body when the blood was wet. They are adhering to the belly, breasts and chest but not to the bottoms of the woman’s bare feet, which are also smeared with dried blood, not from injuries, but from where she stepped.

Scarpetta’s breath is hot and loud behind her surgical mask, sweat stinging her eyes as she waves off flies and goes over the woman’s face with a lens, looking for more hairs, every crack in dried blood magnified and more horrible, every split and cut in the skin more ragged and gaping. Flecks of paint adhere to blood, possibly transferred from the living room wall. The variety of animal hairs recovered from the body supplies Scarpetta with an important piece of information.

“We found the dog.” Nic is standing in the doorway.

Scarpetta is startled back to a different dimension, one that isn’t a hideous, dry red landscape behind a magnifying glass.

“Basil, her dog.”

“That’s not where most of these hairs are from. I’m finding dozens, different kinds, different colors. Dog hairs, possibly. Much coarser than cat hairs. But I’m not positive.”

Dr. Lanier walks back inside the room, brushing past Nic, snapping on fresh gloves.

“What I’m seeing here makes me think the hairs were transferred from the perpetrator—perhaps from his clothing—directly to her upper body. Maybe if he got on top of her.”

She pulls the pajama bottoms down an inch, just far enough to expose the indentations left by their elastic waistband. She sits back on her heels and stares, then takes off her mask.

“Why would someone get on top of her and not take her pajama bottoms off?” Dr. Lanier puzzles. “Why would someone transfer all these dog or doglike hairs to her naked upper body and nowhere else? And why the hell would anybody have all these dog hairs all the hell over them to begin with?”

“We found Basil,” Nic says again. “Hiding under a house across the street. Just cowering and shaking. He must have run off when the killer left, I guess. Who’s going to take care of him, of Basil?”

“I expect the boyfriend will,” Dr. Lanier replies. “If not, Eric loves dogs.”

He tears open two packets containing sterile, plasticized homicide sheets. While Scarpetta spreads one on the floor, Dr. Lanier and Eric grip the body under the arms and behind the knees, lifting it, centering it on the sheet. They spread the second sheet on top of her, rolling up the edges, wrapping her like a mummy so no trace evidence will be added or lost.

JAY LIFTS A HAND OFF the steering wheel to strike Bev, then changes his mind.

“You’re stupid. You know that?” he says coldly. “What the hell did you think you were doing?”

“It didn’t happen the way it was supposed to.”

The radio inside his Cherokee continues with the six o’clock news as he drives toward Jack’s Boat Landing.

“. . . Dr. Sam Lanier, coroner of East Baton Rouge Parish, has not completed the autopsy yet, but sources close to the investigation have confirmed that the victim is thirty-six-year-old Rebecca Milton of Zachary. The cause of death isn’t official, but sources say she was stabbed to death. Police do not believe the murder is related to the women reported missing from Baton Rouge over the past year . . .”

“Fools.” Jay turns off the radio. “Just lucky for you if they aren’t assuming that.”

Four small dogs, mixed breeds, sleep in sunlight shining through a back window of the SUV. Five cases of beer are stacked on the backseat. Bev worked hard today after dropping Jay off at the University Lake in the heart of LSU. He didn’t say why he was going there or what he’d be doing all day, only to pick him up in the same spot where she dropped him off at half past five. Maybe he was looking for his escaped-convict brother. Maybe he was wandering around, enjoying being away from Bev and the fishing shack. He was probably trolling for pretty coeds. Bev imagines him having sex with one of them. Jealousy wakes up inside her. It smolders.

“You shouldn’t have left me all day,” she says to him.

“What were you thinking? You were going to abduct her in the middle of the day and take her back to the boat in broad daylight?”

“At first. Then I knew you wouldn’t be happy.”

He says nothing, his face hard as he drives, careful not to speed or commit any other traffic infraction that could get him pulled over.

“She didn’t look like her. She had black hair. I don’t know if she went to college.”

Bev had been unable to resist the impulse. She had time on her hands, time enough to find that pretty lady she had fixed on at the Wal-Mart. Following her all night, she had learned that the lamb didn’t live in the house in the Garden District but had a small place in Zachary. Her neighborhood was dark, and Bev started getting nervous that her lamb might get suspicious. Bev had turned off on a side street before getting a good fix on the address.

This morning, she cruised, looking for the green Ford Explorer, figuring just because it wasn’t parked in the driveway didn’t mean it wasn’t in the garage. Obviously, she picked the wrong house. Once she was inside, she was committed.

What she never anticipated was that this particular lamb was going to fight like a wolf. The instant the black-haired woman answered the door, Bev reached inside her canvas bag and pulled out the gun and was shoved so hard it flew out of her hand. Bev rolled on the floor and slipped a buck tool out of the sheath on her belt. She managed to open what she thought was a blade, and the chase began. It seemed to go on and on for miles, with the woman running and yelling, and falling against a wall, which gave Bev the opportunity to grab her by her hair and slam her head against plaster, then kick her when she slid to the floor.

Damn if she didn’t get back up and punch Bev in the shoulder, hard. It seems Bev was yelling, too, but she can’t remember. There was a roaring in her head, like a freight train, and she stabbed and chased, blood flying in her face, on and on forever. It couldn’t have lasted more than a minute or two. Bev pinned the woman to the bedroom floor and stabbed and stabbed, and now she isn’t sure if any of it really happened.

Until she keeps hearing it on the radio. Until she remembers the buck knife’s bloody bottle opener. She stabbed the woman with a bottle opener.

How could that have happened?

She looks at Jay, passing by pawnshops and car dealers, and a Taco Bell that makes her want to stop.

Nachos with sour cream, cheese, chili and jalapeños.

Pizza places, auto shops and car dealers, and then the road narrows and is lined with mailboxes as they move along back to Jack’s, then the bayou.

“Maybe we could stop and get us some peanut brittle,” Bev says.

Jay won’t speak to her.

“Well, have it your way. You and your fucking Baton Rouge. Going back there because of your mangy brother. Well, wait ’til dark when it’s easier.”

“Shut up.”

“What if he’s not there?”

A stony silence.

“Well, if he is, he’s probably in that damn creepy cellar, hiding, maybe getting the money stashed down there. We could use some more money, baby. All that beer I’ve been buying . . .”

“I told you to shut up!”

The colder he gets, the prouder she is of the red bruises and deep scratches on her arms, legs, chest and other parts of her body where she must have been injured during what she refers to as a tussle.

“They’ll swab under her fingernails.” Jay finally speaks to her. “They’ll get your DNA.”

“They don’t have my DNA in any of their fancy databases,” Bev replies. “No one ever took my DNA before you and me got the hell out of Dodge. I was just a nice lady running a campsite near Williamsburg, remember that?”

“Nice my ass.”

Bev smiles. Her injuries are badges of courage and power. She didn’t know she had it in her to fight like that. Why, one of these days, she might just go after Jay. Her bravado deflates. She could never overcome Jay. He could kill her with one punch to her temple. He’s told her that. One punch and he’d fracture her skull, because women don’t have very thick skulls. “Even stupid ones” like Bev, he says.

“What did you do to her? You know what I mean,” he says. “You’re blood-soaked down the front of your clothes. You get on top of her like a man?”

“No.” It’s none of his business.

“Then how did your clothes get bloody from the neck to your crotch, huh? You climb on top of some girl who’s bleeding to death and jerk off?”

“It doesn’t matter. They don’t think it’s related to the other ones,” Bev says.

“What word did she say?”

“What do you mean, what word?” Bev’s beginning to think he’s getting loony.

“When she was begging. She must have begged for you to stop. What word did she say to describe it?”

“Describe what?”

“What it felt like to be so fucking afraid of pain and death! What word did she say!”

“I don’t know.” Bev tries hard to remember. “It seems like she said, Why?”

THE ROOM WAS COOL, and there were no odors.

Nic has read that line at least five times. Her mother might have been murdered just minutes before her husband—Nic’s father—got home. Nic wonders if the killer heard her father’s car and fled, or if it was just fate that the son of a bitch left when he did.

It is ten p.m. Nic, Rudy, Scarpetta, Marino and Lucy sit inside Dr. Lanier’s guest house, drinking Community Coffee, the local favorite.

“Multiple abrasions and lacerations to the face,” Scarpetta reviews the autopsy report.

She said right off that she did not intend to gloss over any detail in order to spare Nic’s feelings. She would not be helping Nic if she did that.

“Abrasion and laceration of the forehead, periocular ecchymoses, fracture of the nasal bones, frontal teeth are loosened.”

“So he beat her face up pretty good,” Marino says, sipping his coffee, which is just the way he likes it, white with Cremora and heavily laced with sugar. “Any possibility this was someone she knew?” he asks Nic.

“She opened the door for him. She was found right near the door.”

“Was she careful about keeping the doors locked?” Lucy looks at her intensely, leaning into the conversation.

Nic stares back at her. “Yes and no. At night, we locked up. But she knew Papa and I would be coming home soon, so she may not have had the door locked.”

“That doesn’t mean the person didn’t ring the bell or knock,” Rudy points out. “It doesn’t mean your mom was afraid of whoever it was.”

“No, it doesn’t mean that,” Nic says.

“Blunt-force trauma to the back of the head. Stellate laceration of vertex, three by four inches. Massive hematoma of vertex and back of the head. Fifty milliliters of liquid subscalpular blood . . .”

Marino and Lucy trade scene photographs back and forth. So far, Nic has not looked at them.

“Blood on the wall just left of the door,” Marino observes. “Hair swipes. How long was your mother’s hair?”

Nic swallows hard. “Shoulder length. She had blond hair, pretty much like mine.”

“Something happened the minute he walked in. Blitz attack,” Lucy says. “Not so different from what happened to Rebecca Milton. Not so different from what happens in any blitz attack, when a victim really enrages the perp.”

“Would injuries like this be consistent with her head being slammed against the wall?” Rudy asks.

Nic is stoical. She reminds herself she is a cop.

Scarpetta meets Nic’s eyes. “I know this is hard, Nic. We’re trying to be honest. Maybe you won’t have so many questions if we’re honest.”

“I’ll always have questions, because we’re never going to know who did this.”

“Never say never,” Marino replies.

“Right.” Lucy nods.

“Comminuted non-depressed fracture of the biparietal and occipital bones, fractures of the orbital roofs, bilateral subdural hematomas, thirty mls free blood over each . . . okay, okay, okay . . .” Scarpetta turns a page. It is typed, not computer-printed. “She has stab wounds,” she adds.

Nic shuts her eyes. “I hope she didn’t feel any of this.”

No one comments.

“I mean”—she looks at Scarpetta—“was she feeling all this?”

“She was feeling terror. Physically? It’s hard to say what pain she felt. When injuries occur so quickly . . .”

Marino interrupts. “You know when you stick your hand in a drawer and cut yourself with a knife and don’t feel it? I think it’s like that unless it’s slow. Slow like in torture.”

Nic’s heart seems to flutter, as if something is wrong with it.

“She wasn’t tortured,” Scarpetta says, looking at Nic. “Definitely not.”

“What about the stabs?” Nic asks.

“Lacerations of fingers and palms. Defense injuries.” She glances at Nic again. “Punctures of the right and left lung with two hundred mls of hemothorax on each side. I’m so sorry. I know this is hard.”

“Would that have killed her? The lung injuries?”

“Eventually. But in combination with the head injuries, absolutely. She also had fractured fingernails on the right and left. Nonidentifiable material recovered from under the nails.”

“Do you think it was saved?” Lucy asks. “DNA wasn’t as advanced then as it is now.”

“I wonder what the hell nonidentifiable is,” Marino says.

“What kind of knife?” Nic asks.

“Short-bladed. But just how short-bladed, I can’t tell.”

“Maybe a pocketknife,” Marino offers.

“Maybe,” Scarpetta says.

“My mother didn’t have a pocketknife. She didn’t have any . . .” Nic starts to tear up, then regains control. “She wasn’t into weapons, is what I’m saying.”

“He might have had one,” Lucy tells her kindly. “But my guess is, if the weapon was a pocketknife, he didn’t think he needed a weapon. Might have just been something he carried around with him like a lot of guys do.”

“Are the stab wounds different than the ones we saw today?” Nic asks Scarpetta.

“Absolutely,” she says.

NIC BEGINS TO talk about her mother’s antiques store.

She says her mother owned it but only worked there part-time to be available to her family. She says her mother was acquainted with Charlotte Dard.

Nic stares at her mug of coffee. “If I fire this thing up one more time in the microwave, you think I’ll have caffeine D. T.’s tomorrow?”

“Your mother and Charlotte Dard were friends?” Marino asks. “Shit. You don’t mind my asking, why the hell haven’t you mentioned this before?”

“This is the God’s truth,” Nic replies. “I never remembered it until just now. I guess I blocked out so much. I almost never think about my mother, or at least I didn’t start to until these women began disappearing. Then today . . . that scene. What he did to Rebecca Milton. And now.”

She gets up to reheat her coffee. The microwave runs loudly for a minute, the door opens, and she returns to the sofa, steam rising from coffee no longer fit to drink. It smells overcooked.

“Nic,” Scarpetta says, “is your married name Robillard?”

She nods.

“What is your family name?”

“Mayeux. My mother’s name is Annie Mayeux. That’s why hardly anybody realizes I’m her daughter. With time, people forget anyway. Cops who remember her death never associate me with her. I never say anything.” She sips her coffee, not seeming to mind the taste. “Her antiques shop specialized in stained-glass windows, doors, shutters, old salvage stuff, some of it really nice if you knew what you were looking for.

“And a lot of furniture was handmade out of cypress. Charlotte Dard was one of her customers, was remodeling her house and buying a lot of things from my mom’s shop, and that’s how the two of them got friendly. Not close.” She pauses, searching her memory. “My mom talked about this rich woman with a sports car and how beautiful her house was going to be when it was all done.

“I guess Mrs. Dard’s business helped out a lot. Papa never made much as a schoolteacher.” Nic smiles sadly. “Mama did really well and was frugal. Most of what my father lives off now came from my mother, from how well she did with that shop.”

“Mrs. Dard was a drug abuser,” Scarpetta says. “She died from a drug overdose, an accident or a homicide. I suspect the latter. She supposedly was suffering blackouts not long before her death. Do you know anything about that?”

“Everybody around here does,” Nic replies. “It certainly was the talk of Baton Rouge. She dropped dead in a motel room, the Paradise Acres Motel, sounds like the name of a cemetery. Off Chocktaw, a terrible part of town. Rumor was, she was having an affair and met up with the person there. I don’t know anything more than what was in the news.”

“What about her husband?” Lucy asks.

“Good question. I’ve never heard of anyone who’s met him. How strange is that? Except he’s some sort of aristocrat and travels all the time.”

“Have you ever seen a picture of him?” Rudy asks.

Nic shakes her head.

“So he’s not in the news.”

“He’s really private,” Nic replies.

“What else?” Marino asks.

“Yeah, there’s some kind of weird connection going on here, right?” Rudy looks at Scarpetta. “Some pharmacist came up as a suspect, and Rocco Caggiano was his lawyer.”

Marino gets up for more coffee.

“Think,” Lucy encourages Nic.

“Okay.” She takes a deep breath. “Okay. Here’s something. I think Charlotte Dard invited Mom to a cocktail party. I remember. Mom never went to cocktail parties. She didn’t drink and was shy, felt out of place among uppity people. So this was a big deal that she was going. It was on the plantation, the Dard plantation. Mom went to drum up business for her shop. And out of respect for her best customer, Mrs. Dard.”

“When was this?” Scarpetta asks.

Nic thinks. “Not long before my mother was killed.”

“How long is not long?” Rudy asks.

“I don’t know.” Nic swallows hard again. “Days. Days, I think. She wore this dress, had to go out to buy it.” She shuts her eyes again. A sob catches in her throat. “It was pink with white piping. It was still hanging on her closet door when she got killed, you know, hanging there to remind her it needed to go to the dry cleaner’s.”

“And your mother died less than two weeks before Charlotte Dard did,” Scarpetta remarks.

“Kind of interesting,” Marino points out, “that Mrs. Dard was so fucked up and having violent fits, and nobody worried about her throwing a fancy garden party?”

“I’m thinking that,” Rudy says.

“You know what?” Marino adds. “I drove almost twenty hours to get here. Then Lucy made me airsick. I gotta go to bed. Otherwise, I’ll be making deductions that will cause you to arrest Santa Claus for something.”

“I didn’t make you airsick,” Lucy says. “Go to bed. You need your beauty sleep. I thought you were Santa Claus.”

He gets up from the couch and leaves, heading to the main house.

“I’m not going to make it much longer, either.” Scarpetta gets up from her chair.

“Time to go,” Nic says.

“You don’t have to.” Scarpetta tries hard to help.

“Can I ask you just one last thing?” Nic says.

“Of course.” She is so tired, her brain feels frozen.

“Why would he beat her to death?”

“Why did someone beat Rebecca Milton to death?”

“Things didn’t go the way he planned.”

“Would your mother have resisted him?” Lucy asks.

“She would have clawed his eyes out,” Nic replies.

“Maybe that’s your answer. Please forgive me. I can’t be much use to you now. I’m too tired.”

Scarpetta leaves the small living room and closes her bedroom door.

“How are you?” Lucy moves to the couch and looks at Nic. “This is tough, really tough. Too tough to describe. You’re brave, Nic Robillard.”

“Worse for my father. He gave up on life. Quit everything.”

“Like what?” Rudy asks gently.

“Well, he loved to teach. And he loves the water, or used to. He and Mom. They had this little fishing camp where nobody would bother them. Out in the middle of nowhere, I mean nowhere. He’s never been there since.”

“Where?”

“Dutch Bayou.”

Rudy and Lucy look at each other.

“Who knew about it?” Lucy asks.

“I guess whoever my mother chatted about it to. She was a talker, all right. Unlike my dad.”

“Where’s Dutch Bayou?” Lucy then asks.

“Near Lake Maurepas. Off Blind River.”

“Could you find it now?”

Nic stares at her. “Why?”

“Just answer my question.” She lightly touches Nic’s arm.

She nods. Their eyes lock.

“Okay, then.” Lucy doesn’t stop looking at her. “Tomorrow. You ever been in a helicopter?”

Rudy gets up. “I gotta go. I’m beat.”

He knows. In his own way, he accepts it. But he’s not going to watch.

Lucy gives him her eyes, aware that he understands but in a way never will. “See you in the morning, Rudy.”

He walks off, his feet light on the stairs.

“Don’t be reckless,” Lucy tells Nic. “You strike me as the type who would and probably has been.”

“I’ve been engaging in my own sting operations,” she confesses. “Dressing like potential victims. I look like a potential victim.”

Lucy examines her closely, looking her over, making an assessment, as if she hasn’t been making assessments all night.

“Yes, with your blond hair, body build, air of intelligence. But your demeanor isn’t that of a victim. Your energy is strong. However, that could simply present more of a challenge to the killer. More exciting. A bigger coup.”

“I’ve been wrongly motivated,” Nic chastises herself. “Not that I don’t want him caught. More than anything, I want him caught. But I admit I’m more aggressive, more bullheaded, maybe putting myself in danger, yes, because of a task force that doesn’t want small-town girls like me in their club. Even though I’m probably the only one who’s been trained at the best forensic academy in the U.S., trained by the best. Including your aunt.”

“When you’ve been out there putting yourself in danger, did you observe anything?”

“The Wal-Mart where Katherine was abducted. I was there within hours of it happening. One thing still stands out, this lady who acted peculiar, fell down in the parking lot, said her knee went out from under her. Something bothered me. I backed off and wouldn’t help her up. Something told me not to touch her. I thought her eyes were weird, scary. And she called me a lamb. I’ve been called a lot of things, but never a lamb. I think she was some homeless schizo.”

“Describe what she looked like.” Lucy tries to remain calm, tries not to make the evidence fit the case instead of the other way around.

Nic describes her. “You know, the funny thing about it is, she looked a bit like this woman I saw a few minutes earlier inside the store. She was digging around in cheap lingerie, shoplifting.”

Now Lucy is getting excited.

“It’s never occurred to anyone that the killer might be a woman or at least have a woman who is an accomplice. Bev Kiffin,” she says.

Nic gets up for more coffee, her hand shaking. She blames it on caffeine. “Who is Bev Kiffin?”

“On the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.”

“Oh my God.” Nic sits back down, this time closer to Lucy. She wants to be close to her. She doesn’t know why. But the near proximity of her is energizing and exciting.

“Promise me you won’t go out there prowling again,” Lucy tells her. “Consider yourself on my task force, okay? We do things together, all of us. My aunt, Rudy, Marino.”

“I promise.”

“You don’t want to tangle with Bev Kiffin, who is probably bringing the abducted women to her partner, Jay Talley, number one on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.”

“They hiding out here?” Nic can’t believe it. “Two people like that are hiding out here?”

“I can’t think of a better place. You said your father has a fishing shack that he abandoned after your mother was murdered. Any possibility Charlotte Dard might have known about it, known where it was? Or is.”

“Is. Papa never sold it. The place must be half-rotted by now. Mrs. Dard might have known, since my mother was so into salvage, the stuff she sold in her shop. She liked old weathered wood, would recommend using it for fireplace mantels, exposed beams, whatever. Especially, she liked the thick pilings the fishing shacks are built on. I don’t know what she might have said to Mrs. Dard. But my mother was completely trusting. She thought everybody had their good qualities. The truth is, she talked too much.”

“Can you show me where the fishing shack is, the one your father abandoned?”

“It’s in Dutch Bayou, off the Blind River. I can show you.”

“From the air?”

“I’m pretty sure,” Nic says.

BENTON LEAVES HIS JAGUAR tucked in a church’s back parking lot less than half a mile from the Dard plantation house.

Each time he hears a car or truck approaching from either direction, he crashes through underbrush and hides in thick woods across the road from the Mississippi River. In addition to not knowing who might come along, he is well aware that it would appear odd to see a man in a black suit, black T-shirt, black cap and black butt pack walking along the side of a narrow road in the rain. Someone might stop and ask if he’s had car trouble. People would stare.

When he spots the gates that he drove past late last night, he leaves the pavement and enters the woods, this time penetrating deeper, until the mansion rises above trees, his scan constant. Looking where he steps, he does his best to avoid snapping fallen branches. Fortunately, the dead leaves are wet and silent. When he scouted the area last night, he didn’t venture into the woods because it was too dark to see, and he didn’t dare use a flashlight. He did, however, climb over the gate, getting rust all over his jacket and jeans, one of many explanations for why he opted to wear his suit again.

He wondered how much the place had changed since he had been here last. In the dark, it was difficult to tell whether it had been kept in good repair, but his last act was to toss a rock near shrubbery around the front to see if the motion sensors lit up. They didn’t. He tried again, and not a single light was triggered. If any of them are still in working order and he activates them this morning, they won’t be conspicuous, even though the sun is blanketed in gray. The grounds used to have an elaborate camera system, but there was no way Benton would have been foolish enough to test cameras, to see if they would turn red and follow him as if they were alive.

The cars in the driveway are a new white Mercedes 500 AMC and an older-model white Volvo. The Mercedes was not here last night. He doesn’t know who it belongs to and doesn’t have time or means to run the Louisiana plate. The Volvo belongs to Eveline Guidon, or at least it did six years ago. Grateful for dark clothing, Benton freezes like a deer behind a thick, dripping tree when the front door of the mansion opens. He crouches low, completely out of view, about fifty feet to the left of the front steps.

U.S. Attorney Weldon Winn walks out, talking in his usual booming voice, more obese than when Benton last laid eyes on him. Expecting him to climb into his expensive car, Benton thinks fast. Weldon Winn’s being here isn’t according to plan but certainly is a bonus. It strongly hints that Jean-Baptiste Chandonne has sought or will seek asylum at his family’s Baton Rouge stronghold, a plantation of incredible corruption that has escaped suspicion for decades because the people associated with it are either completely loyal or dead.

Benton, for example, is dead.

He watches Baton Rouge’s despicable U.S. Attorney follow an old brick walkway to an old stone building with a dark Gothic door that leads down into the wine cellar, the centuries-old cave, almost half a mile of convoluted tunnels dug by slaves. Winn unlocks the door, steps inside and shuts it behind him. Benton moves swiftly in a crouch, soaking wet by now, ducking behind the cover of boxwoods, glancing repeatedly from the wine cellar to the house. His riskiest move is his next. He walks casually, upright, his back to the house.

Should anyone look out the window, the man in black may very well appear to be a Chandonne friend. The door is thick oak, and he barely makes out voices behind it.

SCARPETTA CAN’T RELEASE Albert Dard from her mind. She imagines the scars on his little body and is well aware that self-mutilation is an addiction, and if he continues hurting himself, it seems likely that he will be committed to psychiatric hospitals again and again until he becomes as mentally ill as those patients whose diagnoses justify their being institutionalized.

Albert Dard doesn’t need to be committed. He needs help. He needs for someone to at least attempt to find out why his anxiety increased so severely a year ago that he shut down, repressed his feelings and perhaps memories to such an extreme that now he needs self-inflicted pain to experience control, a brief release and an affirmation of his own existence. Scarpetta recalls the boy’s almost dissociated state on the plane while he played with trading cards, violent ones relating to an ax. She envisions his extreme distress at the thought of no one meeting him, of an abandonment that she doubts is anything new.

With each passing moment, she becomes increasingly angry at those who are supposed to take care of him and frightened for his safety.

Digging inside her pocketbook as she drinks coffee in Dr. Lanier’s guest house, she finds the telephone number she wrote down when Albert waited for an aunt who did not intend to pick him up, but orchestrated events so that Scarpetta would take care of him. It no longer matters what manipulations or conspiracies were on Mrs. Guidon’s mind. Perhaps it was all a lure to get Scarpetta to that house to see what she knows about Charlotte Dard’s death. Perhaps Mrs. Guidon is now satisfied that Scarpetta knows nothing more about the death than has ever been known.

She dials the number and is startled when Albert answers the phone.

“It’s the lady who sat next to you on the plane,” she says.

“Hi!” he greets her, surprised and very pleased. “How come you’re calling me? My aunt said you wouldn’t.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know. She went outside.”

“Did she leave the house in her car?”

“No.”

“I’ve been thinking about you, Albert,” Scarpetta says. “I’m still in town, but I’m leaving soon, and wondered if I could come by for a visit.”

“Now?” The thought seems to make him happy. “You’d come see just me?”

“Would that be all right?”

He eagerly says it would.

BENTON QUIETLY, CAREFULLY OPENS the wine cellar door, his Sig Sauer drawn and cocked as he stands to one side of the narrow opening.

The conversation just beyond stops, and a male voice says, “You didn’t shut it all the way.”

Feet sound on steps, maybe five steps, and a hand, most likely Weldon Winn’s, pushes the door to shut it, and Benton pushes back hard, the door opening wide and knocking Winn down the steps, where he lies, shocked and groaning, on the stone floor. Whoever he was talking to had seconds, no more, to flee down another set of steps. Benton can hear the person running fast, getting away, but there is nowhere for him—perhaps Jean-Baptiste—to go. The cave has an entrance and no exit.

“Get up,” Benton says to Winn. “Slowly.”

“I’m hurt.” He looks up as Benton stands on the top step, shutting the door behind him, while he keeps the pistol pointed at Winn’s chest.

“I don’t give a goddamn if you’re hurt. Get up.”

Benton takes off his baseball cap and tosses it on top of Winn. Recognition is slow, then Winn’s face blanches and his lips part as he lies twisted on the floor, tangled in his own raincoat, staring in horror.

“It can’t be you,” he says in awe. “It can’t be!”

All the while this is going on, Benton listens for footsteps, for whoever escaped. He hears no one.

The small, windowless space has a cobweb-covered naked lightbulb overhead and a small, very old cypress table, covered with dark rings left by the countless bottles of wine that were tasted in here. Walls are damp stone, and attached to the one on the left of Benton are four iron rings in eyebolts. They are very old, but most of the rust is worn off. Nearby on the floor are coils of yellow nylon rope and an electrical receptacle.

“Get up,” Benton says again. “Who else is down here? Who were you just talking to?”

The injured Weldon Winn moves with surprising agility as he suddenly rolls on the floor and pulls out a gun from under his coat.

Benton shoots him twice, once in the chest, once in the head, before Winn can even get his finger on the trigger. Gunshots are muffled by stone.

MARINO’S PERSONAL PAYLOAD is enough to slow the helicopter by five knots.

Lucy isn’t concerned. In this weather, she wouldn’t push her machine up to maximum speed. There is no point in rushing to run into an antenna, and antennas are all over the place, rising out of swirling fog that makes the hairline obstacles and their strobes almost impossible to see in the distance. Lucy flies at five hundred feet, the conditions worse than they were when they took off in Baton Rouge twenty minutes ago.

“I don’t like this,” Marino’s nervous voice sounds in Lucy’s headset.

“You’re not the one flying. Relax. Enjoy the flight. Can I get you anything, sir?”

“How ’bout a fucking parachute?”

Lucy smiles as both she and Rudy keep up their scan outside the cockpit.

“You mind if I let go of the controls for a minute?” she says to Rudy for Marino’s benefit.

“You’re shitting me!” Marino yells.

“Ouch.” Lucy turns down the volume in her headset while Rudy takes the controls. “It’s your ship.” She repeats the standard line, ensuring that the other pilot knows for a fact that he’s supposed to be flying at that precise moment.

Turning a small knob on her emergency watch, she changes the upper display to chronograph mode.

Nic has never been up in a helicopter, and she tells Marino to stop making matters worse.

“If we aren’t safe with them,” Nic says, “we aren’t safe with anyone. Besides, you’re more likely to get hit by a car than crash in this weather.”

“That’s a bunch of shit. There ain’t no cars up here. And I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t use the crash word.”

“Concentrate,” Lucy tells everyone, and she’s not smiling now as she glances at the GPS.

Yesterday, when she and Marino flew here and found the northwesternmost edge of the lake, she entered the coordinates into the GPS.

“We’re exactly on track.”

Descending to three hundred feet and slowing to eighty knots, she catches a glimpse of Lake Maurepas between rolling fog. The water is almost below them. Thank God. No fear of antennas over a lake or its creeks and bayous. She slows down more as Rudy leans forward, staring hard, trying to make out the shoreline.

“Nic?” Lucy asks. “You hearing me?”

“Yes,” her voice comes back.

“Recognize anything down there?”

Lucy slows to sixty knots. If she reduces her airspeed more than that, she’ll go ahead and hover, but she prefers not to do so out of ground effect with such poor visibility.

“Can you go back a little ways so we can find Blind River?” she asks. “Dutch Bayou branches off it right at the edge of the lake.”

“Which direction?” Lucy slowly banks the helicopter around, not thrilled about returning to land at this altitude, grateful that yesterday she was fastidious about noting the locations of any obstacles.

Nic pauses, then her voice returns. “Well, if you follow the river toward the lake, Dutch Bayou would be at about three o’clock. To your right,” she tells Lucy.

Swooping back around and getting on track, Lucy flies over water again.

“That’s it,” Nic says. “That’s the river. See how it bends to the left. Well, we could see it better if we were higher.”

“Forget it,” Rudy says.

“I think . . . yes!” Nic is getting excited. “There it is, that very narrow creek. See it on your right. Dutch Bayou. My father’s fishing shack isn’t even a mile up it, on the left.”

Nerves are suddenly on edge. Rudy pulls his pistol out of his shoulder holster. Lucy takes a deep breath, tenser and more apprehensive than she lets on, as she descends to a hundred feet, directly over a narrow bayou thick with cypress trees that appear ominous in the fog.

“At this altitude especially, they can already hear us,” Lucy says calmly, focusing, thinking, trying not to react to what is quickly becoming a very dangerous situation.

Suddenly, a dilapidated gray shack materializes. Tied to a warped pier is a white boat that is completely incongruous with its surroundings.

Lucy swoops around the shack. “You sure, you sure?” She can’t help it, her adrenaline is raising her voice.

“Yes! I recognize the roof! Papa used blue metal. I can still see some of the blue! And the same porch and screen door!”

Lucy drops to fifty feet, in a hover, and turns to the left, Rudy’s window lined up with the boat.

“Shoot it!” Lucy yells at him.

Rudy slides open his window. He rapidly fires seventeen rounds into the bottom of the boat as the front door of the shack flies open and Bev Kiffin runs out with a shotgun. Lucy pushes the cyclic forward to push up her airspeed.

“Duck! But stay in your seats!”

Rudy has already slapped a new magazine into his gun. Although the seats in back are directly over the fuel cell, this isn’t Lucy’s concern. Jet-A is by no means as flammable as gasoline, and the most damage shotgun pellets might do is cause leaks. On the floor, there is less of the aircraft’s skin to penetrate.

Rudy arms the floats.

The shotgun is pump-action with a magazine extender. Bev fires seven rounds, one right after another. Pellets shatter windows, smacking the composite skin, and hit the main rotor blade and engine cowling. If the burn can is penetrated, there’s going to be a fire, and Lucy immediately cuts off the throttle and lowers the collective. Alarms go off in desperate warnings as she lowers the collective, presses the right pedal and turns into the wind, where there is no place to set down but an area of tall saw grass. Nitrogen explodes like another gunshot, and floats on the skids instantly inflate like rubber rafts. The helicopter lurches out of trim, and Lucy fights to stabilize it, realizing that at least one of the six floats has been penetrated by shotgun pellets.

The landing is hard enough to set off the ELT, or emergency locator transmitter, and the helicopter rocks in dense grass and dark, muddy water, and lists hard to the right. Opening her door, Lucy looks down. Two of the three floats were penetrated and didn’t inflate. Rudy shuts off the battery and the generator and everyone sits for a moment, stunned and listening to the abrupt silence outside as the helicopter lists to the right, sinking into the muck. Not more than three hundred feet away, they can see the boat taking on water, its bow rising as it sinks.

“At least she’s not going anywhere,” Rudy remarks as he and Lucy take off their headsets.

Lucy unscrews a large cap on her watch and pulls out the antenna, activating her ELT.

“Come on,” she says. “We can’t sit here.”

“I can,” Marino replies.

“Nic?” Lucy turns around. “You got any idea how deep the water is right here?”

“Not too deep, or there wouldn’t be all this saw grass. It’s the mud that’s the problem. We could sink up to our knees.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Marino says. “What for? The boat’s sunk, so she ain’t going anywhere, either. And I’m not getting snake-bit or eaten by a fucking alligator.”

“Here’s what we can do.” Nic continues as if Marino isn’t in the back with her. “The saw grass stretches all the way behind the shack, and I know the water’s not that deep, because we used to put on high boots and collect mussels.”

“I’m going,” Lucy says, opening her door.

Inside the shack, dogs are barking loudly.

The problem for Lucy is that the fat float on her skid is going to make it impossible for her to lower herself gently, one foot at a time. She tightens the shoelaces on her ankle-high boots and hands Rudy her Glock and extra magazines.

Perched in the door frame like a skydiver, she says, “Here I go!”

She lands in the water feetfirst and is pleasantly surprised to find she sinks in just above her boots. If she steps quickly, she doesn’t sink as much. Stepping closer, her face splattered with dirty water, she reaches out to take her weapon and wedges it into the back of her pants. She temporarily jams the extra magazines into a pocket.

Everybody takes turns holding on to guns and ammo as Rudy, then Nic, jumps out, exiting from the same side of the helicopter as Lucy did. Marino sits like an angry lump in the backseat.

“You gonna sit there until the chopper turns over on its side?” Rudy raises his voice. “Idiot! Get out!”

Marino slides across the seats and tosses Rudy his gun. He jumps, loses his balance and falls, his head hitting a float. When he manages to get to his feet, he is covered with mud and swearing.

“Shhhh,” Lucy says. “Voices carry on the water. You all right?”

Marino wipes his hands on Rudy’s shirt and angrily takes back his gun as both ELTs flash brightly on radar screens in airport towers and are picked up by any pilots who happen to be monitoring the emergency frequency.

They slog along, tensely keeping an eye out for snakes, hearing them rustle through the tall grass. When the four of them are within a hundred feet of the shack, pistols held high, barrels pointed up, the screen door whines open again and Bev dashes out on the pier with the shotgun, shrieking, screaming at them, insane and suicidal with desperation and rage.

Before she can even take aim, Rudy fires.

Crack-crack! Crack-crack! Crack-crack!

She hits the old wood planking and rolls into the water next to the half-sunken boat.

ALBERT DARD OPENS the imposing door, the front of his long-sleeve shirt spotted with blood.

“What happened?” Scarpetta exclaims as she steps inside.

She gets down and gently raises his shirt. In a tic-tac-toe pattern on his stomach are shallow cuts. Scarpetta lets out a long breath as she lowers his shirt and stands up.

“When did you do this?” She takes his hand.

“After she left and didn’t come back. Then he left. The man on the plane. I don’t like him!”

“Your aunt didn’t come back?”

Scarpetta noted when she approached the house that a white Mercedes and Mrs. Guidon’s old Volvo were parked in front.

“You have a place where I can do something about those cuts?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t want to do anything.”

“Well, I do. I’m a doctor. Come on.”

“You are?” He seems dazzled, as if he’s never imagined that women could be doctors.

He leads her up the stairs to a bathroom that, like the kitchen, hasn’t been renovated in many years. Inside is a old-fashioned white tub, a white sink and a medicine cabinet, where she finds iodine but no Band-Aids.

“Let’s get your shirt off.” She helps him pull it over his head. “Can you be brave? I know you can. Cutting yourself hurts, doesn’t it?”

She is dismayed by the multitude of scars covering his back and shoulders.

“I don’t really feel it when I do it,” he says, watching anxiously as she unscrews the cap from the iodine.

“I’m afraid you’re going to feel this, Albert. A little sting.” She lies the way all doctors do when some procedure is going to hurt like hell.

She works quickly while he bites his lip. He waves his hands to cool the burning while he tries not to cry.

“You are brave,” she says, lowering the lid of the toilet and sitting on it. “You want to tell me why you started cutting yourself? Someone said it began several years ago.”

He hangs his head.

“You can tell me.” She takes both his hands. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”

He slowly nods.

“These people came,” he whispers. “I heard cars. My aunt went outside, so I did too, only I hid. And they pulled this lady out of a car and she was trying to scream but they had her tied up.” He points to his mouth, indicating a gag. “Then they pushed her into the cellar.”

“The wine cellar?”

“Yes.”

Scarpetta recalls Mrs. Guidon’s insistence that she tour the wine cellar. Fear raises the hairs on the back of her neck. She is here. She doesn’t know who else is here, except Albert, and someone could drive up at any moment.

“One of the people with the tied-up lady was a monster.” Albert’s voice rises almost to a squeal as his eyes widen in terror. “Like I’ve seen on TV, in scary movies, with these sharp teeth and long hair. I was so afraid he saw me behind the bush!”

Jean-Baptiste Chandonne.

“And then my doggie, Nestlé. She never came home again!” He begins to cry.

Scarpetta hears the front door open and close, then footsteps downstairs.

“Is there a phone up here?” Scarpetta whispers to Albert.

Terrified, he wipes away tears.

She repeats her question urgently.

He stares at her, paralyzed.

“Go lock yourself in your room!”

He touches the wounds on his stomach, then rubs them, causing them to bleed.

“Go! Don’t make any noise.”

He walks quickly, quietly down the hall and turns into a room.

For several minutes she waits, listening to footsteps until they stop. The footsteps sound like those of a man, relatively heavy, but not the sharp sound of hard leather against wood. He starts walking again, and Scarpetta’s heart hammers as he seems to head toward the stairs. She hears him on the first step and walks out of the bathroom, because she does not want him—and she is certain he is Jean-Baptiste Chandonne—to find Albert.

At the top of the stairs she freezes, gripping the railing with all her might, looking down the staircase at him, the sight of him draining the blood from her head. She shuts her eyes and opens them again, thinking he will go away. Slowly, she takes one step at a time, holding on to the railing, staring. Midway, she sits down, staring.

Benton Wesley doesn’t move as he too stares. His eyes glisten with tears that he quickly blinks away.

“Who are you?” Scarpetta’s voice sounds miles away. “You aren’t him.”

“I am.”

She begins to cry.

“Please come down. Or would you like me to come up and get you?” He doesn’t want to touch her until she is ready. Until he is ready, too.

She gets up and slowly walks down the stairs. When she reaches him, she backs away, far away.

“So you’re part of this, you bastard. You goddamn bastard.” Her voice shakes so violently that she can barely speak. “So I guess you’d better shoot me, because now I know. What you’ve been doing all this time I thought you were dead. With them!” She looks at the stairs, as if someone is standing there. “You are one of them!”

“I’m anything but,” he says.

Digging into a pocket of his suit jacket, he takes out a folded piece of white paper. He smooths it open. It is a National Academy of Justice envelope, just like the photocopy Marino showed her—the photocopy of the envelope containing the letters Chandonne wrote to Marino and her.

Benton drops the envelope to the floor where she can see it.

“No,” she says.

“Please, let’s talk.”

“You told Lucy where Rocco was. You knew what she’d do!”

“You’re safe.”

“And you set me up to see him. I never wrote to him. It was you who wrote a letter supposedly from me, claiming I wanted to come see him and make a deal.”

“Yes.”

“Why? Why would you subject me to that? To make me stare at that man, that awful excuse for life?”

“You just called him a man. That’s right. Jean-Baptiste Chandonne is a man, not a monster, not a myth. I wanted you to confront him before he died. I wanted you to take back your power.”

“You had no right to control my life, to manipulate me that way!”

“Are you sorry you went?”

For an instant, she is speechless. Then she says, “You were wrong. He didn’t die.”

“I didn’t anticipate his seeing you would give him cause to stay alive. I should have known. Psychopaths like him don’t want to die. I suppose because he pled guilty in Texas, where he knew he would be death-eligible, I was fooled into thinking he really did want . . .”

“You were wrong,” she accuses him again. “You’ve had too damn much time to play God. And I don’t know what you’ve turned into, some, some . . .”

“I was wrong, yes. I miscalculated, yes. Became a machine, Kay.”

He said her name. And it shakes her to her soul.

“There is no one here to hurt you now,” he then says.

“Now?”

“Rocco is dead. Weldon Winn is dead. Jay Talley is dead.”

“Jay?”

Benton flinches. “I’m sorry. If you still care.”

“About Jay?” Confusion spins. She feels dizzy, about to faint. “Care about him? How could I? Do you know everything?”

“More than everything,” he replies.

INSIDE THE KITCHEN, THEY SIT at the same butcher-block table where Scarpetta talked to Mrs. Guidon on a night Scarpetta scarcely remembers.

“I got in too deep,” Benton is saying.

They are sitting across from each other.

“It was here, in this place of theirs, where a lot of the major players come to do their dirty business at the port and the Mississippi. Rocco. Weldon Winn. Talley. Even Jean-Baptiste.”

“You’ve met him?”

“Many times,” Benton says. “Here in this house. He found me amusing and much nicer to him than the others were. In and out, you name it. Guidon was the matron of the manor, you might say. As bad as the rest of them.”

“Was?”

Benton hesitates. “I saw Winn go into the wine cellar. I didn’t know the others were in there, thought maybe Jean-Baptiste was, hiding. It was her and Talley. I had no choice.”

“You killed them.”

“I had no choice,” Benton repeats.

Scarpetta nods.

“Six years ago, another agent was working with me, Minor. Riley Minor. Supposedly from around here. He did something stupid, I’m not sure what. But they did their number on him.” Benton nods in the direction of the wine cellar. “The torture chamber, where they make everybody talk. There are old iron rings in the walls from the slave days, and Talley was fond of heat guns and other means of deriving information. Quickly.

“When I saw them dragging Minor into the cellar, I knew the operation was over and I got the hell away.”

“You didn’t try to help him?”

“Impossible.”

She is silent.

“If I hadn’t died, I would have, Kay. If I hadn’t died, I could never have been around you, Lucy, Marino. Ever. Because they would have killed you, too.”

“You are a coward,” she says, drained of emotion.

“I understand your hating me for all I made you suffer.”

“You could have told me! So I wouldn’t suffer!”

He looks at her for a long moment, remembers her face. It hasn’t changed much. None of her has.

“What would you have done, Kay, had I told you my death had to be faked and I would never see you again?” he asks.

She doesn’t have the answer she thought she might. The truth is, she wouldn’t have allowed him to vanish, and he knows it. “I would have taken my chances.” Grief closes her throat again. “For you, I would have.”

“Then you understand. And if it’s any consolation, I’ve suffered. Not a day has gone by when I didn’t think of you.”

She shuts her eyes and tries to steady her breathing.

“Then I couldn’t take it anymore. Early on I became so miserable, so goddamn angry, and I began to figure away. Like chess . . .”

“A game?”

“Not a game. I was very serious. One by one, to eliminate the major threats, knowing that once I came out, I could never go back, because if I failed, I would be recognized. Or simply killed during the process.”

“I have never believed in vigilantism.”

“I suppose you can talk to your friend Senator Lord about that. The Chandonnes heavily fund terrorism, Kay.”

She gets up. “Too much, too much for one day. Too much.” She glances up, suddenly remembering Albert. “Is that little mistreated boy really Charlotte Dard’s son?”

“Yes.”

“Please don’t tell me you’re his father.”

“Jay Talley is. Was. Albert doesn’t know that. He’s always been given this mysterious line about a very prominent but busy father he’s never met. A kid’s fantasy. He still believes he has this omnipotent father somewhere. Talley had a brief affair with Charlotte. One night while I was here, there was a garden party and Charlotte invited an acquaintance, an antiques dealer . . .”

“I know,” Scarpetta says. “At least that question will be answered.”

“Talley saw her, spoke to her, went to her house. She resisted him, which is something he won’t tolerate. He murdered her, and because Charlotte had seen the two of them together, and because Talley was tired of Charlotte, bored with her, he saw to it that she died. Met her, brought her pills.”

“The poor little boy.”

“Don’t worry,” Benton says.

“Where are Lucy and Marino? Where are Rudy and Nic?” Now she remembers them.

“Picked up by a Coast Guard helicopter about half an hour ago. After raiding Bev Kiffin and Jay Talley’s hideout.”

“How do you know?”

He gets up from the table. “I have my sources.”

Senator Lord enters Scarpetta’s mind again. The Coast Guard is now Homeland Security. Yes, Senator Lord would know.

Benton moves closer to her, looking into her eyes. “If you hate me forever, I’ll understand. If you don’t want to be with me I don’t blame . . . well, you shouldn’t. Jean-Baptiste is still out there. He will come after me. Somehow.”

She says nothing, waiting for the hallucination to pass.

“Can I touch you?” Benton asks.

“It doesn’t matter who else is out there. I’ve been through too much.”

“Can I touch you, Kay?”

She lifts his hands and presses them against her face.

PREDATOR

PATRICIA CORNWELL

G . P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

PREDATOR

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with Cornwell Enterprises, Inc.

Copyright © 2005 by Cornwell Enterprises, Inc.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

ISBN: 1-101-15593-0

BERKLEY®

Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

BERKLEY is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

The “B” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

To Staci

SPECIAL THANKS

Harvard Medical School–affiliated McLean Hospital is the nation’s top psychiatric hospital and is world renowned for its research programs, especially in the field of neuro-science. The most challenging and significant frontier isn’t outer space. It is the human brain and its biological role in mental illness. McLean not only sets the standard for psychiatric research, but offers a compassionate alternative to debilitating suffering.

I am extremely grateful to the extraordinary doctors and scientists who so kindly shared their remarkable world with me:

Especially
DR. BRUCE M.C OHEN,
President and Psychiatrist in Chief

and also
DR. DAVID P.O LSON,
Clinical Director, Brain Imaging Center

and most of all
DR. STACI A. GRUBER,
Associate Director, Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory

1

It is Sunday afternoon and Dr. Kay Scarpetta is in her office at the National Forensic Academy in Hollywood, Florida, where clouds are building, promising another thunderstorm. It’s not supposed to be this rainy and hot in February.

Gunfire pops, and voices yell things she can’t make out. Simulated combat is popular on the weekends. Special Ops agents can run around in black fatigues, shooting up the place, and nobody hears them, only Scarpetta, and she barely notices. She continues reviewing an emergency certificate issued by a coroner in Louisiana, an examination of a patient, a woman who later went on to murder five people and claims to have no memory of it.

The case probably isn’t a candidate for the Prefrontal Determinants of Aggressive-Type Overt Responsivity research study known as PREDATOR, Scarpetta decides, vaguely aware of a motorcycle getting louder on the Academy grounds.

She writes forensic psychologist Benton Wesley an e-mail:

A woman in the study would be interesting, but wouldn’t the data be irrelevant? I thought you were restricting PREDATOR to males.

The motorcycle blasts up to the building and stops right below her window. Pete Marino harassing her again, she thinks irritably as Benton sends her an Instant Message:

Louisiana probably wouldn’t let us have her anyway. They like to execute people too much down there. Food’s good, though.

She looks out the window as Marino kills the engine, gets off his bike, looks around in his macho way, always wondering who’s watching. She is locking PREDATOR case files in her desk drawer when he walks into her office without knocking and helps himself to a chair.

“You know anything about the Johnny Swift case?” he asks, his huge, tattooed arms bulging from a sleeveless denim vest with the Harley logo on the back.

Marino is the Academy’s head of investigations and a part-time death investigator at the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office. Of late, he looks like a parody of a biker thug. He sets his helmet on her desk, a scuffed black brain bucket with bullet-hole decals all over it.

“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. “A San Francisco doctor with an office here in Miami. Had a place in Hollywood on the beach, he and his brother. Not far from the Renaissance, you know, those twin high-rise condo buildings near John Lloyd State 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 of Laurel.”

“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 about three a.m., a weird-ass phone call at my house that we’ve traced to a pay phone in Boston.”

“Massachusetts?”

“As in the Tea Party.”

“I thought your number’s unlisted.”

“It is.”

Marino slides a folded piece of torn brown paper from the back pocket of his jeans and opens it.

“I’m going to read you what the guy said, since I wrote it down word for word. He called himself Hog.”

“As in pig? That kind of hog?” She studies him, halfway wondering if he’s leading her on, setting her up for ridicule.

He’s been doing that a lot these days.

“He just said, I am Hog. Thou didst send a judgment to mock them. Whatever the hell that means. Then he said, There’s a reason certain items were missing from the Johnny Swift scene, and if you have half a brain, you’ll take a good look at what happened to Christian Christian. Nothing is coincidence. You’d better ask Scarpetta, because the hand of God will crush all perverts, including her dyke bitch niece.”

Scarpetta doesn’t let what she feels register in her voice when she replies. “Are you sure that’s exactly what he said?”

“Do I look like a fiction writer?”

“Christian Christian?”

“Who the hell knows. The guy wasn’t exactly interested in me asking questions like how to spell something. He talked in a soft voice, like someone who feels nothing, kind of flat, then hung up.”

“Did he actually mention Lucy by name or just—?”

“I told you exactly what he said,” he cuts her off. “She’s your only niece, right? So obviously he meant Lucy. And HOG could stand for Hand of God, in case you haven’t connected those dots. Long story short, I contacted the Hollywood police and they’ve asked us to take a look at the Johnny Swift case ASAP. Apparently, there’s some other shit about the evidence showing he was shot from a distance and from close range. Well, it’s one or the other, right?”

“If there was only one shot, yes. Something must be skewed with the interpretation. Do we have any idea who Christian Christian is? Are we even talking about a person?”

“So far nothing in our computer searches that’s helpful.”

“Why are you just telling me now? I’ve been around all weekend.”

“Been busy.”

“You get information about a case like this, you shouldn’t wait days to tell me,” she says as calmly as she can.

“Maybe you’re not one to talk about withholding information.”

“What information?” she asks, baffled.

“You should be more careful. That’s all I got to say.”

“It’s not helpful when you’re cryptic, Marino.”

“I almost forgot. Hollywood’s curious about what Benton’s professional opinion might be,” he adds as if it is an afterthought, as if he doesn’t care.

He typically does a poor job hiding how he feels about Benton Wesley.

“Certainly they can ask him to evaluate the case,” she replies. “I can’t speak for him.”

“They want him to figure out if the call I got from this wacko Hog was a crank, and I said that would be kind of hard when it’s not recorded, when all he’d get is my own version of shorthand scribbled on a paper bag.”

He gets up from his chair, and his big presence seems even bigger, and he makes her feel even smaller than he used to make her feel. He picks up his useless helmet and puts on his sunglasses. He hasn’t looked at her throughout their entire conversation, and now she can’t see his eyes at all. She can’t see what’s in them.

“I’ll give it my complete attention. Immediately,” she says as he walks to the door. “If you’d like to go over it later, we can.”

“Huh.”

“Why don’t you come to the house?”

“Huh,” he says again. “What time?”

“Seven,” she says.

2

Inside the MRI suite, Benton Wesley watches his patient through a partition of Plexiglas. The lights are low, multiple video screens illuminated along the wraparound counter, his wristwatch on top of his briefcase. He is cold. After several hours inside the cognitive neuroimaging laboratory, even his bones are cold, or at least that’s how it feels.

Tonight’s patient goes by an identification number, but he has a name. Basil Jenrette. He is a mildly anxious and intelligent thirty-three-year-old compulsive murderer. Benton avoids the term serial killer. It has been so overused, it means nothing helpful and never did except to loosely imply that a perpetrator has murdered three or more people over a certain period of time. The word serial suggests something that occurs in succession. It suggests nothing about a violent offender’s motives or state of mind, and when Basil Jenrette was busy killing, he was compulsive. He couldn’t stop.

The reason he is getting his brain scanned in a 3-Tesla MRI machine that has a magnetic field sixty thousand times more powerful than the earth’s is to see if there is anything about his gray and white matter and how it functions that might hint at why. Benton has asked him why numerous times during their clinical interviews.

I would see her and that was it. I had to do it.

Had to do it right that minute?

Not right there on the street. I might follow her until I figured it out, came up with a plan. To be honest, the more I calculated, the better it felt.

And how long would this take? The following, the calculating. Can you approximate? Days, hours, minutes?

Minutes. Maybe hours. Sometimes days. Depends. Stupid bitches. I mean, if it was you and you realized you were being abducted, would you just sit there in the car and not even try to get away?

Is that what they did, Basil? They sat in the car and didn’t try to get away?

Except for the last two. You know about them because that’s why I’m here. They wouldn’t have resisted, but my car broke down. Stupid. If it was you, would you rather be killed right there in the car or wait to see what I’m going to do to you when I get you to my special spot?

Where was your special spot? Always the same place?

All because my damn car broke down.

So far, the structure of Basil Jenrette’s brain is unremarkable except for the incidental finding of a posterior cerebellar abnormality, an approximately six-millimeter cyst that might affect his balance a little, but nothing else. It is the way his brain functions that isn’t quite right. It can’t be right. If it were, he wouldn’t have been a candidate for the PREDATOR research study, and he probably wouldn’t have agreed to it. Everything is a game to Basil, and he is smarter than Einstein, thinks he is the most gifted person on earth. He has never suffered one moment of remorse for what he’s done and is quite candid in saying that he would kill more women given the opportunity. Unfortunately, Basil is likeable.

The two prison guards inside the MRI suite vacillate from confused to curious as they stare through the glass at the seven-foot-long tube, the bore of the magnet, on the other side. The guards wear uniforms but no guns. Weapons aren’t allowed in here. Nothing ferrous, including handcuffs and shackles, is permitted, and only plastic flex-cuffs restrain Basil’s ankles and wrists as he lies on the table inside the magnet, listening to the jarring knocks and wonks of radio-frequency pulses that sound like infernal music played on high-voltage power lines—or that’s what Benton imagines.

“Remember, this next one is color blocks. All I want you to do is name the color,” Dr. Susan Lane, the neuropsychologist, says into the intercom. “No, Mr. Jenrette, please don’t nod your head. Remember, the tape is on your chin to remind you not to move.”

“Ten-four,” Basil’s voice sounds through the intercom.

It is half past eight at night and Benton is uneasy. He has been uneasy for months, not so much worried that the Basil Jenrettes of the world are going to suddenly explode into violence inside the gracious old brick walls of McLean Hospital and slaughter everything in sight, but that the research study is doomed to failure, that it is a waste of grant money and a foolish expenditure of precious time. McLean is an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, and neither the hospital nor the university is forgiving about failure.

“Don’t worry about getting all of them right,” Dr. Lane is saying over the intercom. “We don’t expect you to get all of them right.”

“Green, red, blue, red, blue, green.” Basil’s confident voice fills the room.

A researcher marks down results on a data-entry sheet while the MRI technician checks images on his video screen.

Dr. Lane pushes the talk button again. “Mr. Jenrette? You’re doing an excellent job. Can you see everything okay?”

“Ten-four.”

“Very good. Every time you see that black screen, you are nice and still. No talking, just look at the white dot on the screen.”

“Ten-four.”

She releases the talk button and says to Benton, “What’s with the cop jargon?”

“He was a cop. That’s probably how he was able to get his victims into his car.”

“Dr. Wesley?” the researcher says, turning around in her chair. “It’s for you. Detective Thrush.”

Benton takes the phone.

“What’s up,” he asks Thrush, a homicide detective with the Massachusetts State Police.

“I hope you weren’t planning on an early bedtime,” Thrush says. “You hear about the body found this morning out by Walden Pond?”

“No. I’ve been locked up in this place all day.”

“White female, unidentified, hard to tell her age. Maybe in her late thirties, early forties, shot in the head, the shotgun shell shoved up her ass.”

“News to me.”

“She’s been autopsied already, but I thought you might want to take a look. This one ain’t the average bear.”

“I’ll be finished up in less than an hour,” Benton says.

“Meet me at the morgue.”

The house is quiet and Kay Scarpetta walks from room to room, turning on every light, unsettled. She listens for the sound of a car or a motorcycle, listens for Marino. He is late and hasn’t returned her phone calls.

Unsettled and anxious, she checks to make sure that the burglar alarm is armed and the floodlights are on. She pauses at the video display on the kitchen phone to make sure the cameras monitoring the front, back and sides of her house are operating properly. Her property is shadowy in the video display, and dark images of citrus trees, palms and hibiscus move in the wind. The dock behind her swimming pool and the waterway beyond are a black plain dabbed with blurred lights from lamps along the seawall. She stirs tomato sauce and mushrooms in copper pots on the stove. She checks dough rising and fresh mozzarella soaking in covered bowls by the sink.

It is almost nine, and Marino was supposed to be here two hours ago. Tomorrow she is tied up with cases and teaching, and she doesn’t have time for his rudeness. She feels set up. She has had it with him. She has worked nonstop on the Johnny Swift alleged suicide for the past three hours, and now Marino can’t bother to show up. She is hurt, then angry. It is easier to be angry.

She is very angry as she walks into her living room, still listening for a motorcycle or a car, still listening for him. She picks up a twelve-gauge Remington Marine Magnum from her couch and sits down. The nickel-plated shotgun is heavy in her lap, and she inserts a small key in the lock. She turns the key to the right and pulls the lock free from the trigger guard. She racks the pump back to make sure there are no cartridges in the magazine.

3

We’re going to do word reading now,” Dr. Lane is telling Basil over the intercom. “Just read the words from left to right. Okay? And remember, don’t move. You’re doing great.”

“Ten-four.”

“Hey, want to see what he really looks like?” the MRI technician says to the guards.

His name is Josh. He majored in physics at MIT, is working as a tech while working on his next degree, is bright but eccentric with a twisted sense of humor.

“I already know what he looks like. I got to escort him to the showers earlier today,” one of the guards says.

“Then what?” Dr. Lane asks Benton. “What would he do to them after he got them into his car?”

“Red, blue, blue, red…”

The guards wander closer to Josh’s video screen.

“Take them someplace, stab them in the eyes, keep them alive a couple days, rape them repeatedly, cut their throats, dump their bodies, pose them to shock people,” Benton is telling Dr. Lane matter-of-factly, in his clinical way. “The cases we know about. I’m suspicious he killed others. A number of women vanished in Florida during the same time frame. Presumed dead, bodies never found.”

“Take them where? A motel, his house?”

“Hold on a second,” Josh says to the guards as he selects the menu option 3D, then SSD, or Surface Shading Display. “This is really cool. We never show it to patients.”

“How come?”

“Totally freak them out.”

“We don’t know where,” Benton is telling Dr. Lane as he keeps a check on Josh, ready to intervene if he gets too carried away. “But it’s interesting. The bodies he dumped. They all had microscopic particles of copper on them.”

“What on earth?”

“Mixed in with dirt and whatever else was adhering to blood, their skin, in their hair.”

“Blue, green, blue, red…”

“That’s very strange.”

She pushes the talk button. “Mr. Jenrette? How are we doing in there? You okay?”

“Ten-four.”

“Next, you’re going to see words printed in a different color from what they spell. I want you to name the color of the ink. Just name the color.”

“Ten-four.”

“Isn’t this awesome?” Josh says as what looks like a death mask fills his screen, a reconstruction of one-millimeter-thick, high-resolution slices that make up the MRI scan of Basil Jenrette’s head, the image pale, hairless and eyeless, ending raggedly just below the jaw as if he has been decapitated.

Josh rotates the image so the guards can see it from different angles.

“Why’s his head look cut off?” one of them asks.

“That’s where the signal from the coil stopped.”

“His skin doesn’t look real.”

“Red uh green, blue I mean red, green…” Basil’s voice enters the room.

“It’s not really skin. How to explain…well, what the computer’s doing is volume reconstruction, a surface rendering.”

“Red, blue uh green, blue I mean green…”

“Only thing we really use it for is PowerPoints, mainly, to overlay structural with functional. Just an fMRI analysis package where you can put data together and look at it any way you want, have fun with it.”

“Man, he’s ugly.”

Benton has heard enough. The color naming has stopped. He gives Josh a sharp look.

“Josh? You ready?”

“Four, three, two, one, ready,” Josh says, and Dr. Lane begins the interference test.

“Blue, red, I mean…shit, uh, red, I mean blue, green, red…” Basil’s voice violates the room as he gets all of them wrong.

“He ever tell you why?” Dr. Lane asks Benton.

“I’m sorry,” he says, distracted. “Why what?”

“Red, blue shit! Uh red, blue-green…”

“Why he gouged their eyes out.”

“He said he didn’t want them to see how small his penis is.”

“Blue, blue-red, red, green…”

“He didn’t do so well on this one,” she says. “In fact, he missed most of them. What police department did he work for, so I remember not to get pulled for speeding in that part of the world?” She pushes the talk button. “You okay in there?”

“Ten-four.”

“Dade County PD.”

“Too bad. I’ve always liked Miami. So that’s how you managed to conjure this one up. Because of your South Florida connections,” she replies, pushing the talk button again.

“Not exactly.” Benton stares through the glass at Basil’s head in the far end of the magnet, imagining the rest of him dressed like a normal person in jeans and a button-up white shirt.

The inmates are not allowed to wear prison fatigues on the hospital campus. It’s bad public relations.

“When we began querying state penitentiaries for study subjects, Florida thought he was just the guy for the job. He was bored. They were happy to get rid of him,” Benton says.

“Very good, Mr. Jenrette,” Dr. Lane says into the intercom. “Now, Dr. Wesley is going to come in and give you the mouse. You’re going to see some faces next.”

“Ten-four.”

Ordinarily, Dr. Lane would go into the MRI room and deal with the patient herself. But women doctors and scientists are not allowed physical contact with the subjects of PREDATOR. Male doctors and scientists have to be cautious, too, while inside the MRI suite. Outside of it, restraining research study subjects during interviews is up to the clinician. Benton is accompanied by the two prison guards as he turns on the lights inside the MRI room and shuts the door. The guards hover near the magnet and pay attention as he plugs in the mouse and places it in Basil’s restrained hands.

He is nothing much to look at, a short, slight man with thinning blond hair and small gray eyes closely spaced. In the animal kingdom, lions, tigers and bears—the predators—have closely spaced eyes. Giraffes, rabbits, doves—the preyed upon—have eyes more widely spaced and oriented toward the sides of their heads, because they need their peripheral vision to survive. Benton has always wondered if the same evolutionary phenomenon applies to humans. That’s a research study nobody’s going to fund.

“You doing all right, Basil?” Benton asks him.

“What kind of faces?” Basil’s head talks from the end of the magnet, bringing to mind an iron lung.

“Dr. Lane will explain it to you.”

“I’ve got a surprise,” Basil says. “I’ll tell you when we’re done.”

He has an odd gaze, as if a malignant creature is looking out through his eyes.

“Great. I love surprises. Just a few more minutes and you’re done,” Benton says with a smile. “Then we’ll have a follow-up chat.”

The guards accompany Benton back outside the MRI room and return to the suite as Dr. Lane begins to explain over the intercom that all she wants Basil to do is click the left side of the mouse if the face is male and right if it is female.

“Nothing for you to do or say, just press the button,” she reiterates.

There are three tests, and the point of them is not the patient’s ability to distinguish between the two genders. What is actually measured in this series of functional scanning is affective processing. The male and female faces appearing on the screen are behind other faces that flash too quickly for the eye to detect, but the brain sees all. Jenrette’s brain sees the faces behind the masks, faces that are happy, angry or afraid, faces that are provocative.

After each set, Dr. Lane asks him what he saw, and if he had to attach an emotion to the faces, what was it. The male faces are more serious than the female, he answers. He says basically the same thing for each set. It means nothing yet. None of what has gone on in these rooms will mean anything until the thousands of neuroimages are analyzed. Then the scientists can visualize which areas of his brain were most active during the tests. The point is to see if his brain works differently from someone who supposedly is normal, and to learn something besides the fact that he has an incidental cyst that is completely unrelated to his predatory proclivities.

“Anything jump out at you?” Benton asks Dr. Lane. “And by the way, thanks, as always, Susan. You’re a good sport.”

They try to schedule inmate scans late in the day or on the weekend, when few people are around.

“Just from the localizers, he looks okay—I don’t see any gross abnormalities. Except for his incessant chatting. His hyperfluency. He ever been diagnosed as bipolar?”

“His evaluations and history make me wonder. But no. Never diagnosed. Unmedicated for any psychiatric disorders, in prison only a year. A dream subject.”

“Well, your dream subject didn’t do well suppressing interfering stimuli, made a huge number of errors by commission on the interference test. My bet is he doesn’t stay in set, which is certainly consistent with bipolar disorder. We’ll know more later.”

She pushes the talk button again and says, “Mr. Jenrette? We’re all done. You did an excellent job. Dr. Wesley’s coming back in to get you out. I want you to sit up very slowly, okay? Very slowly so you don’t get dizzy. Okay?”

“That’s all? Just these stupid tests? Show me the pictures.”

She gives Benton a look and releases the talk button.

“You said you’d look at my brain when I’m looking at the pictures.”

“Autopsy pictures of his victims,” Benton explains to Dr. Lane.

“You promised me pictures! You promised I’d get my mail!”

“All righty,” she says to Benton. “He’s all yours.”

The shotgun is heavy and cumbersome, and she has trouble lying on the couch and pointing the barrel at her chest while trying to pull the trigger with her left toe.

Scarpetta lowers the shotgun and imagines attempting the same thing after wrist surgery. Her shotgun weighs about seven and a half pounds and starts to shake in her hands when she holds it up by its eighteen-inch barrel. She lowers her feet to the floor and takes off her right running shoe and sock. Her left foot is dominant, but she will have to try her right, and she wonders what Johnny Swift was, right-foot-dominant or left. It would make a difference, but not necessarily a significant one, especially if he was depressed and determined, but she’s not sure he was either, not sure of much.

She thinks about Marino, and the more her thoughts shift back to him, the more upset she gets. He has no right to treat her this way, no right to disrespect her the same way he did when they first met, and that was many years ago, so many years ago she is surprised he can even remember how to treat her the way he once did. The aroma of her homemade pizza sauce is in the living room. It fills the house, and resentment speeds up her heart and makes her chest tight. She lies back down on her left side, props the stock of the shotgun on the back of the couch, positions the barrel at the center of her chest and pulls the trigger with her right big toe.

4

Basil Jenrette is not going to hurt him.

Unrestrained, he sits across the table from Benton inside the small examination room, the door shut. Basil is quiet and polite in his chair. His outburst inside the magnet lasted maybe two minutes, and when he calmed down, Dr. Lane was already gone. He didn’t see her when he was escorted out, and Benton will make sure he never does.

“You’re sure you’re not lightheaded or dizzy,” Benton says in his calm, understanding way.

“I feel great. The tests were cool. I’ve always loved tests. I knew I’d get everything right. Where are the pictures? You promised.”

“We never discussed anything like that, Basil.”

“I got everything right, straight A’s.”

“So you enjoyed the experience.”

“Next time show me the pictures like you promised.”

“I never promised you that, Basil. Did you find the experience exciting?”

“I guess I can’t smoke in here.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“What did my brain look like? Did it look good? Did you see anything? Can you tell how smart someone is by looking at their brain? If you showed me the pictures you’d see they match the ones I have in my brain.”

He is talking quietly and rapidly now, his eyes bright, almost glassy, as he goes on and on about what the scientists might expect to find in his brain, assuming they are able to decipher what is there, and there is definitely a there there, he keeps saying.

“A there there?” Benton inquires. “Can you explain what you mean, Basil?”

“My memory. If you can see into it, see what’s in there, see my memories.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Really. I’ll bet all kinds of pictures came up when you were doing the beep-beep, bang-bang, knock-knock. Bet you saw the pictures and don’t want to tell me. There were ten of them, and you saw them. Saw their pictures, ten of them, not four. I always say ten-four as a joke, a real big ha-ha. You think it’s four and I know it’s ten, and you would know if you showed me the pictures, because you’d see they matched the pictures in my brain. You’d see my pictures when you’re inside my brain. Ten-four.”

“Tell me which pictures you mean, Basil.”

“I’m just messing with you,” he says with a wink. “I want my mail.”

“What pictures might we see inside your brain?”

“Those foolish women. They won’t give me my mail.”

“You’re saying you killed ten women?” Benton asks this without shock or judgment. Basil smiles as if something has occurred to him.

“Oh. I can move my head now, can’t I. No more tape on my chin. Will they tape my chin down when they give me the needle?”

“You won’t be getting the needle, Basil. That’s part of the deal. Your sentence has been commuted to life. You remember us talking about that?”

“Because I’m crazy,” he says with a smile. “That’s why I’m here.”

“No. We’ll go over this again, because it is important you understand. You’re here because you’ve agreed to participate in our study, Basil. The governor of Florida allowed you to be transferred to our state hospital, Butler, but Massachusetts wouldn’t agree to it unless he commuted your sentence to life. We don’t have the death penalty in Massachusetts.”

“I know you want to see the ten ladies. See them as I remember them. They’re in my brain.”

He knows it isn’t possible to scan someone and see his thoughts and memories. He is being his usual clever self. He wants the autopsy photographs so he can fuel his violent fantasies, and as is true of narcissistic sociopaths, he thinks he is quite entertaining.

“Is that the surprise, Basil?” he asks. “That you committed ten murders instead of the four you were charged with?”

He shakes his head and says, “There’s one you want to know about. That’s the surprise. Something special just for you because you’ve been so nice to me. But I want my mail. That’s the deal.”

“I’m very interested in hearing about your surprise.”

“The lady in The Christmas Shop,” he says. “Remember that one?”

“Why don’t you tell me about it,” Benton replies, and he doesn’t know what Basil means. He isn’t familiar with a murder that occurred in a Christmas shop.

“What about my mail?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Cross your heart and hope to die?”

“I’ll look into it.”

“I can’t remember the exact date. Let me see.” He stares at the ceiling, his unrestrained hands restless in his lap. “About three years ago in Las Olas, I think it was around July. So maybe two and a half years ago. Why would anyone want to buy Christmas shit in July in South Florida? She sold little Santas and his elves and nutcrackers and baby Jesuses. I went in on this particular morning after staying up all night.”

“Do you remember her name?”

“I never knew her name. Well, I might have. But I forgot it. If you showed me the pictures, it might jog my memory, you might see her in my brain. Let me see if I can describe her. Let me see. Oh, yes. She was a white woman with long, dyed hair the color of I Love Lucy. Sort of fat. Maybe thirty-five or forty. I went in and locked the door and pulled a knife on her. I raped her in the back, in the storage area, cut her throat from here to here in one cut.”

He makes a slicing motion across his neck.

“It was funny because there was one of those oscillating fans in there and I turned it on because it was hot and stuffy and it blew blood all the fuck over the place. Quite a mess to clean up. Then, let’s see”—he looks up at the ceiling again, the way he often does when he’s lying—“I wasn’t in my cop car that day, had taken my bike and parked it in a pay lot behind the Riverside Hotel.”

“Your motorcycle or a bicycle?”

“My Honda Shadow. Like I would ride a bicycle when I was going to kill someone.”

“So you planned on killing someone that morning?”

“It seemed like a good idea.”

“You planned on killing her or just planned on killing someone?”

“I remember there were all these ducks in the parking lot hanging out around the puddles because it had been raining for days. Mommy ducks and little baby ducks everywhere. That’s always bothered me. Poor little ducks. They get run over a lot. You see little babies squashed in the road and Mommy walking round and around her dead little baby, looking so sad.”

“Did you ever run over the ducks, Basil?”

“I would never hurt an animal, Dr. Wesley.”

“You said you killed birds and rabbits when you were a child.”

“That was a long time ago. You know, boys and their BB guns. Anyway, to go on with my story, all I got was twenty-six dollars and ninety-one cents. You have to do something about my mail.”

“So you’ve said repeatedly, Basil. I told you I’ll do my best.”

“Sort of disappointing after all that. Twenty-six dollars and ninety-one cents.”

“From the cash drawer.”

“Ten-four.”

“You must have had a lot of blood on you, Basil.”

“She had a bathroom in the back of the shop.” He looks up at the ceiling again. “I poured Clorox on her, just now remembered it. To kill my DNA. Now you owe me. I want my fucking mail. Get me out of the suicide cell. I want a normal cell where they don’t spy on me.”

“We’re making sure you’re safe.”

“Get me a new cell and the pictures and my mail, and I’ll tell you more about The Christmas Shop,” he says and his eyes are very glassy now and he is very restless in the chair, clenching his fists, tapping his foot. “I deserve to be rewarded.”

5

Lucy sits where she can see the front door, where she can see who is coming in or leaving. She watches people without them knowing. She watches and calculates even when she is supposed to be relaxing.

The last few nights, she has wandered into Lorraine’s and talked to the bartenders, Buddy and Tonia. Neither knows Lucy’s real name, but both remember Johnny Swift, remember him as that hot-looking doctor who was straight. A brain doctor who liked Provincetown and unfortunately was straight, Buddy says. What a shame, Buddy says. Always alone, too, except for the last time he was here, Tonia says. She was working that night and remembers that Johnny had splints on his wrists. When she asked him about it, he said he’d just had surgery and it hadn’t gone very well.

Johnny and a woman sat at the bar and were very friendly with each other, talking as if no one else was there. Her name was Jan and she seemed really smart, was pretty and polite, very shy, not the least bit stuck on herself, young, dressed casually in jeans and a sweatshirt, Tonia recalls. It was obvious Johnny hadn’t known her long, maybe had just met her, found her interesting, obviously liked her, Tonia says.

Liked her as in sexually? Lucy asked Tonia.

I didn’t get that impression. He was more, well, it’s like she had some sort of problem and he was helping her out. He was a doctor, you know.

That doesn’t surprise Lucy. Johnny was unselfish. He was extraordinarily kind.

She sits at the bar in Lorraine’s and thinks about Johnny walking in the same way she just did and sitting at the same bar, maybe on the same stool. She imagines him with Jan, someone he may have just met. It wasn’t like him to pick up women, to have casual encounters. He wasn’t into one-night stands and may very well have been helping her, counseling her. But about what? Some medical problem? Some psychological problem? The story about the shy young woman named Jan is puzzling and disconcerting. Lucy isn’t quite sure why.

Maybe he wasn’t feeling good about himself. Maybe he was scared because the carpal tunnel surgery wasn’t as successful as he had hoped. Maybe counseling and befriending a shy, pretty young woman made him forget his fears, feel powerful and important. Lucy drinks tequila and thinks about what he said to her in San Francisco when she was with him last September, the last time she saw him.

Biology is cruel, he said. Physical liabilities are unforgiving. Nobody wants you if you’re scarred and crippled, useless and maimed.

My God, Johnny. It’s just carpal tunnel surgery. Not amputation.

I apologize, he said. We’re not here to talk about me.

She thinks about him as she sits at the bar in Lorraine’s, watching people, mostly men, enter and leave the restaurant as snow gusts in.

It has begun to snow in Boston as Benton drives his Porsche Turbo S past the Victorian brick buildings of the university medical campus and remembers the early days when Scarpetta used to summon him to the morgue at night. He always knew the case was bad.

Most forensic psychologists have never been to a morgue. They have never seen an autopsy and don’t even want to look at the photographs. They are more interested in the details of the offender than in what he did to his victim, because the offender is the patient and the victim is nothing more than the medium he used to express his violence. This is the excuse many forensic psychologists and psychiatrists give. A more likely explanation is they don’t have the courage or the inclination to interview victims or, worse, spend time with their mauled dead bodies.

Benton is different. After more than a decade of Scarpetta, there is no way he couldn’t be different.

You have no right to work any case if you won’t listen to what the dead have to say, she told him some fifteen years ago when they were working their first homicide together. If you can’t be bothered with them, then, frankly, I can’t be bothered with you, Special Agent Wesley.

Fair enough, Dr. Scarpetta. I’ll trust you to make introductions.

All right then, she said. Come with me.

That was the first time he had ever been inside a morgue refrigerator, and he can still hear the loud clack of the handle pulling back and the whoosh of cold, foul air. He would know that smell anywhere, that dark, dead stench, foul and flat. It hangs heavy in the air, and he has always imagined that if he could see it, it would look like filthy ground fog slowly spreading out from whatever has died.

He replays his conversation with Basil, analyzes every word, every twitch, every facial expression. Violent offenders promise all sorts of things. They manipulate the hell out of everybody to get what they want, promise to reveal the locations of bodies, admit to crimes that were never solved, confess the details of what they did, offer insights into their motivation and psychological state. In most cases, it is lies. In this case, Benton is concerned. Something about at least some of what Basil confessed strikes him as true.

He tries Scarpetta on his cell phone. She doesn’t answer. Several minutes later, he tries again and still can’t get her.

He leaves a message: “Please call me when you get this,” he says.

The door opens again and a woman comes in with the snow, as if blown in by the blizzard.

She wears a long, black coat and is brushing it off as she pushes back her hood, and her fair skin is rosy from the cold, her eyes quite bright. She is pretty, remarkably pretty, with dark blond hair and dark eyes and a body that she flaunts. Lucy watches her glide to the back of the restaurant, glide between tables like a sexy pilgrim or a sensuous witch in her long, black coat, and it swirls around her black boots as she heads straight back to the bar where there are plenty of empty stools. She chooses one next to Lucy’s and takes off her coat and folds it and sits on it without a word or a glance.

Lucy drinks tequila and stares at the TV over the bar as if the latest celebrity romance is interesting. Buddy makes the woman a drink as if he knows what she likes.

“I’ll have another,” Lucy tells him soon enough.

“Coming up.”

The woman with the black hooded coat gets interested in the colorful tequila bottle that Buddy lifts from a shelf. She keenly watches the pale amber liquor pour in a delicate stream, filling the bottom of the brandy snifter. Lucy slowly swirls the tequila, and the smell of it fills her nose all the way up to her brain.

“That stuff will give you the headache from Hades,” the woman with the black hooded coat says in a husky voice that is seductive and full of secrets.

“It’s much purer than regular liquor,” Lucy says. “Haven’t heard the word Hades in a while. Most people I know say hell.”

“The worst headaches I ever got were from margaritas,” the woman offers, sipping a Cosmopolitan that is pink and lethal-looking in a champagne glass. “And I don’t believe in hell.”

“You’ll believe in it if you keep drinking that shit,” Lucy replies, and in the mirror behind the bar, she watches the front door open again and more snow blow into Lorraine’s.

Wind gusting in from the bay sounds like silk whipping, reminding her of silk stockings whipping on a clothesline, although she has never seen silk stockings on a clothesline or heard what they sound like in the wind. She is aware of the woman’s black stockings because tall stools and short, slitted skirts are not a safe combination unless a woman is in a bar where the men are interested only in one another, and in Provincetown, this is usually the case.

“Another Cosmo, Stevie?” Buddy asks, and now Lucy knows her name.

“No,” Lucy answers for her. “Let Stevie try what I’m having.”

“I’ll try anything,” Stevie says. “I think I’ve seen you at the Pied and the Vixen, dancing with different people.”

“I don’t dance.”

“I’ve seen you. You’re hard to miss.”

“You come here a lot?” Lucy asks, and she has never seen Stevie before, not at the Pied or the Vixen or any other club or restaurant in Ptown.

Stevie watches Buddy pour more tequila. He leaves the bottle on the bar, steps away and busies himself with another customer.

“This is my first time,” Stevie says to Lucy. “A Valentine’s Day present to myself, a week in Ptown.”

“In the dead of winter?”

“Last I checked, Valentine’s Day was always in the winter. It happens to be my favorite holiday.”

“It’s not a holiday. I’ve been here every night this week and never seen you.”

“What are you? The bar police?” Stevie smiles and looks into Lucy’s eyes so intensely it has an effect.

Lucy feels something. No, she thinks. Not again.

“Maybe I don’t come in here only at night like you do,” Stevie says, reaching for the tequila bottle, brushing Lucy’s arm.

The feeling gets stronger. Stevie studies the colorful label, sets the bottle back on the bar, taking her time, her body touching Lucy. The feeling intensifies.

“Cuervo? What’s so special about Cuervo?” Stevie asks.

“How would you know what I do?” Lucy says.

She tries to make the feeling go away.

“Just guessing. You look like a night person,” Stevie says. “Your hair is naturally red, isn’t it. Maybe mahogany mixed with deep red. Dyed hair can’t look like that. You haven’t always worn it long, as long as it is now.”

“Are you some kind of psychic?”

The feeling is awful now. It won’t go away.

“Just guessing,” Stevie’s seductive voice says. “So, you haven’t told me. What’s so special about Cuervo?”

“Cuervo Reserva de la Familia. It’s special enough.”

“Well, that’s something. It looks like this is my night for first times,” Stevie says, touching Lucy’s arm, her hand resting on it for a minute. “First time in Ptown. First time for one hundred percent agave tequila that costs thirty dollars a shot.”

Lucy wonders how Stevie can know it costs thirty dollars a shot. For someone unfamiliar with tequila, she seems to know a lot.

“I believe I’ll have another,” Stevie calls out to Buddy, “and you really could pour a little more in the glass. Be sweet to me.”

Buddy smiles as he pours her another, and two shots later, Stevie leans against Lucy and whispers in her ear, “You got anything?”

“Like what?” Lucy asks, and she gives herself up to it.

The feeling is fueled by tequila and plans to stay for the night.

“You know what,” Stevie’s voice says quietly, her breath touching Lucy’s ear, her breast pressed against her arm. “Something to smoke. Something that’s worth it.”

“What makes you think I’d have something?”

“Just guessing.”

“You’re remarkably good at it.”

“You can get it anywhere here. I’ve seen you.”

Lucy made a transaction last night, knows just where to do it, at the Vixen, where she doesn’t dance. She doesn’t remember seeing Stevie. There weren’t that many people, never are this time of year. She would have noticed Stevie. She would notice her in a huge crowd, on a busy street, anywhere.

“Maybe you’re the one who’s the bar police,” Lucy says.

“You have no idea how funny that is,” Stevie’s seductive voice says. “Where you staying?”

“Not far from here.”

6

The state Medical Examiner’s Office is located where most are, on the fringe of a nicer part of town, usually at the outer limits of a medical school. The red-brick-and-concrete complex backs up to the Massachusetts Turnpike, and on the other side of it is the Suffolk County House of Corrections. There is no view and the noise of traffic never stops.

Benton parks at the back door and notes only two other cars in the lot. The dark-blue Crown Victoria belongs to Detective Thrush. The Honda SUV probably belongs to a forensic pathologist who doesn’t get paid enough and probably wasn’t happy when Thrush persuaded him to come in at this hour. Benton rings the bell and scans the empty back parking lot, never assuming he is safe or alone, and then the door opens and Thrush is motioning him inside.

“Jeez, I hate this place at night,” Thrush says.

“There’s not much to like about it any time of day,” Benton remarks.

“I’m glad you came. Can’t believe you’re out in that,” he says, looking out at the black Porsche as he shuts the door behind them. “In this weather? You crazy?”

“All-wheel drive. It wasn’t snowing when I went to work this morning.”

“These other psychologists I’ve worked with, they never come out, snow, rain or shine,” Thrush says. “Not the profilers, either. Most FBI I’ve met have never seen a dead body.”

“Except for the ones at headquarters.”

“No shit. We got plenty of them at state police headquarters, too. Here.”

He hands Benton an envelope as they follow a corridor.

“Got everything on a disk for you. All the scene and autopsy pictures, whatever’s written up so far. It’s all there. It’s supposed to snow like a bitch.”

Benton thinks of Scarpetta again. Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, and they’re supposed to spend the evening together, have a romantic dinner on the harbor. She’s supposed to stay through Presidents’ Day weekend. They haven’t seen each other in almost a month. She may not be able to get here.

“I heard light snow showers are predicted,” Benton says.

“A storm’s moving in from the Cape. Hope you got something to drive other than that million-dollar sports car.”

Thrush is a big man who has spent his life in Massachusetts and talks like it. There isn’t a single R in his vocabulary. In his fifties, he has military-short gray hair and is dressed in a rumpled brown suit, has probably worked nonstop all day. He and Benton follow the well-lit corridor. It is spotless and scented with air deodorizer and lined with storage and evidence rooms, all of them requiring electronic passes. There is even a crash cart—Benton can’t imagine why—and a scanning electron microscope, the facility the most spacious and best equipped of any morgue he has ever seen. Staffing is another story.

The office has suffered crippling personnel problems for years because of low salaries that fail to attract competent forensic pathologists and other staff. Added to this are alleged mistakes and misdeeds resulting in scathing controversies and public-relations problems that make life and death difficult for everyone involved. The office isn’t open to the media or to outsiders, and hostility and distrust are pervasive. Benton would rather come here late at night. To visit during business hours is to feel unwelcome and resented.

He and Thrush pause outside the closed door of an autopsy room that is used in high-profile cases or those that are considered a biohazard or bizarre. His cell phone vibrates. He looks at the display. No ID is usually her.

“Hi,” Scarpetta says. “I hope your night’s been better than mine.”

“I’m at the morgue.” Then, to Thrush, “One minute.”

“That can’t be good,” Scarpetta says.

“I’ll fill you in later. Got a question. You ever heard of something that happened at a Christmas shop in Las Olas maybe two and a half years ago?”

“By something I assume you mean a homicide.”

“Right.”

“Not offhand. Maybe Lucy can try to track it down. I hear it’s snowing up there.”

“I’ll get you here if I have to hire Santa’s reindeer.”

“I love you.”

“Me, too,” he says.

He ends the call and asks Thrush, “Who are we dealing with?”

“Well, Dr. Lonsdale was nice enough to help me out. You’ll like him. But he didn’t do the autopsy. She did.”

She is the chief. She got where she is because she’s a she.

“You ask me,” Thrush says, “women got no business doing this anyway. What kind of woman would want to do this?”

“There are good ones,” Benton says. “Very good ones. Not all of them get where they are because of their gender. More likely, in spite of it.”

Thrush is unfamiliar with Scarpetta. Benton never mentions her, not even to people he knows rather well.

“Women shouldn’t see shit like this,” Thrush says.

The night air is penetrating and milky-white up and down Commercial Street. Snow swarms in lamplight and lights the night until the world glows and seems surreal as the two of them walk in the middle of the deserted silent street east along the water to the cottage Lucy began renting several days ago after Marino got the strange phone call from the man named Hog.

She builds a fire, and she and Stevie sit in front of it on quilts and roll a joint with very good stuff from British Columbia, and they share it. They smoke and talk and laugh, and then Stevie wants more.

“Just one more,” she begs as Lucy undresses her.

“That’s different,” Lucy says, staring at Stevie’s slender nude body, at the red handprints on it, maybe tattoos.

There are four of them. Two on her breasts as if someone is grabbing them, two on her upper inner thighs as if someone is forcing her legs apart. There are none on her back, none where Stevie couldn’t reach and apply them herself, assuming they are fake. Lucy stares. She touches one of the handprints, places her hand over one of them, fondling Stevie’s breast.

“Just checking to see if it’s the right fit,” Lucy says. “Fake?”

“Why don’t you take off your clothes.”

Lucy does what she wants, but she won’t take off her clothes. For hours, she does what she wants in the firelight, on the quilts, and Stevie lets her, is more alive than anyone Lucy has ever touched, smooth with soft contours, lean in a way Lucy isn’t anymore, and when Stevie tries to undress her, almost fights her, Lucy won’t allow it, then Stevie gets tired and gives up and Lucy helps her to bed. After she is asleep, Lucy lies awake listening to the eerie whining of the wind, trying to figure out exactly what it sounds like, deciding it doesn’t sound like silk stockings after all, but like something distressed and in pain.

7

The autopsy room is small with a tile floor and the usual surgical cart, digital scale, evidence cabinet, autopsy saws and various blades, dissecting boards and a transportable autopsy table latched to the front of a wall-mounted dissecting sink. The walk-in refrigerator is built into a wall, the door partially open.

Thrush hands Benton a pair of blue nitrile gloves, asks him, “You want booties or a mask or anything?”

“No thanks,” Benton says as Dr. Lonsdale emerges from the refrigerator, pushing a stainless-steel cadaver carrier bearing the pouched body.

“We need to make this quick,” he says as he parks near the sink and locks two of the swivel casters. “I’m already in deep shit with my wife. It’s her birthday.”

He unzips the pouch and spreads it open. The victim has raggedly cut short, black hair that is damp and still gory with bits of brain and other tissue. There is almost nothing left of her face. It looks as if a small bomb blew up inside her head, which is rather much what happened.

“Shot in the mouth,” Dr. Lonsdale says, and he is young with an intensity that borders on impatience. “Massive skull fractures, brain pulpifaction, which of course we usually associate with suicides, but nothing else about this case is consistent with suicide. It appears to me that her head was tilted pretty far back when the trigger was pulled, explaining why her face is basically shot off, some of her teeth blown out. Again, not uncommon in suicides.”

He switches on a magnifying lamp and positions it close to the head.

“No need to pry open her mouth,” he comments. “Since she has no face left. Thank God for small favors.”

Benton leans close and smells the sweet, putrid stench of decomposing blood.

“Soot on the palate, the tongue,” Dr. Lonsdale continues. “Superficial lacerations of the tongue, the perioral skin and nasolabial fold due to the bulging-out effect when gases from the shotgun blast expand. Not a pretty way to die.”

He unzips the pouch the rest of the way.

“Saved the best for last,” Thrush says. “What do you make of it? Reminds me of Crazy Horse.”

“You mean the Indian?” Dr. Lonsdale gives him a quizzical look as he unscrews the lid from a small glass jar filled with a clear liquid.

“Yeah. I think he put red handprints on his horse’s ass.”

There are red handprints on the woman, on her breasts, abdomen and upper inner thighs, and Benton positions the magnifying lamp closer.

Dr. Lonsdale swabs the edge of a handprint and says, “Isopropyl alcohol, a solvent like that will get it off. Obviously, it’s not water-soluble and brings to mind the sort of stuff people use for temporary tattooing. Some type of paint or dye. Could also have been done in permanent Magic Marker, I suppose.”

“I’m assuming you haven’t seen this in any other cases around here,” Benton says.

“Not at all.”

The magnified handprints are well defined with clean margins, as if made with a stencil, and Benton looks for feathering strokes of a brush, for anything that might indicate how the paint, ink or dye was applied. He can’t tell, but based on the density of color, he suspects the body art is recent.

“I suppose she could have gotten this at some point earlier. In other words, it’s unrelated to her death,” Dr. Lonsdale adds.

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Thrush agrees. “There’s a lot of witchcraft around here with Salem and all.”

“What I’m wondering is how quickly something like this begins to fade,” Benton says. “Have you measured them to see if they’re the same size as her hand?” He indicates the body.

“They look bigger to me,” Thrush says, holding out his own hand.

“What about her back?” Benton asks.

“One on each buttock, one between her shoulder blades,” Dr. Lonsdale replies. “Look like a man’s size, the hands do.”

“Yeah,” Thrush says.

Dr. Lonsdale pulls the body partially on its side, and Benton studies the handprints on the back.

“Looks like she has some sort of abrasion here,” he says, noting a scraped area on the handprint between the shoulder blades. “Some inflammation.”

“I’m not clear on all the details,” Dr. Lonsdale replies. “It’s not my case.”

“Looks as if it was painted after she got the scrape,” Benton says. “Am I seeing welts, too?”

“Maybe some localized swelling. Histology should answer that. It’s not my case,” he reminds them. “I didn’t participate in her autopsy,” he is sure to remind them. “I glanced at her. That was it before I just now rolled her out. I did look over the autopsy report.”

Should the chief’s work be negligent or incompetent, he’s not about to take the blame.

“Any idea how long she’s been dead?” Benton asks.

“Well, the cold temperatures would have slowed rigor.”

“Frozen when she was found?”

“Not yet. Apparently, her body temperature when she got here was thirty-eight degrees. Fahrenheit. I didn’t go to the scene. I can’t give you those details.”

“The temperature at ten o’clock this morning was twenty-one degrees,” Thrush tells Benton. “The weather conditions are on the disk I gave you.”

“So the autopsy report has already been dictated,” Benton says.

“It’s on the disk,” Thrush answers.

“Trace evidence?”

“Some soil, fibers, other debris adhering to blood,” Thrush replies. “I’ll get them run in the labs as quick as I can.”

“Tell me about the shotgun shell you recovered,” Benton says to him.

“Inside her rectum. You couldn’t see it from the outside, but it showed up on x-ray. Damnedest thing. When they first showed me the film, I thought maybe the shell was under her body on the x-ray tray. Had no idea the damn thing was inside her.”

“What kind?”

“Remington Express Magnum, twelve-gauge.”

“Well, if she shot herself, she’s certainly not the one who shoved the shell up her rectum after the fact,” Benton says. “You running it through NIBIN?”

“Already in the works,” Thrush says. “The firing pin left a nice drag mark. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

8

Early the next morning, snow blows sideways over Cape Cod Bay and melts when it touches the water. The snow barely dusts the tawny sliver of beach beyond Lucy’s windows but is deep on nearby rooftops and the balcony beyond her bedroom. She pulls the comforter up to her chin and looks out at the water and the snow, unhappy that she has to get up and deal with the woman sleeping next to her, Stevie.

Lucy shouldn’t have gone to Lorraine’s last night. She wishes she hadn’t and can’t stop wishing it. She is disgusted with herself and in a hurry to leave the tiny cottage with its wraparound porch and shingled roof, the furniture dingy from endless rounds of renters, the kitchen small and musty with outdated appliances. She watches the early morning play with the horizon, turning it various shades of gray, and the snow is falling almost as hard as it was last night. She thinks of Johnny. He came here to Provincetown a week before he died and met someone. Lucy should have found that out a long time ago, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t face it. She watches Stevie’s regular breathing.

“Are you awake?” Lucy asks. “You need to get up.”

She stares at the snow, at sea ducks bobbing on the ruffled gray bay, and wonders why they aren’t frozen. Despite what she knows about the insulating qualities of down, she still can’t believe that any warm-blooded creature can comfortably float on frigid water in the middle of a blizzard. She feels cold beneath the comforter, chilled and repulsed and uncomfortable in her bra and panties and button-down shirt.

“Stevie, wake up. I’ve got to get going,” she says loudly.

Stevie doesn’t stir, her back gently rising and falling with each slow breath, and Lucy is sick with regret and is annoyed and disgusted because she can’t seem to stop herself from doing this thing, this thing she hates. For the better part of a year, she has told herself no more, and then nights like last night happen and it isn’t smart or logical and she is always sorry, always, because it is degrading and then she has to extricate herself and tell more lies. She has no choice. Her life is no longer a choice. She is too deeply into it to choose anything different, and some choices have been made for her. She still can’t believe it. She touches her tender breasts and distended belly to make sure it’s true and still can’t comprehend it. How could this happen to her?

How could Johnny be dead?

She never looked into what happened to him. She walked away and took her secrets with her.

I’m sorry, she thinks, hoping wherever he is, he knows her mind the way he used to, only differently. Maybe he can know her thoughts now. Maybe he understands why she kept away, just accepted he did it to himself. Maybe he was depressed. Maybe he felt ruined. She never believed his brother killed him. She didn’t entertain the possibility that someone else did. Then Marino got the phone call, the ominous one from Hog.

“You’ve got to get up,” she says to Stevie.

Lucy reaches for the Colt Mustang .380 pistol on the table by the bed.

“Come on, wake up.”

Inside Basil Jenrette’s cell, he lies on his steel bed, a thin blanket pulled over him, the kind that doesn’t give off poisonous gases like cyanide if there’s a fire. The mattress is thin and hard and won’t give off deadly gases if there’s a fire. The needle would have been unpleasant, the chair worse, but the gas chamber, no. Choking, not breathing, suffocating. God no.

When he looks at his mattress when he is making the bed, he thinks about fires and not being able to breathe. He’s not so bad. At least he’s never done that to anybody, that thing that his piano teacher did until Basil quit his lessons, didn’t care how hard his mother whipped him with the belt. He quit and wouldn’t go back for one more episode of almost gagging, choking, almost suffocating. He didn’t think about it much until the subject of the gas chamber came up. No matter what he knew about the way they execute people down there in Gainesville, with the needle, the guards threatened him with the gas chamber, laughed and hooted when he’d curl up on the bed and start to shake.

Now he doesn’t have to worry about the gas chamber or any other means of execution. He’s a science project.

He listens for the drawer at the bottom of the steel door, listens for it to open, listens for his breakfast tray.

He can’t see that it is light outside because there is no window, but he knows it is dawn by the sounds of guards making their rounds and drawers sliding open and slamming shut as other inmates get eggs and bacon and biscuits, sometimes fried eggs, sometimes scrambled. He can smell the food as he lies on the bed under his nonpoisonous blanket on his nonpoisonous mattress and thinks about his mail. He has to have it. He feels as furious and anxious as he’s ever been. He listens to footsteps and then Uncle Remus’s fat, black face appears behind the mesh opening high up on the door.

That’s what Basil calls him. Uncle Remus. Calling him Uncle Remus is why Basil’s not getting his mail anymore. He hasn’t gotten it for a month.

“I want my mail,” he says to Uncle Remus’s face behind the mesh. “It’s my constitutional right to get my mail.”

“What makes you think anybody would write your sorry ass,” the face behind the mesh asks.

Basil can’t make out much, just the dark shape of the face and the wetness of eyes peering in at him. Basil knows what to do about eyes, how to put them out so they don’t shine at him, so they don’t see places they shouldn’t before they turn dark and crazed and he almost suffocates. He can’t do much in here, in his suicide cell, and rage and anxiety twist his stomach like a dishrag.

“I know I have mail,” Basil says. “I want it.”

The face vanishes and then the drawer opens. Basil gets off the bed, takes his tray and the drawer loudly clangs shut at the bottom of the thick, gray, steel door.

“Hope nobody spit on your food,” Uncle Remus says through the mesh. “Enjoy your breakfast,” he says.

The wide plank floor is cold beneath Lucy’s bare feet as she returns to the bedroom. Stevie is asleep under the covers, and Lucy sets two coffees on the bedside table and slides her hand under the mattress, feeling for the pistol’s magazines. She may have been reckless last night, but not so reckless that she would leave her pistol loaded with a stranger in the house.

“Stevie?” she says. “Come on. Wake up. Hey!”

Stevie opens her eyes and stares at Lucy standing by the bed inserting a magazine into the pistol.

“What a sight,” Stevie says, yawning.

“I’ve got to go.” Lucy hands her a coffee.

Stevie stares at the gun. “You must trust me, leaving it right there on the table all night.”

“Why wouldn’t I trust you?”

“I guess you lawyers have to worry about all those people whose lives you’ve ruined,” Stevie says. “You never know about people these days.”

Lucy told her she is a Boston attorney. Stevie probably thinks a lot of things that aren’t true.

“How did you know I like my coffee black?”

“I didn’t,” Lucy says. “There’s no milk or cream in the house. I’ve really got to go.”

“I think you should stay. Bet I can make it worth your while. We never finished, now did we? Got me so liquored up and stoned, I never got your clothes off. That’s a first.”

“Seems like a lot of things were your first.”

“You didn’t take your clothes off,” Stevie reminds her, sipping coffee. “That’s a first, all right.”

“You weren’t exactly with it.”

“I was with it enough to try. It’s not too late to try again.”

She sits up and settles into the pillows, and the covers slip below her breasts, and her nipples are erect in the chilled air. She knows exactly what she has and what to do with it, and Lucy doesn’t believe what happened last night was a first, that any of it was.

“God, my head hurts,” Stevie says, watching Lucy look at her. “I thought you told me good tequila wouldn’t do that.”

“You mixed it with vodka.”

Stevie plumps the pillows behind her and the covers settle low around her hips. She pushes her dark-blond hair out of her eyes, and she is quite something to look at in the morning light, but Lucy wants nothing more with her and is put off by the red handprints again.

“Remember I asked you about those last night?” Lucy says, looking at them.

“You asked me a lot of things last night.”

“I asked you where you got them done.”

“Why don’t you climb back in.” Stevie pats the bed, and her eyes seem to burn Lucy’s skin.

“It must have hurt getting them. Unless they’re fake and I happen to think they are.”

“I can clean them off with nail polish remover or baby oil. I’m sure you don’t have nail polish remover or baby oil.”

“What’s the point?” Lucy stares at the handprints.

“It wasn’t my idea.”

“Then whose?”

“Someone annoying. She does it to me and I have to clean them off.”

Lucy frowns, staring at her. “You let someone paint them on you. Well, kind of kinky,” and she feels a pinch of jealousy as she imagines someone painting Stevie’s naked body. “You don’t have to tell me who,” Lucy says as if it’s unimportant.

“Much better to be the one who does it to someone else,” Stevie says, and Lucy feels jealous again. “Come here,” Stevie says in her soothing voice, patting the bed again.

“We need to head out of here. I’ve got things to do,” Lucy replies, carrying black cargo pants, a bulky black sweater and the pistol into the tiny bathroom that adjoins the bedroom.

She shuts the door and locks it. She undresses without looking at herself in the mirror, wishing what has happened to her body is imagined or a nightmare. She touches herself in the shower to see if anything has changed and avoids the mirror as she towels herself dry.

“Look at you,” Stevie says when Lucy emerges from the bathroom, dressed and distracted, her mood much worse than it was moments before. “You look like some kind of secret agent. You’re really something. I want to be just like you.”

“You don’t know me.”

“After last night, I know enough,” she says, staring Lucy up and down. “Who wouldn’t want to be just like you? You don’t seem afraid of anything. Are you afraid of anything?”

Lucy leans over and rearranges the bed linens around Stevie, covering her up to her chin, and Stevie’s face changes. She stiffens, stares down at the bed.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you,” Stevie says meekly, her cheeks turning red.

“It’s cold in here. I was just covering you because…”

“It’s okay. It’s happened before.” She looks up, her eyes bottomless pits filled with fear and sadness. “You think I’m ugly, don’t you. Ugly and fat. You don’t like me. In the daylight, you don’t.”

“You’re anything but ugly or fat,” Lucy says. “And I do like you. It’s just…Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

“I’m not surprised. Why would someone like you like someone like me?” Stevie says, pulling the blanket around her and off the bed, covering herself completely as she gets up. “You could have anybody. I’m grateful. Thank you. I won’t tell anyone.”

Lucy is speechless, watching Stevie retrieve her clothes from the living room, getting dressed, shaking, her mouth contorting in peculiar ways.

“God, please don’t cry, Stevie.”

“At least call me the right thing!”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Her eyes huge and dark and scared, Stevie says, “I’d like to go now, please. I won’t tell anyone. Thank you, I’m very grateful.”

“Why are you talking like this?” Lucy says.

Stevie retrieves her long, black, hooded coat and puts it on. Through the window, Lucy watches her walk off in a swirl of snow, her long, black coat flapping around her tall, black boots.

9

Half an hour later, Lucy zips up her ski jacket and tucks the pistol and two extra magazines in a pocket.

She locks the cottage and climbs down the snow-covered wooden steps to the street as she thinks about Stevie and her inexplicable behavior, feeling guilty. She thinks about Johnny and feels guilty, remembering San Francisco, when he took her to dinner and reassured her that everything would be all right.

You’re going to be fine, he promised.

I can’t live like this, she said.

It was women’s night at Mecca on Market Street, and the restaurant was crowded with women, attractive women who looked happy and confident and pleased with themselves. Lucy felt stared at, and it bothered her in a way it never had before.

I want to do something about it now, she said. Look at me.

Lucy, you look great.

I haven’t been this fat since I was ten.

You stop taking your medicine and…

It makes me sick and exhausted.

I’m not going to let you do anything rash. You have to trust me.

He held her gaze in the candlelight, and his face will always be in her mind, looking at her the way he did that night. He was handsome, with fine features and unusual eyes the color of tiger eyes, and she could keep nothing from him. He knew all there was to know in every way imaginable.

Loneliness and guilt follow her as she follows the snowy sidewalk west along the Cape Cod Bay. She ran away. She remembers when she heard about his death. She heard about it the way no one should, on the radio.

A prominent doctor was found shot to death in a Hollywood apartment in what sources close to the investigation say is a possible suicide….

She had no one to ask. She wasn’t supposed to know Johnny and had never met his brother, Laurel, or any of their friends, so who could she ask?

Her cell phone vibrates, and she tucks the earpiece in her ear and answers.

“Where are you?” Benton says.

“Walking through a blizzard in Ptown. Well, not literally a blizzard. It’s starting to taper off.” She is dazed, a little hung-over.

“Anything interesting come up?”

She thinks of last night and feels bewildered and ashamed.

What she says is, “Only that he wasn’t alone when he was here last, the week before he died. Apparently, he came here right after his surgery, then went down to Florida.”

“Laurel with him?”

“No.”

“How did he manage alone?”

“As I said, it appears he wasn’t alone.”

“Who told you?”

“A bartender. Apparently, he met someone.”

“We know who?”

“A woman. Someone a lot younger.”

“A name?”

“Jan, don’t know the rest of it. Johnny was upset about the surgery, which wasn’t all that successful, as you know. People do a lot of things when they’re scared and don’t feel good about themselves.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Okay,” she lies.

She was a coward. She was selfish.

“You don’t sound okay,” Benton says to her. “What happened to Johnny isn’t your fault.”

“I ran away from it. I didn’t do a damn thing.”

“Why don’t you spend some time with us. Kay’s going to be up here for a week. We’d love to see you. You and I will find some private time to talk,” Benton the psychologist says.

“I don’t want to see her. Somehow make her understand.”

“Lucy, you can’t keep doing this to her.”

“I’m not trying to hurt anyone,” she says, thinking of Stevie again.

“Then tell her the truth. It’s that simple.”

“You called me.” She abruptly changes the subject.

“I need you to do something for me as soon as possible,” he replies. “I’m on a secured phone.”

“Unless there’s anyone around here with an intercept system, I am, too. Go ahead.”

He tells her about a murder that supposedly occurred at some sort of Christmas shop, supposedly in the Las Olas area about two and a half years ago. He tells her everything Basil Jenrette told him. He says Scarpetta is unfamiliar with any case that sounds similar, but she wasn’t working in South Florida back then.

“The information came from a sociopath,” he reminds her, “so I’m not holding my breath that there’s anything to it.”

“The alleged victim in the Christmas shop have her eyes gouged out?”

“He didn’t tell me that. I didn’t want to ask him too many questions until I check out his story. Can you run it in HIT, see what you can find?”

“I’ll get started on the plane,” she says.

10

The clock on the wall above the bookcase reads half past noon, and the attorney representing a kid who probably murdered his baby brother is taking his time going through paperwork on the other side of Kay Scarpetta’s desk.

Dave is young, dark, nicely built, one of those men whose irregular features somehow fit together in a very appealing way. He is known for his flamboyance in the malpractice arena, and whenever he comes to the Academy, the secretaries and female students suddenly find reasons to walk past Scarpetta’s door, except Rose, of course. She has been Scarpetta’s secretary for fifteen years, is well past retirement age and isn’t particularly vulnerable to male charm unless it is Marino’s. He is probably the only man whose flirtations she welcomes, and Scarpetta picks up the phone to ask her where he is. He is supposed to be here for this meeting.

“I tried him last night,” Scarpetta says over the phone to Rose. “Several times.”

“Let me see if I can find him,” Rose says. “He’s been acting rather odd lately.”

“Not just lately.”

Dave studies an autopsy report, his head tilted back as he reads through the horn-rimmed glasses low on his nose.

“The last few weeks have been worse. I have a funny feeling it’s about a woman.”

“See if you can find him.”

She hangs up and looks across her desk to see if Dave is ready to get on with his prejudicial questions about another difficult death that he is convinced can be resolved for a substantial fee. Unlike most police departments that invite the assistance of the Academy’s scientific and medical experts, lawyers usually pay, and, as a rule, most clients who can pay are representing people who are as guilty as hell.

“Marino not coming?” he asks.

“We’re trying to find him.”

“I’ve got a deposition in less than an hour.” He turns a page of the report. “Seems to me when all is said and done, the findings are in favor of an impact and nothing more.”

“I’m not going to say that in court,” she replies, looking at the report, at the details of an autopsy she didn’t perform. “What I can say is that while a subdural hematoma can be caused by an impact—in this case, the alleged fall off the couch onto the tile floor—it is highly unlikely, was more likely caused by violent shaking that causes shearing forces in the cranial cavity and subdural bleeding and injury to the spinal cord.”

“As for the retinal hemorrhages, aren’t we in agreement those can also be caused by trauma, such as his head striking the tile floor, resulting in a subdural?”

“Not at all in a short fall like this. Again, was more likely caused by the head whipping back and forth. Just as the report makes clear.”

“I don’t think you’re helping me out much here, Kay.”

“If you don’t want an unbiased opinion, you should find another expert.”

“There is no other expert. You’re unrivaled.” He smiles. “What about a vitamin K deficiency?”

“If you have antemortem blood that revealed protein-induced vitamin K deficiency,” she replies. “If you’re looking for leprechauns.”

“Problem is, we don’t have antemortem blood. He didn’t survive long enough to get to the hospital.”

“That’s a problem.”

“Well, shaken baby syndrome can’t be proved. It’s definitely unclear and improbable. You can at least say that.”

“What’s clear is you don’t have mama’s fourteen-year-old son babysit his newborn brother when the son has already been to juvenile court twice for assault on other children and is legendary for his explosive temper.”

“And you won’t say that.”

“No.”

“Look, all I ask is you point out there’s no definitive evidence that this baby was shaken.”

“I will also point out there’s no definitive evidence that he wasn’t, that I can find no fault with the autopsy report in question.”

“The Academy’s great,” Dave says, getting up from his chair. “But you guys are roughing me up. Marino’s a no-show. Now you’re leaving me hanging out to dry.”

“I’m sorry about Marino,” she says.

“Maybe you need to control him better.”

“That’s not exactly possible.”

Dave tucks in his bold striped shirt, straightens his bold silk tie, puts on his tailored silk jacket. He arranges his paperwork inside his crocodile briefcase.

“Rumor has it you’re looking into the Johnny Swift case,” he then says, snapping shut the silver clasps.

Scarpetta is caught for a minute. She can’t imagine how Dave could know this.

What she says is, “It’s been my practice to pay little attention to rumors, Dave.”

“His brother owns one of my favorite restaurants in South Beach. Called Rumors, ironically,” he says. “You know, Laurel’s had some problems.”

“I don’t know anything about him.”

“Someone who works there is passing around the story that Laurel killed Johnny for money, for whatever Johnny might have left him in his will. Says Laurel’s got habits he can’t afford.”

“Sounds like hearsay. Or maybe someone who has a grudge.”

Dave walks to the door.

“I haven’t talked to her. Every time I try, she’s not there. I personally think Laurel’s a really nice guy, by the way. I just find it a bit coincidental that I start hearing stories and then Johnny’s case is reopened.”

“I’m not aware it was ever closed,” Scarpetta says.

Snowflakes are icy and sharp, the sidewalks and streets frosted white. Few people are out.

Lucy walks briskly, sipping from a steaming hot latte, heading to the Anchor Inn, where she checked in several days ago under a fictitious name so she could hide her rented Hummer. She hasn’t parked it at the cottage once, never interested in strangers knowing what she drives. She veers off on a narrow drive that winds around to the small parking lot on the water where the Hummer is covered with snow. She unlocks the doors, starts the engine and turns on the defrost, and the white-blanketed windows give her the cool, shady sensation of being inside an igloo.

She is calling one of her pilots when a gloved hand suddenly begins wiping snow off her side window and a black-hooded face fills the glass. Lucy aborts the call and drops the phone on the seat.

She stares at Stevie for a long moment, then lowers the window as her mind races through possibilities. It isn’t a good thing that she was followed here. It is a very bad thing that she didn’t notice she was being followed.

“What are you doing?” Lucy asks.

“I just wanted to tell you something.”

Stevie’s face has an expression that is hard to read. Maybe she is near tears and extremely upset and hurt, or it could be the cold, sharp wind blowing in from the bay that is making her eyes so bright.

“You’re the most awesome person I’ve ever met,” Stevie says. “I think you’re my hero. My new hero.”

Lucy isn’t sure if Stevie is mocking her. Maybe she isn’t.

“Stevie, I’ve got to get to the airport.”

“They haven’t started canceling flights yet. But it’s supposed to be terrible the rest of the week.”

“Thanks for the weather update,” Lucy says, and the look in Stevie’s eyes is fierce and unnerving. “Look, I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt your feelings.”

“You didn’t,” Stevie says, as if this is the first she’s heard of it. “Not at all. I didn’t think I’d like you so much. I wanted to find you to tell you that. Tuck it away in some part of that clever head of yours, maybe remember it on a rainy day. I just never thought I would like you so much.”

“You keep saying that.”

“It’s intriguing. You come across so sure of yourself, arrogant really. Hard and distant. But I realize it’s not who you are inside. Funny how things turn out so differently from what you expect.”

Snow is blowing inside the Hummer, dusting the interior.

“How did you find me?” Lucy asks.

“I went back to your place but you were gone. I followed your footprints in the snow. They led right here. You wear what? Size eight? It wasn’t hard.”

“Well, I’m sorry for…”

“Please,” Stevie says intensely, strongly. “I know I’m not just another notch on your belt, as they say.”

“I’m not into that,” Lucy says, but she is.

She knows it, even if she would never describe it like that. She feels bad for Stevie. She feels bad for her aunt, for Johnny, for everyone she has failed.

“Some might argue you’re a notch on mine,” Stevie says playfully, seductively, and Lucy doesn’t want to have the feeling again.

Stevie is sure of herself again, full of secrets again, amazingly attractive again.

Lucy shoves the Hummer into reverse as snow blows in and her face stings from the snow and the wind blowing off the water.

Stevie digs in her coat pocket, pulls out a slip of paper, hands it to her through the open window.

“My phone number,” she says.

The area code is 617, the Boston area. She never told Lucy where she lived. Lucy never asked.

“That’s all I wanted to say to you,” Stevie says. “And happy Valentine’s Day.”

They look at each other through the open window, the engine rumbling, snow coming down and clinging to Stevie’s black coat. She’s beautiful and Lucy feels what she felt at Lorraine’s. She thought it was gone. She is feeling it.

“I’m not like all the rest,” Stevie says, looking into Lucy’s eyes.

“You’re not.”

“My cell phone number,” Stevie says. “I actually live in Florida. After I left Harvard, I never bothered to change my cell phone number. It doesn’t matter. Free minutes, you know.”

“You went to Harvard?”

“I usually don’t mention it. It can be rather off-putting.”

“Where in Florida?”

“Gainesville,” she says. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” she says again. “I hope it turns out to be the most special one you’ve ever had.”

11

The smart board inside classroom 1A is filled with a colorful photograph of a man’s torso. His shirt is unbuttoned, a large knife plunged into his hairy chest.

“Suicide,” one of the students volunteers from his desk.

“Here’s another fact. Although you can’t tell from this picture,” Scarpetta says to the sixteen students who make up this session’s Academy class, “he has multiple stab wounds.”

“Homicide.” The student quickly changes his answer and everybody laughs.

Scarpetta flashes up the next slide, this one of multiple wounds clustered near the fatal one.

“They look shallow,” another student says.

“What about the angle? They should be angled up if he did it to himself?”

“Not necessarily, but here’s a question,” Scarpetta says from the podium in the front of the classroom. “What might his unbuttoned shirt tell you?”

Silence.

“If you were going to stab yourself, would you do it through your clothing?” she asks. “And, by the way, you’re right.” She directs this to the student who made the comment about shallow stab wounds. “Most of these”—she points them out on the smart board—“barely broke the skin. What we call hesitation marks.”

The students take notes. They are a bright, eager bunch, different ages, different backgrounds, from different areas of the country, two of them from England. Several are detectives who want intensive forensic training in crime-scene investigation. Others are death investigators who want the same thing. Some are college graduates working on master’s degrees in psychology, nuclear biology and microscopy. One is an assistant district attorney who wants more convictions in court.

She displays another slide on the smart board, this one an especially gruesome photograph of a man with his intestines spilling out of a gaping incision to his abdomen. Several students groan. One says “ouch.”

“Who’s familiar with seppuku?” Scarpetta asks.

“Hari-kari,” a voice sounds from the doorway.

Dr. Joe Amos, this year’s forensic pathology fellow, walks in as if it is his class. He is tall and gangly, with an unruly shock of black hair, a long, pointed chin and dark, glittering eyes. He reminds Scarpetta of a black bird, a crow.

“I don’t mean to interrupt,” he says, then he does it anyway. “This guy”—he nods at the gruesome image on the smart board—“took a big hunting knife, stabbed it into one side of his abdomen and slashed across to the other. That’s called motivation.”

“Was it your case, Dr. Amos?” a student asks, this one female and pretty.

Dr. Amos moves closer to her, looks very serious and important. “No. What you need to remember, though, is this: The way you can tell suicide versus homicide is if it’s a suicide, the person will slash the knife across his abdomen and then cut upwards, making the classic L shape that you see in hari-kari. Which is not what you see here.”

He directs the students’ attention to the smart board.

Scarpetta holds in her temper.

“Be kind of hard to do that in a homicide,” he adds.

“This one’s not L-shaped.”

“Precisely,” he says. “Who wants to vote for homicide?”

A few students raise their hands.

“My vote, too,” he says with confidence.

“Dr. Amos? How quickly would he have died?”

“You might survive a few minutes. You’re going to bleed out really fast. Dr. Scarpetta, I wonder if I could see you for a minute. I’m sorry to interrupt,” he says to the students.

She and Joe walk into the hallway.

“What is it?” she asks.

“The hell scene we have scheduled for later this afternoon,” he says. “I’d like to spice it up a little.”

“This couldn’t wait until after class?”

“Well, I thought you could get one of the students to volunteer. They’ll do anything you ask.”

She ignores the flattery.

“Ask if one of them will help out with this afternoon’s hell scene, but you can’t tell the details in front of everyone.”

“And what are the details, exactly?”

“I was thinking of Jenny. Maybe you’ll let her skip your three o’clock class so she can help me.” He refers to the pretty student who asked him if the evisceration was his case.

Scarpetta has seen them together on more than one occasion. Joe is engaged, but that doesn’t seem to stop him from being quite friendly with attractive female students, no matter how much the Academy discourages it. So far, he hasn’t been caught committing an unredeemable infraction, and, in a way, she wishes he had been. She’d love to get rid of him.

“We get her to play the perp,” he explains quietly, excitedly. “She looks so innocent, so sweet. So we take two students at a time, have them work a homicide, the victim shot multiple times while on the toilet. This is in one of the motel rooms, of course, and Jenny comes in acting all broken up, hysterical. The dead guy’s daughter. We’ll see if the students let their guard down.”

Scarpetta is silent.

“Of course, there’ll be a few cops at the scene. Let’s say they’re looking around, assuming the perp’s fled. Point is, we’ll see if anybody’s smart enough to make sure this pretty young thing isn’t the person who just blew the guy away, her father, while he was taking a dump. And guess what? She is. They let their guard down, she pulls a gun and starts shooting, gets taken out. And voilà. A classic suicide by police.”

“You can ask Jenny yourself after class,” Scarpetta says as she tries to figure out why the scenario seems familiar.

Joe is obsessed with hell scenes, an innovation of Marino’s, extreme mock crime scenes that are supposed to mirror the real risks and unpleasantries of real death. She sometimes thinks Joe should give up forensic pathology and sell his soul to Hollywood. If he has a soul. The scenario he has just proposed reminds her of something.

“Pretty good, huh?” he says. “It could happen in real life.”

Then she remembers. It did happen in real life.

“We had a case in Virginia like that,” she recalls. “When I was chief.”

“Really?” he says, amazed. “Guess there’s nothing new under the sun.”

“And by the way, Joe,” she says. “In most cases of seppuku, of hari-kari, the cause of death is cardiac arrest due to sudden cardiac collapse due to a sudden drop in intra-abdominal pressure due to sudden evisceration. Not exsanguination.”

“Your case? The one in there?” He indicates the classroom.

“Marino’s and mine. From years back. And one other thing,” she adds. “It’s a suicide, not a homicide.”

12

The Citation X flies south at just under mach one as Lucy uploads files on a virtual private network that is so firewall-protected not even Homeland Security can break in.

At least, she believes her information infrastructure is secure. She believes that no hacker, including the government, can monitor the transmissions of classified data generated by the Heterogenous Image Transaction database management system that goes by the acronym HIT. She developed and programmed HIT herself. The government doesn’t know about it, she is sure of it. Few people do, she is sure of it. HIT is proprietary, and she could sell the software easily, but she doesn’t need the money, having made her fortune years ago from other software development, mostly from some of the same search engines she is conducting through cyberspace this minute, looking for any violent deaths that might have occurred in a South Florida business of any description.

Other than homicides in the expected convenience and liquor stores, massage parlors and topless clubs, she has found no violent crime, unsolved or otherwise, that might verify what Basil Jenrette told Benton. However, there once was a business called The Christmas Shop. It was located at the intersection of A1A and East Las Olas Boulevard, along a strip of tacky touristy boutiques and cafés and ice-cream joints on the beach. Two years ago, The Christmas Shop was sold to a chain called Beach Bums that specializes in T-shirts, swimwear and souvenirs.

It is hard for Joe to believe how many cases Scarpetta has worked in what is a relatively brief career. Forensic pathologists rarely land their first job until they are thirty, assuming their arduous educational track is continuous. Added to her six years of postgraduate medical training were three more for law school. By the time she was thirty-five, she was the chief of the most prominent medical examiner system in the United States. Unlike most chiefs, she wasn’t just an administrator. She did autopsies, thousands of them.

Most of them are in a database that is supposed to be accessible to her only, and she’s even gotten federal grants to conduct various research studies on violence—sexual violence, drug-related violence, domestic violence—all kinds of violence. In quite a number of her old cases, Marino, a local homicide detective when she was chief, was the lead investigator. So she has his reports in the database as well. It’s a candy store. It’s a fountain spewing fine champagne. It’s orgasmic.

Joe scrolls through case C328-93, the police suicide that is the model for this afternoon’s hell scene. He clicks on the scene photographs again, thinking about Jenny. In the real case, the trigger-happy daughter is facedown in a pool of blood on the living-room floor. She was shot three times, once in the abdomen, twice in the chest, and he thinks about the way she was dressed when she killed her daddy while he was on the toilet and then put on an act in front of the police before pulling out her pistol again. She died barefoot, in a pair of cutoff blue jeans and a T-shirt. She wasn’t wearing panties or a bra. He clicks to her autopsy photographs, not as interested in what she looked like with a Y incision as in how she looked naked on the cold, steel table. She was only fifteen when the police shot her dead, and he thinks of Jenny.

He looks up, smiles at her from the other side of his desk. She has been sitting patiently, waiting for instructions. He opens a desk drawer and gets out a Glock nine-millimeter, drops out the magazine, pulls back the slide to make sure the chamber is clear, and pushes the pistol across the desk to her.

“You ever shot a gun before?” he asks his newest teacher’s pet.

She has the cutest turned-up nose and huge eyes the color of milk chocolate, and he imagines her naked and dead like the girl in the scene photograph on his screen.

“I grew up with guns,” she says. “What’s that you’re looking at, if you don’t mind my asking.”

“E-mail,” he says, and not telling the truth has never bothered him.

He rather likes not telling the truth, likes it far more than dislikes it. Truth isn’t always truth. What is true? What is true is what he decides is true. It’s all a matter of interpretation. Jenny cranes her head to get a better look at what’s on his screen.

“Cool. People e-mail entire case files to you.”

“Sometimes,” he says, clicking to a different photograph, and the color printer behind his desk starts up. “What we’re doing is classified,” he then says. “Can I trust you?”

“Of course, Dr. Amos. I completely understand classified. If I didn’t, I’m training for the wrong profession.”

A color photograph of the dead girl in a pool of blood on the living-room floor slides into the printer tray. Joe turns around to get it, looks it over, hands it to her.

“That’s going to be you this afternoon,” he says.

“I hope not literally,” she teases.

“And this is your gun.” He looks at the Glock in front of her on the desk. “Where do you propose you hide it?”

She looks at the photograph, not fazed by it, and asks, “Where did she hide it?”

“You can’t see it in the photograph,” he replies. “A pocketbook, which, by the way, should have cued somebody. She finds her father dead, supposedly, calls nine-one-one, opens the door when the cops get there and has her pocketbook. She’s hysterical, never left the house, so why’s she walking around with her pocketbook?”

“That’s what you want me to do.”

“The pistol goes in your pocketbook. At some point, you reach in for tissues because you’re boo-hooing, and you pull the gun and start shooting.”

“Anything else?”

“Then you’re going to get killed. Try to look pretty.”

She smiles. “Anything else?”

“The way she’s dressed.” He looks at her, tries to show it in his eyes, what he wants.

She knows.

“I don’t have the exact same thing,” she replies, playing him a little, acting naïve.

She’s anything but, probably been fucking since kindergarten.

“Well, Jenny, see if you can approximate. Shorts, T-shirt, no shoes or socks.”

“She doesn’t have on underwear, looks to me.”

“Then there’s that.”

“She looks like a slut.”

“Okay. Then look like a slut,” he says.

Jenny thinks this is very funny.

“I mean, you are a slut, aren’t you?” he asks, his small, dark eyes looking at her. “If not, I’ll ask somebody else. This hell scene requires a slut.”

“You don’t need someone else.”

“Oh, really.”

“Really,” she says.

She turns around, glancing at the shut door as if worried that someone might walk in. He doesn’t say anything.

“We could get in trouble,” she says.

“We won’t.”

“I don’t want to get kicked out,” she says.

“You want to be a death investigator when you grow up.”

She nods, looking at him, coolly playing with the top button of her Academy polo shirt. She looks good in it. He likes the way she fills it.

“I’m a grown-up,” she says.

“You’re from Texas,” he then says, looking at the way she fills her polo shirt, the way she fills her snug-fitting khaki cargo pants. “They grow things big in Texas, don’t they.”

“Why, are you talking dirty to me, Dr. Amos?” she drawls.

He imagines her dead. He imagines her in a pool of blood, shot dead on the floor. He imagines her naked on the steel table. One of life’s fables is that dead bodies can’t be sexy. Naked is naked if the person looks good and hasn’t been dead long. To say a man has never had a thought about a beautiful woman who happens to be dead is a joke. Cops pin photographs on their cork-boards, pictures of female victims who are exceptionally fine. Male medical examiners give lectures to cops and show them certain pictures, deliberately pick the ones they’ll like. Joe has seen it. He knows what guys do.

“You do a good job getting killed in the hell scene,” he says to Jenny, “and I’ll cook dinner for you. I’m a wine connoisseur.”

“You’re also engaged.”

“She’s at a conference in Chicago. Maybe she’ll get snowed in.”

Jenny gets up. She looks at her watch, then looks at him.

“Who was your teacher’s pet before me?” she asks.

“You’re special,” he says.

13

An hour out from Signature Aviation in Fort Lauderdale, Lucy gets up for another coffee and a bathroom break. The sky beyond the jet’s small oval windows is overcast with mounting storm clouds.

She settles back into her leather seat and executes more queries of Broward County tax assessment and real-estate records, news stories and anything else she can think of to see what she can find out about the former Christmas shop. From the mid-seventies to the early nineties, it was a diner called Rum Runner’s. For two years after that, it was a fudge and ice-cream parlor called Coco Nuts. Then, in 2000, the building was rented to a Mrs. Florrie Anna Quincy, the widow of a wealthy landscaper from West Palm Beach.

Lucy’s fingers rest lightly on the keyboard as she scans a feature article that ran in the Miami Herald not long after The Christmas Shop opened. It says that Mrs. Quincy grew up in Chicago, where her father was a commodities broker, and every Christmas he volunteered as a Santa at Macy’s department store.

“Christmas was just the most magical time in our lives,” Mrs. Quincy said. “My father’s love was lumber futures, and maybe because he grew up in the logging country of Alberta, Canada, we had Christmas trees in the house all year round, big potted spruces decorated with white lights and little carved figures. I guess that’s why I like to have Christmas all year round.”

Her shop is an astonishing collection of ornaments, music boxes, Santas of every description, winter wonderlands and tiny electric trains running on tiny tracks. One has to be careful moving down the aisles of her fragile, fanciful world, and it is easy to forget there are sunshine, palm trees and the ocean right outside her door. Since opening The Christmas Shop last month, Mrs. Quincy says there has been quite a lot of traffic, but far more customers come to browse than to buy….

Lucy sips her coffee and eyes the cream-cheese bagel on the burlwood tray. She is hungry but afraid to eat. She thinks about food constantly, obsessed with her weight, knowing that dieting won’t help. She can starve herself all she wants and it won’t change the way she looks and feels. Her body was her most finely tuned machine, and it has betrayed her.

She executes another search and tries Marino on the phone built into the armrest of her seat as she scans more results from her queries. He answers but the reception is bad.

“I’m in the air,” she says, reading what is on her screen.

“When you going to learn to fly that thing?”

“Probably never. Don’t have time to get all the ratings. I barely have time for helicopters these days.”

She doesn’t want to have time. The more she flies, the more she loves it, and she doesn’t want to love it anymore. Medication has to be explained to the FAA unless it is some innocuous over-the-counter remedy, and the next time she goes to the flight surgeon to renew her medical certificate, she will have to list Dostinex. Questions will be raised. Government bureaucrats will rip apart her privacy and probably find some excuse to revoke her license. The only way around it is to never take the medicine again, and she has tried to do without it for a while. Or she can give up flying completely.

“I’ll stick to Harleys,” Marino is saying.

“I just got a tip. Not about that case. A different one, maybe.”

“From who?” he says suspiciously.

“Benton. Apparently, some patient passed along a story about some unsolved murder in Las Olas.”

She is careful how she words it. Marino hasn’t been told about PREDATOR. Benton doesn’t want him involved, fearing Marino wouldn’t understand or be helpful. Marino’s philosophy about violent offenders is to rough them up, to lock them up, to put them to death as cruelly as possible. He is probably the last person on the planet to care if a murderous psychopath is really mentally ill as opposed to evil, or if a pedophile can no more help his proclivities than a psychotic individual can help his delusions. Marino thinks psychological insights and explorations in structural and functional brain imaging are a crock of shit.

“Apparently, this patient claims that maybe two and a half years ago, a woman was raped and murdered in The Christmas Shop,” Lucy is explaining to Marino, worried that one of these days she will let it slip that Benton is evaluating inmates.

Marino knows that McLean, the teaching hospital for Harvard, the model psychiatric hospital with its self-pay Pavillion that caters to the rich and famous, is certainly not a forensic psychiatric institution. If prisoners are being transported there for evaluations, something unusual and clandestine is going on.

“The what?” Marino asks.

She repeats what she just said, adding, “Owned by a Florrie Anna Quincy, white woman, thirty-eight, husband had a bunch of nurseries in West Palm…”

“Trees or kids?”

“Trees. Mostly citrus. The Christmas Shop was around for only two years, from 2000 to 2002.”

Lucy types in more commands and converts data files to text files that she will e-mail to Benton.

“Ever heard of a place called Beach Bums?”

“You’re breaking up on me,” Marino says.

“Hello? Is this better? Marino?”

“I can hear you.”

“That’s the name of the business there now. Mrs. Quincy and her seventeen-year-old daughter, Helen, vanished in July of 2002. I found an article about it in the newspaper. Not much in the way of follow-up, just a small article here and there and nothing at all in the past year.”

“So maybe they turned up and the media didn’t cover it,” Marino replies.

“Nothing I can find would indicate they’re alive and well. In fact, the son tried to have them declared legally dead last spring with no success. Maybe you can check with the Fort Lauderdale police, see if anybody remembers anything about Mrs. Quincy’s and her daughter’s disappearance. I plan to drop by Beach Bums at some point tomorrow.”

“The Fort Lauderdale cops wouldn’t let it go like that without a damn good reason.”

“Let’s find out what it is,” she says.

At the USAir ticket counter, Scarpetta continues to argue.

“It’s impossible,” she says again, about to lose her temper, she’s so frustrated. “Here’s my record location number, my printed receipt. Right here. First class, departure time six-twenty. How can my reservation have been cancelled?”

“Ma’am, it’s right here in the computer. Your reservation was cancelled at two-fifteen.”

“Today?” Scarpetta refuses to believe it.

There must be a mistake.

“Yes, today.”

“That’s impossible. I certainly didn’t call to cancel.”

“Well, someone did.”

“Then rebook it,” Scarpetta says, reaching in her bag for her wallet.

“The flight’s full. I can waitlist you for coach, but there’s seven other people ahead of you.”

Scarpetta reschedules her flight for tomorrow and calls Rose.

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to come back and get me,” Scarpetta says.

“Oh, no. What happened. Weathered out?”

“Somehow my reservation got cancelled. The plane’s overbooked. Rose, did you call for a confirmation earlier?”

“I most certainly did. Around lunchtime.”

“I don’t know what happened,” Scarpetta says, thinking about Benton, about their Valentine’s Day together. “Shit!” she says.

14

The yellow moon is misshapen like an overripe mango, hanging heavy over scrubby trees and weeds and dense shadows. In the uneven light of the moon, Hog can see well enough to make out the thing.

He sees it coming because he knows where to look. For several minutes, he has detected its infrared energy in the Heat Stalker he moves horizontally in the dark in a slow scan, like a wand, like a magic wand. A line of bright-red hatch marks marches across the rear LED window of the lightweight olive-green PVC tube as it detects differences in the surface temperatures of the warm-blooded thing and the earth.

He is Hog, and his body is a thing, and he can leave it on demand and no one can see him. No one can see him now in the middle of the empty night holding the Heat Stalker like a leveler while it detects warmth radiating from living flesh and alerts him with small bright-red marks that flow in single file across the dark glass.

Probably the thing is a raccoon.

Stupid thing. Hog silently talks to it as he sits cross-legged on sandy soil and scans. He glances down at the bright red marks moving across the lens at the rear end of the tube, the front end pointed at the thing. He searches the shadowy berm and feels the ruined old house behind him, feels its pull. His head is thick because of the earplugs, his breathing loud, the way it sounds when you breathe through a snorkel, submerged and silent, nothing but the sound of your own rapid, shallow breaths. He doesn’t like earplugs, but it is important to wear them.

You know what happens now, he silently says to the thing. I guess you don’t know.

He watches the dark, fat shape creep along, low to the ground. It moves like a thick, furry cat, and maybe it is a cat. Slowly, it moves through ragged Bermuda and torpedo grass and sedge, moving in and out of thick shadows beneath the spiny silhouettes of spindly pines and the brittle litter of dead trees. He scans, watching the thing, watching the red marks flow across the lens. The thing is stupid, the breeze blowing the wrong way for it to pick up his scent and be anything but stupid.

He turns off the Heat Stalker and rests it in his lap. He picks up the camouflage-finished Mossberg 835 Ulti-Mag pump, the stock hard and cool against his jaw as he lines up the tritium ghost ring with the thing.

Where you think you’re going? he mocks it.

The thing doesn’t run. Stupid thing.

Go on. Run. See what happens.

It continues its oblivious lumbering pace, low to the ground.

He feels his own heart thud hard and slow, and hears his own rapid breathing as he follows the thing with the glowing green post and squeezes the trigger and the shotgun blast cracks open the quiet night. The thing jerks and goes still in the dirt. He removes the earplugs and listens for a cry or grunt but hears nothing, just distant traffic on South 27 and the gritty sound of his own feet as he gets up and shakes out the cramps in his legs. He slowly ejects the shell, catches it, stuffs it in a pocket and walks through the berm. He pushes the pressure pad on the shotgun’s slide and the SureFire WeaponLight shines down on the thing.

It is a cat, furry and striped with a swollen belly. He nudges it over. It is pregnant, and he considers shooting it again as he listens. There is nothing, not a movement, not a sound, not a sign of any life left. The thing was probably slinking toward the ruined house, looking for food. He thinks about it smelling food. If it thought there was food in the house, then recent occupation is detectable. He ponders this possibility as he presses in the safety and shoulders the shotgun, draping his forearm over the stock like a lumberjack shouldering an ax. He stares at the dead thing and thinks of the carved wooden lumberjack in The Christmas Shop, the big one by the door.

“Stupid thing,” he says, and there is no one to hear him, only the dead thing.

“No, you’re the stupid thing,” God’s voice sounds from behind him.

He takes out the earplugs and turns around. She is there in black, a black, flowing shape in the moonlit night.

“I told you not to do that,” she says.

“No one can hear it out here,” he replies, shifting the shotgun to his other shoulder and seeing the wooden lumberjack as if it is right in front of him.

“I’m not telling you again.”

“I didn’t know you were here.”

“You know where I am if I choose for you to know.”

“I got you the Field & Streams. Two of them. And the paper, the glossy laser paper.”

“I told you to get me six in all, including two Fly Fishing, two Angling Journals.”

“I stole them. It was too hard to get six at once.”

“Then go back. Why are you so stupid?”

She is God. She has an IQ of a hundred and fifty.

“You will do what I say,” she says.

God is a woman, and she is it, and there is no other. She became God after he did the bad thing and was sent away, sent very far away where it was cold and kept snowing, and then he came back and by then, she had somehow become God and she told him he is her Hand. The Hand of God. Hog.

He watches God go away, dissolving in the night. He hears the loud engine as she flies away, flying down the highway. And he wonders if she’ll ever have sex with him again. All the time he thinks about it. When she became God, she wouldn’t have sex with him. Theirs is a holy union, she explains it. She has sex with other people but not with him, because he is her Hand. She laughs at him, says she can’t exactly have sex with her own Hand. It would be the same thing as having sex with herself. And she laughs.

“You were stupid, now weren’t you?” Hog says to the dead pregnant thing in the dirt.

He wants to have sex. He wants it right now as he stares at the dead thing and nudges it with his boot again and thinks about God and what she looks like naked with hands all over her.

I know you want it, Hog.

I do, he says. I want it.

I know where you want to put your hands. I’m right, aren’t I?

Yes.

You want to put them where I let other people put them, don’t you?

I wish you wouldn’t let anybody. Yes, I want it.

She makes him paint the red handprints in places he doesn’t want other people to touch, places where he put his hands when he did the bad thing and was sent away, sent to the cold place where it snows, the place where they put him in the machine and rearranged his molecules.

15

The next morning, Tuesday, clouds pile up from the distant sea and the pregnant dead thing is stiff on the ground and flies have found it.

“Now look what you did. Killed all your children, didn’t you? Stupid thing.”

Hog nudges it with his boot. Flies scatter like sparks. He watches as they buzz back to the gory, coagulated head. He stares at the stiff, dead thing and the flies crawling on it. He stares at it, not bothered by it. He squats beside it, getting close enough to craze the flies again and now he smells it. He gets a whiff of death, a stench that in several days will be overpowering and noticeable an acre away, depending on the wind. Flies will lay their eggs in orifices and the wounds, and soon the carcass will team with maggots, but it won’t bother him. He likes to watch what death does.

He walks off toward the ruined house, the shotgun cradled in his arms. He listens to the distant rumble of traffic on South 27, but there is no reason for anybody to come out here. Eventually, there will be. But now there isn’t. He steps up on the rotting porch and a curling plank gives under his boots, and he shoves open the door, entering a dark, airless space thick with dust. Even on a clear day, it is dark and suffocating inside the house, and this morning it is worse because a thunderstorm is on the way. It is eight o’clock and almost as dark as night inside the house, and he begins to sweat.

“Is that you?” The voice sounds from the darkness, from the rear of the house, where the voice ought to be.

Against a wall is a makeshift table of plywood and cinder blocks, and on top is a small glass fish tank. He points the shotgun at the tank and pushes the pressure pad on the slide, and the xenon light flashes brilliantly on glass and illuminates the black shape of the tarantula inside. It is motionless on sandy dirt and wood chips, poised like a dark hand next to its water sponge and favorite rock. In a corner of the tank, small crickets stir in the light, disturbed by it.

“Come talk to me,” the voice calls out, demanding but weaker than it was not even a day ago.

He isn’t sure if he is glad the voice is alive, but he probably is. He takes the lid off the tank and talks quietly, sweetly, to the spider. Its abdomen is balding and crusty with dried glue and pale yellow blood, and hatred wraps around him as he thinks about why it is bald and what caused it to almost bleed to death. The spider’s hair won’t grow back until he molts, and maybe he will heal and maybe he won’t.

“You know whose fault it is, don’t you?” he says to the spider. “And I did something about it, didn’t I?”

“Come here,” the voice calls out. “Do you hear me?”

The spider doesn’t move. He might die. There’s a good chance he will.

“I’m sorry I’ve been gone so much. I know you must be lonely,” he says to the spider. “I couldn’t take you with me because of your condition. It was a very long drive. Cold, too.”

He reaches inside the glass tank and gently strokes the spider. It barely moves.

“Is that you?” The voice is weaker and hoarse but demanding.

He tries to imagine what it will be like when the voice is gone, and he thinks about the dead thing, stiff and fly-infested on the dirt.

“Is that you?”

He keeps his finger pressed against the pressure pad, and the light points where the shotgun points, illuminating wooden flooring filthy with dirt and the hulls of dried-out insect eggs. His boots move behind the moving light.

“Hello? Who’s there?”

16

Inside the firearms and tool marks lab, Joe Amos zips a Harley-Davidson black leather jacket around an eighty-pound block of ordnance gelatin. On top is a smaller block weighing twenty pounds, and it wears a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses and a black do-rag with a skull-and-bones pattern.

Joe steps back to admire his work. He is pleased but a little tired. He stayed up late with his newest teacher’s pet. He drank too much wine.

“It’s funny, isn’t it,” he says to Jenny.

“Funny but disgusting. You’d better not let him know. I hear he’s not somebody to tangle with,” she says, sitting on a countertop.

“The person not to tangle with is me. I’m thinking of putting red food coloring in a batch. To look more like blood.”

“Cool.”

“Add a little brown, and maybe it will look like it’s decomposing. Maybe find a way to make it stink.”

“You and your hell scenes.”

“My mind never stops. My back hurts,” he says, admiring his work. “I hurt my damn back and I’m suing her.”

The gelatin, an elastic transparent material comprised of denatured animal bone and connective-tissue collagen, isn’t easy to handle, and the blocks he has dressed up were hard as hell to transfer from the ice chests to the back padded wall of the indoor firing range. The lab door is locked. The red light on the wall outside is on, warning that the range is hot.

“All dressed up with no place to go,” he says to the un-appetizing mass.

More properly known as gelatin hydrolysate, it is also used in shampoos and conditioners, lipsticks, protein drinks, arthritis relief formulas and many other products that Joe will never touch the rest of his life. He won’t even kiss his fiancée if she is wearing lipstick, not anymore. Last time he did, he closed his eyes as her lips pressed against his and suddenly he imagined cow, pig and fish shit boiling in a huge pot. He reads labels now. If hydrolyzed animal protein is listed in the ingredients, the item goes into the trash or back on the shelf.

Properly prepared, ordnance gelatin simulates human flesh. It is almost as good a medium as swine tissue, which Joe would prefer. He’s heard of firearms labs that shoot up dead swine to test bullet penetration and expansion in a multitude of different situations. He would rather shoot up a hog. He would rather dress up a big hog carcass to look like a person and let the students riddle it with bullets from different distances and with different weapons and ammunition. That would be a good hell scene. A more hellish one would be to shoot a live hog, but Scarpetta would never allow it. She wouldn’t even hear of the students shooting a dead one.

“It won’t do any good to try to sue her,” Jenny is saying. “She’s also a lawyer.”

“Big shit.”

“Well, from what you tell me, you tried that before and didn’t get anywhere. Anyway, Lucy’s the one with all the money. I hear she thinks she’s something. I’ve never met her. None of us have.”

“You’re not missing anything. One of these days, someone will put her in her place.”

“Like you?”

“Maybe I already am.” He smiles. “I’ll tell you one thing, I’m not leaving here without my share. I deserve something after all the shit she’s put me through.” And now he’s thinking about Scarpetta again. “She treats me like shit.”

“Maybe I’ll meet Lucy before I graduate,” Jenny says thoughtfully, sitting on the counter, staring at him and the gelatin man he has dressed up like Marino.

“They’re all crap,” he says. “The fucking trinity. Well, I’ve got a little surprise for them.”

“What?”

“You’ll see. Maybe I’ll share it with you.”

“What is it?”

“Put it this way,” he says. “I’m getting something out of this. She underestimates me, and that’s a huge mistake. At the end of the day, it’s going to be a lot of laughs.”

Part of his fellowship entails his assisting Scarpetta in the Broward County morgue, where she treats him like a common laborer, forcing him to suture up the bodies after autopsies and count the pills in bottles of prescription drugs that come in with the dead and catalogue personal effects as if he is a lowly morgue assistant and not a doctor. She has made it his responsibility to weigh, measure, photograph and undress the bodies, and to sift through any disgusting mess that might linger in the bottom of a body bag, especially if it is putrid, maggot-infested slop from a floater, or rancid flesh and bones from partially skeletonized remains. Most insulting is the chore of mixing up ten percent ordnance gelatin for the ballistic gelatin blocks used by the scientists and students.

Why? Give me one good reason, he said to Scarpetta when she gave him the assignment last summer.

It’s part of your training, Joe, she replied in her typically unflappable way.

I’m training to be a forensic pathologist, not a lab tech or a cook, he complained.

My method is to train forensic fellows from the ground up, she said. There isn’t anything you shouldn’t be able or willing to do.

Oh. And I suppose you’re going to tell me you’ve made ordnance jelly blocks, that you used to do that when you were getting started, he said.

I still do it and am happy to pass along my favorite recipe, she replied. I prefer Vyse but Kind & Knox Type two-fifty-A will do just fine. Always start with cold water, between seven and ten degrees centigrade, and add the gelatin to the water and not the other way around. Keep stirring, but not vigorously, because you don’t want to introduce air. Add two-point-five milliliters of Foam Eater per twenty-pound block and make sure the mold pan is whistle-clean. For the pièce de résistance, add point-five milliliters of cinnamon oil.

That’s cute.

Cinnamon oil prevents fungus growth, she said.

She wrote out her personal recipe and then an equipment list that included a triple-beam balance, graduated pitcher, paint stirrer, 12cc hypodermic syringe, propionic acid, aquarium hose, aluminum foil, large spoon and so on, and next gave him a Martha Stewart demonstration in the lab kitchen, as if that makes it all fine and dandy when he’s scooping animal-pieces-and-parts powder out of twenty-five-pound drums and weighing and curing and lifting or dragging huge, heavy pans and placing them inside ice chests or the walk-in refrigerator and then making sure the students gather at the indoor range or outdoor rifle deck before the damn things start deteriorating, because they do. They melt like Jell-O and are best when served no longer than twenty minutes after removal from refrigeration, depending on the ambient temperature of the test environment.

He retrieves a window screen from a storage closet and props it flush against the Harley-outfitted blocks of ordnance gelatin, then puts on hearing protectors and protective glasses. He nods for Jenny to do the same. He picks up a stainless-steel Beretta 92, a top-of-the-line double-action pistol with a tritium front post sight. He loads a magazine with 147-grain Speer Gold Dot ammunition, which has six serrations around the rim of the hollowpoint so the projectile will expand or blossom even after passing through clothing as heavy as four layers of denim or a thick leather motorcycle jacket.

What will be different in this test-fire is the mesh pattern produced when the bullet passes through the window screen before ripping through the Harley jacket and buzz-sawing a swath through the chest of Mr. Jell-O, as he calls his ordnance-gelatin test dummies.

He racks back the slide and fires fifteen rounds, imagining Mr. Jell-O is Marino.

17

Palm trees thrash in the wind beyond the conference-room windows. It will rain, Scarpetta thinks. It looks like a bad thunderstorm is headed her way, and Marino is late again and still hasn’t returned her phone calls.

“Good morning and let’s get going,” she says to her staff. “We’ve got a lot to go over, and it’s already quarter of nine.”

She hates being late. She hates it when someone else causes her to be late, and in this instance, it’s Marino. Again, it’s Marino. He is ruining her routines. He is ruining everything.

“This evening, hopefully, I’ll be on a plane, heading to Boston,” she says. “Providing my reservation isn’t magically cancelled again.”

“The airlines are so screwed up,” Joe says. “No wonder they’re all going bankrupt.”

“We’ve been asked to take a look at a Hollywood case, a possible suicide that has some disturbing circumstances associated with it,” she begins.

“There’s one thing I’d like to bring up first,” says Vince, the firearms examiner.

“Go ahead.” Scarpetta slides eight-by-ten photographs out of an envelope and begins passing them around the table.

“Someone was test-firing in the indoor range about an hour ago.” He looks pointedly at Joe. “It wasn’t on the schedule.”

“I meant to reserve the indoor range last night but forgot,” Joe says. “No one was waiting for it.”

“You’ve got to reserve it. It’s the only way we can keep track of…”

“I was trying out a new batch of ballistic gelatin, where I used hot water instead of cold to see if it made any difference in the calibration test. A difference of one centimeter. Good news. It passed.”

“There’s probably a difference of plus or minus one centimeter every time you mix up the damn stuff,” Vince says irritably.

“We aren’t supposed to use any block that isn’t valid. So I’m constantly checking the calibration and trying to perfect it. That requires me to spend a lot of time in the firearms lab. It’s not my choice.”

Joe looks at Scarpetta.

“Ordnance gelatin is one of my assignments.”

He looks at her again.

“I hope you remembered to use stopper blocks before you started pounding the back wall with a lot of fire-power,” Vince says. “I’ve asked you before.”

“You know the rules, Dr. Amos,” Scarpetta says.

In front of his colleagues, she always calls him Dr. Amos instead of Joe. She shows him more respect than he deserves.

“We have to enter everything in the log,” she adds. “Every firearm removed from the reference collection, every round, every test-fire. Our protocols must be followed.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“There are legal implications. Most of our cases end up in court,” she adds.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“All right.” She tells them about Johnny Swift.

She tells them that in early November he had surgery on his wrists, and soon after came to Hollywood to stay with his brother. They were identical twins. The day before Thanksgiving, the brother, Laurel, went out shopping and returned to the house at approximately four thirty p.m. After carrying in the groceries, he discovered Dr. Swift on the couch, dead from a shotgun wound to the chest.

“I sort of remember this case,” Vince says. “It was in the news.”

“Well, I happen to remember Dr. Swift very well,” Joe says. “He used to call Dr. Self. Once when I was on her show, he called in, gave her hell about Tourette’s syndrome, and I happen to agree with her, usually nothing more than an excuse for bad behavior. He rambled on about neurochemical dysfunction, about abnormalities of the brain. Quite the expert,” he says sarcastically.

Nobody is interested in Joe’s appearances on Dr. Self’s show. Nobody is interested in his appearances on any show.

“What about an ejected shell and the weapon?” Vince asks Scarpetta.

“According to the police report, Laurel Swift noted a shotgun on the floor some three feet behind the back of the couch. No shell casing.”

“Well, that’s a bit unusual. He shoots himself in the chest and then somehow manages to toss the shotgun over the back of the couch?” It is Joe talking again. “I’m not seeing a scene photograph with the shotgun.”

“The brother claims he saw the shotgun on the floor behind the couch. I say claims. We’ll get to that part in a minute,” Scarpetta says.

“What about gunshot residue on him?”

“I’m sorry Marino isn’t here, since he’s our investigator in this case and working closely with the Hollywood police,” she replies, keeping her feelings about him barricaded. “All I know is that Laurel’s clothing wasn’t tested for GSR.”

“What about his hands?”

“Positive for GSR. But he claims he touched him, shook him, got blood on him. So theoretically, that could explain it. A few more details. His wrists were in splints when he died, his blood alcohol point-one, and according to the police report, there were numerous empty wine bottles in the kitchen.”

“We sure he was drinking alone?”

“We’re not sure of anything.”

“Sounds like holding a heavy shotgun might not have been easy for him if he’d just had surgery.”

“Possibly,” Scarpetta says. “And if you can’t use your hands, then what?”

“Your feet.”

“It can be done. I tried it with my twelve-gauge Remington. Unloaded,” she adds a little humor.

She tried it herself because Marino didn’t show up. He didn’t call. He didn’t care.

“I don’t have photographs of the demonstration,” she says, diplomatic enough not to add that the reason she doesn’t have them is because Marino didn’t show up. “Suffice it to say the blast would have kicked the gun back, or maybe his foot jerked and kicked the gun back, and the shotgun would have fallen off the back of the couch. Saying he killed himself. No abrasions on either of his big toes, by the way.”

“A contact wound?” Vince asks.

“Density of soot on his shirt, the abraded margin and diameter and shape of the wound, the absence of petal marks from the wad, which was still in the body, are consistent with a contact wound. Problem is, we have a gross inconsistency, which, in my opinion, is due to the medical examiner relying on a radiologist for a distance determination.”

“Who?”

“It’s Dr. Bronson’s case,” she says, and several of the scientists groan.

“Jesus, he’s as old as the damn Pope. When the hell’s he going to retire?”

“The Pope died,” Joe jokes.

“Thank you, CNN news flash.”

“The radiologist decided the shotgun wound is a, quote, distant wound,” Scarpetta resumes. “A distance of at least three feet. Uh-oh. Now we have a homicide, because you couldn’t possibly hold the barrel of a shotgun three feet from your own chest, now could you?”

Several clicks of the mouse, and a digital x-ray of Johnny Swift’s fatal shotgun blast is sharply displayed on the smart board. Shotgun pellets look like a storm of tiny white bubbles floating through the ghostly shapes of ribs.

“The pellets are spread out,” Scarpetta points out, “and to give the radiologist a little credit, the spread of the pellets inside the chest is consistent with a range of three or four feet, but what I think we’re dealing with here is a perfect example of the billiard-ball effect.”

She clears the x-ray off the smart board and collects several styluses, different ones for different colors.

“The leading pellets slowed when they entered the body and were then hit by the trailing pellets, causing colliding pellets to ricochet and spread out into a pattern that simulates distant-range fire,” she explains, drawing red ricocheting pellets hitting blue pellets like billiard balls. “Therefore simulating a distant gunshot wound, when in fact, it wasn’t a distant shot at all but a contact wound.”

“None of the neighbors heard a shotgun blast?”

“Apparently not.”

“Maybe a lot of people were out on the beach or out of town for the Thanksgiving holiday.”

“Maybe.”

“What kind of shotgun, and whose was it?”

“All we can tell is it’s a twelve-gauge, based on the pellets,” Scarpetta says. “Apparently, the shotgun disappeared before the police showed up.”

18

Ev Christian is awake and sitting on a mattress that is black with what she by now believes is old blood.

Scattered about the filthy floor inside the small, filthy room with its caving ceiling and water-stained wallpaper are magazines. She sees poorly without her glasses and can barely make out the pornographic covers. She barely makes out soda-pop bottles and fast-food wrappers scattered about. Between the mattress and the splintery wall is a small pink Keds tennis shoe, a girl’s size. Ev has picked it up countless times and held it, wondering what it means and who it once belonged to, worried the girl is dead. Sometimes Ev tucks the shoe behind her when he comes in, fearful he will take it from her. It is all she has.

She never sleeps longer than an hour or two at a stretch and has no idea how much time has passed. There is no such thing as time. Gray light fills the broken window on the other side of the room, and she can’t see the sun. She smells rain.

She doesn’t know what he has done with Kristin and the boys. She doesn’t know what he has done to them. She dimly remembers the first hours, those awful, unreal hours when he brought her food and water and stared at her from the darkness, and he was as dark as the darkness, dark like a dark spirit, hovering in the doorway.

How does it feel? he said to her in a soft, cold voice. How does it feel to know you’re going to die?

It is always dark inside the room. It is so much darker when he is in it.

I’m not afraid. You can’t touch my soul.

Say you’re sorry.

It’s not too late to repent. God will forgive even the most vile sin if you humble yourself and repent.

God is a woman. I am her Hand. Say you’re sorry.

Blasphemy. Shame on you. I’ve done nothing to be sorry about.

I’ll teach you shame. You’ll say you’re sorry just like she did.

Kristin?

Then he was gone, and Ev heard voices from another part of the house. She couldn’t make out what they were saying, but he was talking to Kristin, must have been. He was talking to a woman. Ev really couldn’t hear it, but she heard them talking. She could not make out what they said, and she remembers feet scuffing and voices on the other side of the wall, and then she heard Kristin, knew it was her. When Ev thinks about it now, she wonders if she dreamed it.

Kristin! Kristin! I’m right here! I’m right here! Don’t you dare hurt her!

She hears her own voice in her head, but it might have been a dream.

Kristin? Kristin? Answer me! Don’t you dare hurt her!

Then she heard talking again, so maybe it was all right. But Ev’s not sure. She might have dreamed it. She might have dreamed she heard his boots moving down the hallway and the front door shutting. All this might have taken place in minutes, maybe hours. Maybe she heard a car engine. Maybe it was a dream, a delusion. Ev sat in the dark, her heart flying as she listened for Kristin and the boys and heard nothing. She called out until her throat was on fire and she could barely see or breathe.

Daylight came and went, and his dark shape would appear with paper cups of water and something to eat, and his shape would stand and watch her, and she could not see his face. She has never seen his face, not even the first time, when he came into the house. He wears a black hood with holes cut in it for his eyes, a hood like a black pillowcase, long and loose around his shoulders. His hooded shape likes to poke her with the barrel of the shotgun as if she is an animal in the zoo, as if he is curious about what she will do if he pokes her. He pokes her in her private places and watches what she will do.

Shame on you, Ev says when he pokes her. You can harm my flesh but you can’t touch my soul. My soul belongs to God.

She isn’t here. I am her Hand. Say you’re sorry.

My God is a jealous God. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

She isn’t here, and he pokes her with the gun barrel, sometimes pokes her so hard it leaves perfect blackish-blue circles on her flesh.

Say you’re sorry, he says.

Ev sits on the stinking, rotting mattress. It has been used before, used horribly, stiff and stained black, and she sits on it inside the stinking, airless, trash-strewn room, listening and trying to think, listening and praying and screaming for help. No one answers. No one hears her, and she wonders where she could be. Where is she that no one can hear her scream?

She can’t escape because of the clever way he bent and twisted coat hangers around her wrists and ankles with ropes through them and looped over a rafter in the falling-down ceiling, as if she is some sort of grotesque marionette, bruised and covered with insect bites and rashes, her naked body itching and racked with pain. With effort, she can get to her feet. She can move off the mattress to relieve her bladder and bowels. When she does, the pain is so searing, she almost faints.

He does everything in the dark. He can see in the dark. She hears his breathing in the dark. He is a black shape. He is Satan.

“Help me God,” she says to the broken window, to the gray sky beyond, to the God beyond the sky, somewhere in His heaven. “Please God help me.”

19

Scarpetta hears the distant roar of a motorcycle with very loud pipes.

She tries to concentrate as the motorcycle gets closer, cruising past the building toward the faculty parking lot. She thinks about Marino and wonders if she is going to have to fire him. She’s not sure she could.

She is explaining that there were two phones inside Laurel Swift’s house and both of them were unplugged, the cords missing. Laurel had left his cell phone in his car and says he was unable to find his brother’s cell phone, so he had no way to call for help. Panicking, Laurel fled and flagged somebody down. He didn’t return to the house until the police arrived, and by then the shotgun was gone.

“This is information I got from Dr. Bronson,” Scarpetta says. “I’ve talked to him several times and I’m sorry I don’t have a better grasp of the details.”

“The phone cords. Have they ever shown up?”

“I don’t know,” Scarpetta says, because Marino hasn’t briefed her.

“Johnny Swift could have removed them to make sure no one could call for help in case he didn’t die right away, assuming he’s a suicide,” Joe offers, another one of his creative scenarios.

Scarpetta doesn’t answer because she knows nothing about the phone cords beyond what Dr. Bronson relayed to her in his vague, somewhat disjointed way.

“Anything else missing from the house? Anything besides the phone cords, the decedent’s cell phone and the shotgun? As if that’s not enough.”

“You’ll have to ask Marino,” she says.

“I believe he’s here. Unless someone else has a motorcycle as loud as the space shuttle.”

“I’m surprised Laurel hasn’t been charged with murder, you want my opinion,” Joe says.

“You can’t charge someone with murder when the manner of death hasn’t been determined,” Scarpetta replies. “The manner is still pending, and there isn’t sufficient evidence to change it to suicide or homicide or accident, although I certainly fail to see how this is an accident. If the death isn’t resolved to Dr. Bronson’s satisfaction, he’ll eventually change the manner to undetermined.”

Heavy footsteps sound on carpet in the hallway.

“What happened to common sense?” Joe says.

“You don’t determine manner of death based on common sense,” Scarpetta says, and she wishes he could keep his unwelcome comments to himself.

The conference-room door opens, and Pete Marino walks in dressed in black jeans, black leather boots, a black leather vest with the Harley logo on the back, his usual garb, carrying a briefcase and a box of Krispy Kreme donuts. He ignores Scarpetta as he sits in his usual chair next to hers and scoots the box of donuts across the table.

“I sure wish we could test the brother’s clothing for GSR, get our hands on whatever he was wearing when he was shot,” Joe says, leaning back in his chair the way he does when he’s about to pontificate, and he tends to pontificate more than usual when Marino is around. “Take a look at them on soft x-ray, the Faxitron, SEM/spectrometry.”

Marino stares at Joe as if he might hit him.

“Of course, it’s possible to get trace amounts on your person from sources other than a gunshot. Plumbing materials, batteries, automobile greases, paints. Just like in my lab practicum last month,” Joe says as he plucks out a chocolate-iced donut that is smashed, most of its icing stuck to the box. “You know what happened to them?”

He licks his fingers as he looks across the table at Marino.

“That was quite a practicum,” Marino says. “Wonder where you got the idea.”

“What I asked is, do you know what happened to the brother’s clothes,” Joe says.

“I think you been watching too many fantasy forensic shows,” Marino says, his big face staring at him. “Too much Harry Potter policing on your big flat-screen TV. Think you’re a forensic pathologist, or almost one, a lawyer, a scientist, a crime-scene investigator, a cop, Captain Kirk and the Easter Bunny all rolled up in one.”

“By the way, yesterday’s hell scene was a screaming success,” Joe says. “Too bad all of you missed it.”

“Well, what is the story about the clothes, Pete?” Vince asks Marino. “We know what he had on when he found his brother’s body?”

“What he had on, according to him, was nothing,” Marino says. “Supposedly, he came in through the kitchen door, put the groceries on the counter, then went straight back to the bedroom to pee. Supposedly. Then he took a shower because he had to work at his restaurant that night and happened to look out the doorway and saw the shotgun on the carpet behind the couch. At this point, he was naked, so he says.”

“Sounds like a lot of crap to me.” Joe talks with his mouth full.

“My personal opinion is it’s probably a robbery that got interrupted,” Marino says. “Or something got interrupted. A rich doctor maybe gets tangled up with the wrong person. Anybody seen my Harley jacket? Black with a skull and bones on one shoulder, an American flag on the other.”

“Where did you have it last?”

“I took it off in the hangar the other day when Lucy and me were doing an aerial. Came back, it was gone.”

“I haven’t seen it.”

“Neither have I.”

“Shit. That thing cost me. And the patches are custom. Goddamn it. If someone stole it…”

“Nobody steals around here,” Joe says.

“Oh yeah? What about stealing ideas?” Marino glares at him. “And that reminds me,” he says to Scarpetta, “while we’re on the subject of hell scenes…”

“We’re not on the subject,” she says.

“I came here this morning with a few things to say about them.”

“Another time.”

“I got some good ones, left a file on your desk,” Marino says to her. “Give you something interesting to think about during your vacation. Especially since you’ll probably get snowed in up there, we’ll probably see you again in the spring.”

She controls her irritation, tries to keep it tucked into a secret place where she hopes no one can see it. He is deliberately disrupting staff meeting and treating her the same way he did some fifteen years ago when she was the new chief medical examiner of Virginia, a woman in a world where women didn’t belong, a woman with an attitude, Marino decided, because she has an M.D. and a law degree.

“I think the Swift case would be a damn good hell scene,” Joe says. “GSR and x-ray spectrometry and other findings tell two different stories. See if the students figure it out. Bet they’ve never heard of the billiard-ball effect.”

“I didn’t ask the peanut gallery.” Marino raises his voice. “Anybody hear me ask the peanut gallery?”

“Well, you know my opinion about your creativity,” Joe says to him. “Frankly, it’s dangerous.”

“I don’t give a shit about your opinion.”

“We’re lucky the Academy isn’t bankrupt. That would have been one hell of an expensive settlement,” Joe says, as if it never has occurred to him that one of these days Marino might knock him across the room. “Real lucky after what you did.”

Last summer, one of Marino’s mock crime scenes traumatized a student who then quit the Academy, threatened to sue and fortunately was never heard from again. Scarpetta and her staff are paranoid about allowing Marino to participate in training, whether it is mock scenes, hellish or otherwise, or even classroom lectures.

“Don’t think what happened doesn’t enter my mind when I’m creating hell scenes,” Joe goes on.

“Hell scenes you create?” Marino declares. “You mean all those ideas you stole from me?”

“I believe that’s called sour grapes. I don’t need to steal anyone’s ideas, certainly not yours.”

“Oh really? You think I don’t recognize my own shit? You don’t know enough to come up with the kind of shit I do, Dr. Almost a Forensic Pathologist.”

“That’s it,” Scarpetta says. She raises her voice. “That’s enough.”

“I happen to have a great one of a body found in what appears to be a drive-by shooting,” Joe says, “but when the bullet’s recovered, it has an unusual waffle or mesh pattern in the lead because the victim was actually shot through a window screen, his body dumped…”

“That’s mine!” Marino slams his fist down on the table.

20

The Seminole belongs to a beat-up white pickup truck filled with ears of corn, parked some distance from the gas pumps. Hog has been watching him for a while.

“Some motherfucker took my fucking wallet, my cell phone, I think maybe when I was in the fucking shower,” the man is saying on the pay phone, standing with his back to the CITGO station and all the eighteen-wheelers rumbling in and out.

Hog doesn’t show his amusement as he listens to the man rant and rave about overnighting again, complaining and cursing because he’ll have to sleep in the cab of his truck, has no phone, no money for a motel. He doesn’t even have money for a shower, and anyway, a shower has gone up to five bucks, and that’s a lot to pay for a shower when nothing comes with it, not even soap. Some of the men double up and get a discount, disappearing behind an unpainted privacy fence on the west side of the CITGO food mart, piling their clothes and shoes on a bench inside the fence before stepping into a tiny concrete space dimly lit with a single showerhead and a big, rusty drain in the middle of the floor.

It is always wet inside the shower. The shower head always drips, and the water handles screech. The men carry in their own soap, shampoo, toothbrushes and toothpaste, usually in plastic bags. They bring their own towels. Hog has never showered in there, but he’s looked at the men’s clothes, figuring out what might be in the pockets. Money. Cell phones. Sometimes drugs. Women shower in a similar arrangement on the east side of the food mart. They never go in two at a time, no matter the discount, and are in a nervous hurry when they shower, shamed by their nakedness and terrified that someone will walk in on them, that a man will, a big, powerful man who can do what he wants.

Hog dials the 800 number on the green card he keeps folded in his back pocket, a rectangular card maybe eight inches long with a large hole and a slit in one end so it can be attached to a door handle. Printed on the card is information and a cartoon of an animated citrus fruit wearing a tropical shirt and sunglasses. He is doing God’s will. He is the Hand of God doing God’s work. God has an IQ of a hundred and fifty.

“Thank you for calling the Citrus Canker Eradication Program,” the familiar recording says. “Your call may be monitored for quality.”

The canned female voice goes on to say that if he is calling to report damage in Palm Beach, Dade or Broward Counties or Monroe to please dial the following number. He watches the Seminole climb into his pickup truck, and his red-plaid shirt reminds him of a lumber-jack, the carved one by the front door of The Christmas Shop. He dials the number the recorded voice gave him.

“Department of Agriculture,” a woman answers.

“I need to speak to a citrus inspector, please,” he says as he stares at the Seminole and thinks about alligator wrestling.

“What may I help you with?”

“Are you an inspector?” he asks as he thinks of the alligator he saw about an hour ago on the bank of the narrow canal that runs along South 27.

He took it as a good sign. The gator was at least five feet long and very dark and dry, and not interested in the big lumber trucks rumbling by. He would have pulled over if there had been any place to do it. He would have watched the gator, studied the way it fearlessly handles life, quiet and calm but poised to flash into the water or grab its unsuspecting prey and drag it down to the bottom of the canal, where it would drown and rot and be eaten. He would have watched the gator for a long time, but he couldn’t safely get off the highway, and he is on a mission.

“Do you have something to report?” the woman’s voice is asking over the line.

“I work for a lawn service and happened to notice citrus canker in a yard about a block from where I was cutting the grass yesterday.”

“Can you give me the address?”

He gives her an address in the West Lake Park area.

“May I have your name?”

“I’d rather report this anonymously. I could get in trouble with my boss.”

“All right. I’d like to ask you a few questions. Did you actually enter this yard where you think you spotted the canker?”

“It’s an open yard, so I walked in because there are a lot of really nice trees and hedges and a lot of grass, and I was thinking maybe I could do some work there if they needed anyone. Then I noticed the suspicious-looking leaves. Several of the trees have tiny lesions on their leaves.”

“Did you notice a watery-looking margin around any of these lesions?”

“It’s my impression these trees were recently infected, which is probably why your routine inspections have missed them. What worries me is the yards on either side. They have citrus that in my estimation are less than nineteen hundred feet from the infected ones, meaning they’re probably infected, too, and the citrus in other yards beyond that in my estimation are also less than nineteen hundred feet away. And on and on throughout the neighborhood. So you can understand my concern.”

“What makes you think our routine inspections have missed the properties you’re mentioning?”

“Nothing to indicate you’ve been there. I’ve been working with citrus trees down here for a long time, working with professional lawn services most of my life. I’ve seen the worst of the worst, entire orchards that had to be burned. People wiped out.”

“Did you notice any lesions on any of the fruit?”

“As I’ve been explaining, it looks like the canker’s in the early stages, very early stages. I’ve seen entire orchards burned because of the canker. People’s lives ruined.”

“When you walked into the yard where you think you saw citrus canker, did you disinfect after you left?” she asks, and he doesn’t like her tone.

He doesn’t like her. She’s stupid and tyrannical.

“Of course I deconned. I’ve been in the lawn-care business for a long time. I always spray myself and my tools with GX-1027, according to regulation. I know all about what happens. I’ve seen entire commercial orchards destroyed, burned up and abandoned. People ruined.”

“Excuse me…”

“Very bad things happen.”

“Excuse me…”

“People need to take the canker seriously,” Hog says.

“What’s the registration number for your vehicle, the one you use for your lawn service? I’m assuming you have a yellow-and-black regulatory sticker on the left side of the windshield? I need that number.”

“My number’s irrelevant,” he says to the inspector, who thinks she’s so much more important and powerful than he. “The vehicle belongs to my boss and I’ll get in trouble if he knows I made this call. If people find out his lawn service reported citrus canker that’s probably going to result in every citrus tree in the neighborhood being eradicated, what do you think will happen to our lawn-care business?”

“I understand, sir. But it’s important I have your decal number for our records. And I really would like a way to contact you, if necessary.”

“No,” he says. “I’ll get fired.”

21

The CITGO station is getting busy with truckers who park their semis behind the food mart and off to the side of the Chickee Hut restaurant, line them up at the edge of the woods and sleep in them and probably have sex in them.

The truckers eat at the Chickee Hut, which is misspelled because the people who come here are too ignorant to know how to spell chikee and probably don’t even know what it is. Chikee is a Seminole word, and even the Seminoles can’t spell it.

The ignorant truckers live from mile to mile and pull over here to spend their money at the food mart, where there is plenty of diesel fuel, beer, hotdogs and cigars, and a selection of folding knives in a glass case. They can play pool in the Golden Tee game room and get their trucks repaired at the CB antenna or tire services. The CITGO is a full-service stop out in the middle of nothing, where people come and go and mind their own business. Nobody bothers Hog. They barely look at him, so many people in and out, hardly anybody to see him twice, except the guy who works in the Chickee Hut restaurant.

It is behind a chain-link fence at the edge of the parking lot. Signs posted on the fence announce that solicitors will be prosecuted and the only dogs allowed are K9s, and wildlife can enter at its own risk. There is plenty of wildlife at night, but Hog wouldn’t know about it first-hand because he doesn’t waste money in the game room, not on pool or the jukebox. He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t smoke. He doesn’t want sex with any of the women at the CITGO.

They are disgusting in skimpy shorts and tight tops, their faces made harsh by too much cheap makeup and too much sun. They sit in the open-air restaurant or at the bar, which is nothing but a roof thatched with palmetto leaves and a scarred wooden counter lined with eight stools. They eat dinner specials like BBQ ribs and meat-loaf and country-fried steak, and they drink. The food is good and cooked right there on the premises. Hog likes the trucker burger, and it’s only three ninety-five. A grilled cheese is three dollars and a quarter. Cheap, disgusting women, bad things happen to women like that. They deserve it.

They want it.

They tell everyone.

“I’ll have a grilled cheese to go,” Hog says to the man behind the bar. “And a trucker burger for here.”

The man has a big belly and wears a soiled white apron. He is busy popping caps off dripping bottles of beer that he keeps on ice inside tubs. The man with the big belly has waited on him before but never seems to remember him.

“You want the grilled cheese the same time as your burger?” he asks, sliding two bottles of beer closer to a trucker and his lady who are already drunk.

“Just make sure the grilled cheese is wrapped to go.”

“I asked you if you wanted them at the same time.” He isn’t annoyed but rather indifferent about it.

“That would be fine.”

“What do you want to drink?” the man with the big belly asks as he opens another beer.

“Plain water.”

“Now what the hell is plain water?” the drunk trucker asks loudly as his lady giggles and presses her breast against his big, tattooed arm. “Water you get on an air-plane?”

“Just plain water,” Hog says to the man behind the bar.

“I don’t like nothing plain, do I baby?” the drunk trucker’s drunk girlfriend slurs, gripping the stool with her plump legs in their tight shorts, her plump breasts bulging from her low-cut top.

“So where you heading?” the drunk girlfriend asks.

“North,” he says. “Eventually.”

“Well you be careful driving around down here all by your lonesome,” the woman slurs. “There’s a lot of crazies.”

22

Do we have any idea where he is?” Scarpetta asks Rose.

“He’s not in his office and he’s not answering his cell phone. When I spoke to him after staff meeting and said you needed to see him, he told me he had an errand to run and would be right back,” Rose reminds her. “That was an hour and a half ago.”

“What time did you say we should leave for the airport?” Scarpetta looks out the window at palm trees shaking in the gusting wind and thinks again about firing him. “We’re going to have a thunderstorm, a bad one. That figures. Well, I’m not going to sit around and wait for him. I should just leave.”

“Your flight’s not until six thirty,” Rose says as she hands Scarpetta several phone messages.

“I don’t know why I’m bothering. Why am I bothering to talk to him?” Scarpetta glances through the messages.

Rose looks at her in a way that only Rose can. She stands quietly, thoughtfully, in the doorway, her white hair swept up and pinned back in a French twist, her gray linen suit out of style but elegant and crisp. After ten years, her gray lizard-skin pumps still look new.

“One minute you want to talk to him, the next you don’t. What is it?” Rose remarks.

“I guess I should go.”

“I didn’t say which is it. I asked what is it.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do about him. I keep thinking about firing him, but I’d rather resign than do that.”

“You could take the position of chief,” Rose reminds her. “They’d force Dr. Bronson to retire if you’d agree, and maybe you should seriously consider it.”

Rose knows what she’s doing. She can seem very sincere when suggesting something that she secretly doesn’t want Scarpetta to do, and the result is predictable.

“No thank you,” Scarpetta says adamantly. “Been there, done that, and in case you’ve forgotten, Marino’s one of their investigators, so I wouldn’t exactly get away from him by resigning from the Academy and ending up at the ME’s office full-time. Who’s Mrs. Simister and what church?” she asks, puzzling over one of the phone messages.

“I don’t know who she is, but she acted as if she knows you.”

“Never heard of her.”

“She called a few minutes ago and said she wanted to talk to you about some missing family in the West Lake Park area. She didn’t leave her number, said she’d call back.”

“What missing family? Here in Hollywood?”

“That’s what she said. Let’s see, you’re flying out of Miami, unfortunately. Worst airport on earth. I’d say we don’t need to leave…well, you know the traffic down here. Maybe we should leave as early as four. But we’re not going anywhere until I check on your flight.”

“You’re sure I’m in first class? And it’s not been cancelled.”

“I have your printed reservation, but you’re going to have to check in because it’s last-minute.”

“Can you believe it? They cancel me, and now it’s last-minute because I had to rebook?”

“You’re all set.”

“No offense, but that’s what you said last month, Rose. And I wasn’t in the computer and ended up in coach. All the way to Los Angeles. And look what happened yesterday.”

“I confirmed it first thing this morning. I’ll do it again.”

“Do you think this is all about Marino’s hell scenes? Maybe that’s what’s wrong with him.”

“I suspect he feels you shunned him after that, no longer trusted or respected him.”

“How can I trust his judgment?”

“I’m still not sure what Marino did,” Rose replies. “I typed up that particular hell scene and edited it just like I do all of his, and as I’ve told you before, his script didn’t include a hypodermic needle in that big, old, fat dead man’s pocket.”

“He set up the scene. He supervised it.”

“He swears someone else put that needle in the pocket. Probably she did. For money, which thankfully, she didn’t get. I don’t blame Marino for the way he feels. Hell scenes were his idea, and now Dr. Amos is doing them and getting all sorts of attention from the students while Marino’s treated like…”

“He’s not nice to the students. Not from day one.”

“Well, now it’s worse. They don’t know him and think he’s an ill-tempered dinosaur, a cranky old has-been. And I know just how it feels to be treated like a cranky old has-been or, worse, to feel like one.”

“You’re anything but cranky or a has-been.”

“At least you agree that I’m old,” Rose says as she steps back through the doorway, adding, “I’ll try him again.”

Inside room 112 of the Last Stand motel, Joe sits at the cheap desk across from the cheap bed and checks the computer for Scarpetta’s plane reservation, jotting down the flight number and other information. He calls the airline.

After five minutes of dead time on hold, he gets a real person.

“I need to change a reservation,” he says.

He recites the information, then changes the seating to coach, as far back in the plane as is available, preferably a middle seat, because his boss doesn’t like windows or the aisle. Just like he did last time so successfully, when she was flying to Los Angeles. He could cancel her flight again. But this is more fun.

“Yes, sir.”

“What about an E-ticket?”

“No sir, a change this close to departure, and you’re going to have to check in at the desk.”

He hangs up, exhilarated, as he imagines the Almighty Scarpetta trapped between two strangers, hopefully two enormous, smelly ones for three hours. He smiles as he plugs a digital recorder into his super hybrid system telephone handset. The window air-conditioning unit rattles loudly but is ineffective. He is getting uncomfortably warm and detects the faint, foul stench of rotting meat from a recent hell scene that included racks of raw pork ribs, beef liver and chicken skin rolled up in carpet and hidden beneath closet flooring.

He scheduled the exercise right after a special lunch he charged to the Academy that included barbecue ribs and rice and resulted in several students gagging when the foul bundle was discovered oozing with rotting fluids and teeming with maggots. In their haste to recover the simulated human remains and clear the scene, Team A neglected to notice a torn bit of fingernail that was also beneath the flooring, lost in the stinking, putrid slop, and as it turned out, that piece of evidence was the only one that could have revealed the identity of the killer.

Joe lights a cigar as he fondly remembers the success of that hell scene, a success made all the better because of Marino’s outrage, his insistence that Joe once again had stolen an idea from him. The big bumpkin cop has yet to figure out that Lucy’s choice of a communications-monitoring system that interfaces with the Academy’s PBX means that given the appropriate security clearance, one can monitor whomever he pleases in almost any way imaginable.

Lucy was careless. The intrepid super-agent Lucy left her Treo—an ultra-high-tech palm-size communications device that is a personal digital assistant, cell phone, e-mail, camera and everything else—inside one of her helicopters. It happened almost a year ago. He’d barely started his fellowship when he had the most amazing bit of luck, was in the hangar with one of the students, an especially pretty one, showing her Lucy’s helicopters when he happened to notice a Treo inside the Bell 407.

Lucy’s Treo.

She was still logged on. He didn’t need her password to access everything in it. He kept the Treo long enough to download all its files before returning it to the helicopter, leaving it on the floor, partially under a seat, where Lucy found it later that day, having no idea what had happened. She still has no idea.

Joe has passwords, dozens of them, including Lucy’s system-administrator password, which enables her and now him to access and alter the computer and telecommunications systems of the South Florida regional headquarters, the central headquarters in Knoxville, satellite offices in New York and Los Angeles, and Benton Wesley and his top-secret PREDATOR research study and everything else he and Scarpetta confide in each other. Joe can redirect files and e-mail, get hold of the unlisted phone numbers of anybody who has ever had anything to do with the Academy, wreak havoc. His fellowship ends in a month, and by the time he moves on, and he will in a big way, he might just have succeeded in causing the Academy to implode and everybody, especially the big stupid thug Marino and the overbearing Scarpetta, to hate each other.

It is easy to monitor the big dope’s office line, to secretly activate his speakerphone so it is like having an open mic in the room. Marino dictates everything, including his hell scenes, and Rose types them up because he can’t spell, has terrible grammar, rarely reads and is practically illiterate.

Joe feels a rush of euphoria as he taps cigar ash into a Coke can and logs into the PBX system. He accesses Marino’s office line, activates the speakerphone to see if he is in and up to something.

23

When Scarpetta agreed to serve as the consulting forensic pathologist for PREDATOR, she wasn’t enthusiastic about it.

She warned Benton, tried to talk him out of it, repeatedly reminded him that the subjects of the research study don’t care if someone is a physician or a psychologist or a Harvard professor.

They’ll break your neck or smash your head against a wall just like they will anybody else, she said. There’s no such thing as sovereign immunity.

I’ve been around these people most of my life, he replied. That’s what I do, Kay.

You’ve never done it in this type of setting. Not at an Ivy League–affiliated psychiatric hospital that has historically never dealt with convicted murderers. You’re not only staring into the abyss, you’re installing lights and an elevator in it, Benton.

She hears Rose talking on the other side of the wall in her office.

“Where on earth have you been?” Rose is saying.

“So when am I taking you for that ride?” Marino replies loudly.

“I told you, I’m not getting on the back of that thing. I think there’s something wrong with your phone.”

“I’ve always had this fantasy of seeing you in black leather.”

“I went looking for you, and you weren’t in your office. Or, at least, you didn’t answer the door….”

“I ain’t been in there all morning.”

“But your line’s lit up.”

“No it ain’t.”

“It was a few minutes ago.”

“You checking on me again? I think you’re sweet on me, Rose.”

Marino goes on in his boisterous voice as Scarpetta reviews an e-mail she just got from Benton, another recruitment ad that is to run in The Boston Globe and on the Internet.

HEALTHY ADULTS MRI STUDY

HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL–AFFILIATED RESEARCHERS ARE CURRENTLY STUDYING BRAIN STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION IN HEALTHY ADULTS AT THE MCLEAN HOSPITAL BRAIN IMAGING CENTER IN BELMONT, MA.

“Go on now. Dr. Scarpetta’s waiting and you’re late again.” She hears Rose chastise Marino in her firm but affectionate way. “You need to quit the disappearing acts.”

YOU MAY QUALIFY FOR THE STUDY IF YOU:

- ARE A 17-TO 45-YEAR-OLD MALE

- ARE AVAILABLE TO COME TO MCLEAN HOSPITAL FOR FIVE VISITS

- HAVE NO HISTORY OF HEAD TRAUMA OR DRUG ABUSE

- HAVE NEVER BEEN DIAGNOSED WITH SCHIZOPHRENIA OR BIPOLAR DISORDER

Scarpetta scrolls through the rest of the ad, getting to the good part, a P.S. from Benton.

You’d be amazed how many people think they’re normal. I wish the damn snow would stop. I love you.

Marino’s big presence fills the doorway.

“What’s up?” he asks.

“Please shut the door,” Scarpetta says as she reaches for the phone.

He pulls it shut, takes a chair, not directly across from her but at an angle so he doesn’t have to look at her straight on as she sits at her big desk in her big leather chair. She knows about his tricks. She knows all about his gauche manipulations. He doesn’t like dealing with her from the other side of her big desk, but would prefer they were seated with nothing between them, like equals. She knows about office psychology, knows a lot more about it than he does.

“Just give me a minute,” she says.

BONG-BONG-BONG-BONG-BONG- BONG, the rapid sounds of a radio frequency pulse causing a magnetic field to excite protons.

In the MRI lab, the structure of another so-called normal’s brain is being scanned.

“Just how bad is the weather up there?” Scarpetta is saying over the phone.

Dr. Lane pushes the intercom button. “Are you all right?” she asks their latest research study subject for PREDATOR.

He claims to be normal. He probably isn’t. He has no idea the point is to compare his brain to a killer’s.

“I don’t know,” the normal’s unnerved voice answers.

“It’s okay,” Benton is saying to Scarpetta over the phone. “If you don’t get delayed again. But tomorrow night it’s supposed to get bad….”

BWAWWH…BWAWWH…BWAWH…BWAWH…

“I can’t hear a damn thing,” he says in exasperation.

The reception is bad. Sometimes his cell phone doesn’t even ring in here, and he is distracted, frustrated, tired. The scan isn’t going well. Nothing has gone well today. Dr. Lane is dejected. Josh sits in front of his screen, bored.

“I don’t feel hopeful,” Dr. Lane says to Benton, a resigned look on her face. “Even with earplugs.”

Twice today, normal control subjects have refused to be scanned because they’re claustrophobic, a detail they failed to mention when they were accepted into the study. Now this control subject is complaining about the noise, says it sounds like electric bass guitars being played in hell. At least he’s creative.

“I’ll call before I take off,” Scarpetta is saying over the phone. “The ad looks fine, as fine as any of them look.”

“Thanks for the enthusiasm. We’re going to need a big response. The casualties are mounting. Must be something phobic in the air. Add to that, about one out of three normal subjects isn’t.”

“I’m not sure what’s normal anymore.”

Benton covers his other ear, walks around, trying to hear, trying to get a better signal. “I’m afraid a big case has come in, Kay. It’s going to be a lot of work.”

“How are we doing in there?” Dr. Lane asks over the intercom.

“Not good,” the subject’s voice comes back.

“They always do when we’re about to get together,” Scarpetta is saying above what now sounds like a hammer rapidly striking wood. “I’ll help in any way I can.”

“I’m really starting to freak out,” the normal subject’s voice says.

“This isn’t going to work.” Benton looks through the Plexiglas at the normal control subject on the far side of the magnet.

He is moving his taped-down head.

“Susan?” Benton looks at her.

“I know,” Dr. Lane says. “I’m going to need to reposition him.”

“Good luck. I think he’s done,” Benton says.

“He’s destroyed the landmark,” Josh looks up and says.

“Okay,” Dr. Lane tells the subject. “We’re going to stop. I’m coming in to get you out.”

“I’m sorry, man, I can’t take this,” his stressed voice sounds.

“Sorry. Another one bites the dust,” Benton says to Scarpetta over the phone as he watches Dr. Lane open the magnet room and head in to free their latest failure. “I just spent two hours evaluating this guy and bye-bye. He’s out. Josh?” Benton says. “Call someone to get him a taxi.”

Black leather creaks as Marino makes himself comfortable in his Harley gear. He goes out of his way to show how relaxed he is, slumped back in the chair, his legs spread.

“What ad?” he asks when Scarpetta hangs up.

“Just another research study he’s involved in up there.”

“Huh. What kind of study?” He says it as if he is suspicious of something.

“A neuropsychological study. How different types of people process different types of information, that sort of thing.”

“Huh. That’s a line all right. Probably the same line they use every time a reporter calls, a line that says nothing. What did you want to see me about?”

“Did you get my messages? Since Sunday night, I’ve left you four.”

“Yeah I got them.”

“It would have been nice if you’d returned them.”

“You didn’t say it was a nine-one-one.”

That has been their code over the years when they paged each other, back when cell phones weren’t so popular, then later because they were insecure. Now Lucy has scramblers and who-knows-what to protect privacy, and it’s fine to leave voicemail.

“I don’t leave a nine-one-one when it’s a phone message,” she says. “How does that work? After the beep I say ‘nine-one-one’?”

“My point being, you didn’t say it was an emergency. What did you want?”

“You stood me up. We were set to review the Swift case, remember?”

She fixed dinner for him, too, but she leaves out that part.

“I’ve been busy, on the road.”

“Would you like to tell me what you’ve been doing and where?”

“Riding my new bike.”

“For two solid days? You didn’t stop for gas, maybe go to the men’s room? Couldn’t find time for one phone call?”

She leans back in the big chair behind her big desk and feels small as she looks at him. “You’re being contraire. That’s what this is about.”

“Why should I tell you what I’m doing?”

“Because I’m the director of forensic science and medicine, if for no other reason.”

“And I’m the head of investigations, and that really falls under training and Special Ops. So Lucy’s really my supervisor, not really you.”

“Lucy isn’t your supervisor.”

“Guess you’d really better talk to her about that.”

“Investigations really falls under forensic science and medicine. You really aren’t a Special Ops agent, Marino. My department pays your salary. Really.” She is about to rip into him and knows she shouldn’t.

He looks at her with his big, tough face, his big, thick fingers drumming the armrest. He crosses his legs and starts jiggling a big Harley-booted foot.

“Your job is to assist me in casework,” she says. “You’re the person I depend on most.”

“Guess you better take that up with Lucy.”

He slowly drums the armrest and jiggles his foot, his flinty eyes looking past her.

“I’m supposed to tell you everything and you don’t tell me shit,” he says. “You do whatever the hell you want and don’t think you ever owe me an explanation. I’m sitting right here, listening to you lie like I’m so stupid I don’t see through it. You don’t ask or tell me nothing unless it suits you.”

“I don’t work for you, Marino.” She can’t stop herself from saying it. “I believe it’s the other way around.”

“Oh yeah?”

He leans closer to her big desk, his face turning crimson.

“Ask Lucy,” he says. “She owns this damn place. She pays everybody’s salary. Ask her.”

“Obviously, you weren’t present for most of our discussion about the Swift case,” she says, changing her tone, trying to abort what is about to turn into a battle.

“Why bother? I’m the one with the damn information.”

“We were hoping you might share it. We’re all in this together.”

“No kidding. Everybody’s into everything. Nothing of mine’s private anymore. It’s open season on my old cases, my hell scenes. You just give away whatever you want and don’t care how I feel.”

“That’s not true. I wish you’d calm down. I don’t want you having a stroke.”

“You hear about yesterday’s hell scene? Where do you think that came from? He’s getting into our files.”

“That’s not possible. The hard copies are locked up. Electronic copies are completely inaccessible. As for yesterday’s hell scene, I agree it’s very similar…”

“Similar my ass. It’s exactly the same.”

“Marino, it was also in the news. In fact, you can still pull it up on the Internet. I checked.”

His big flushed face stares at her, a face so unfriendly she scarcely recognizes it anymore.

“Can we talk about Johnny Swift for a minute, please?” she says.

“Ask me anything you want,” he says glumly.

“I’m confused about the possibility of robbery as a motive. Was there a robbery or not?”

“Nothing of value missing from the house except we can’t figure out the credit-card shit.”

“What credit-card shit?”

“The week after his death, someone withdrew a total of twenty-five hundred dollars cash. Each withdrawal was five hundred bucks from five different ATMs in the Hollywood area.”

“Tracked?”

Marino shrugs and says, “Yeah. To machines in parking lots, different days, different times, everything different except the amount. Always the limit of five hundred bucks. By the time the credit-card company tried to notify Johnny Swift—who was dead by then—about an out-of-pattern behavior that might indicate someone was using his card, the withdrawals had stopped.”

“What about cameras? Any chance the person was caught on video?”

“Each ATM machine that was picked didn’t have one. Somebody knew what he was doing, has probably done it before.”

“Did Laurel have the PIN number?”

“Johnny wasn’t able to drive yet because of the surgery. So Laurel had to do everything, including cash withdrawals.”

“Anybody else have the PIN number?”

“Not as far as we know.”

“It certainly doesn’t look good for him,” Scarpetta says.

“Well, I don’t think he whacked his twin brother for his ATM card.”

“People have killed for a lot less.”

“I think we’re talking someone else, maybe someone Johnny Swift had some kind of encounter with. Maybe the person had just killed him and heard Laurel drive up. So he ducked, explaining why the shotgun was still on the floor. Then when Laurel ran from the house, the guy grabbed it and bolted.”

“Why was the shotgun on the floor to begin with?”

“Maybe he was staging the scene to look like a suicide and got interrupted.”

“You’re telling me you have no doubt it’s a homicide.”

“You telling me you don’t think it is?”

“I’m just asking questions.”

Marino’s eyes wander around the office, over the top of her piled desk, across stacks of paperwork and case files. He looks at her with hard eyes that she might find frightening had she not seen insecurity and pain in them so often in the past. Maybe he seems different and distant only because he shaves his balding head and has taken to wearing a diamond stud earring. He works out in the gym obsessively and is the biggest she’s ever seen him.

“I’d appreciate it if you’d review my hell scenes,” he says. “Every one I’ve ever come up with is on that disk. I’d like you to look at them carefully. Since you’ll be sitting on a plane with nothing better to do.”

“I might have something better to do.” She tries to tease him a little, get him to lighten up.

It doesn’t work.

“Rose put all of them on a disk going back to the first of last year, and it’s in the file there. In a sealed envelope”—he indicates files on her desk. “Maybe you can pop it in your laptop and take a look. The bullet with the mesh pattern from the screen door’s in there. That lying piece of shit. I swear I came up with it first.”

“You do a search on the Internet of intermediary targets in shootings and I guarantee you’ll find cases and firearms tests that include bullets fired through screen doors,” she says. “I’m afraid there really isn’t much that’s new or private anymore.”

“He’s nothing but a laboratory rat who lived inside a microscope until a year ago. He couldn’t know the stuff he’s writing about. It’s impossible. It’s because of what happened at the Body Farm. At least you could have been honest about it.”

“You’re right,” she says. “I should have told you I stopped reviewing your hell scenes after that. All of us did. I should have sat you down and explained, but you were so angry and combative, none of us wanted to deal with you.”

“Maybe if you got set up the way I did, you’d be angry and combative, too.”

“Joe wasn’t at the Body Farm or even in Knoxville when it happened,” she reminds him. “So please explain how he could have slipped a hypodermic needle into a dead man’s jacket pocket.”

“The field exercise was supposed to expose the students to a real dead body rotting away at the Body Farm and see if they could overcome the puke factor and recover several items of evidence. A dirty needle wasn’t one of them. He set that up to get me.”

“Not everybody is out to get you.”

“If he didn’t set me up, then why did the girl not follow through with the lawsuit? Because it’s bogus, that’s why. The damn needle didn’t have AIDS on it, now did it, had never been used. A little oversight on the asshole’s part.”

She gets up from her desk.

“What I’m going to do about you is the bigger issue,” she says, locking her briefcase.

“I’m not the one who has secrets,” he says, watching her.

“You have plenty of secrets. I never know where you are or what you’re doing half the time.”

She grabs her suit jacket off the back of the door. He looks steadily at her with his flinty eyes. His fingers stop drumming the armrest. Leather creaks as he gets up from his chair.

“Benton must feel like a real big shot working with all those Harvard people,” he says, and it’s not the first time he’s said it. “All those rocket scientists with all their secrets.”

She stares at him, her hand on the doorknob. Maybe she’s getting paranoid, too.

“Yup. Must be exciting, what he’s doing up there. But if you’d asked my opinion, I’d been happy to tell you not to waste your time.”

It can’t be possible he is alluding to PREDATOR.

“Not to mention a waste of money. Money that could sure as hell be better spent. Me? I just can’t stomach the thought of giving all that money and attention to scum-bags like that.”

No one is supposed to know about PREDATOR except the study team, the hospital’s president, the Internal Review Board and certain key prison officials. Even the normal subjects in the study don’t know the name of it or what it is about. Marino couldn’t know unless he has somehow broken into her e-mail or the hard copies she keeps locked up in file drawers. For the first time, it occurs to her that if anyone is breaching security, it might be him.

“What are you talking about?” she asks quietly.

“Maybe you should be more careful about forwarding files, make sure nothing is attached to them,” he replies.

“Forwarding what files?”

“The notes you typed up after your first meeting with Darling Dave about that shaken baby case he wants everyone to think is an accident.”

“I didn’t forward any notes to you.”

“Sure as hell did. Sent this past Friday, didn’t happen to open it until after I saw you on Sunday. Notes accidentally attached to an e-mail to you from Benton. An e-mail I sure as hell wasn’t supposed to see.”

“I didn’t,” she insists with growing alarm. “I didn’t send you anything.”

“Maybe not on purpose. Funny how lies catch up with people,” he says as a light knock sounds at the door.

“Is that why you didn’t show up at my house Sunday night? Why you didn’t show up for the meeting with Dave yesterday morning?”

“Excuse me,” Rose says as she lets herself in. “I think one of you should handle this.”

“You could have said something, given me a chance to defend myself,” Scarpetta says to him. “I may not always tell you everything, but I don’t lie.”

“Lying by omission is still lying.”

“Excuse me,” Rose tries again.

“PREDATOR,” Marino says to Scarpetta. “Try that lie on for size.”

“Mrs. Simister,” Rose interrupts them loudly. “The lady from the church who called a little while ago. I’m sorry, but it seems rather urgent.”

Marino makes no move to go to the phone, as if to remind Scarpetta that he doesn’t work for her, that she can take the call herself.

“Oh for God’s sake,” she says, walking back to her desk. “Put her through.”

24

Marino digs his hands into the pockets of his jeans and leans against the doorway, watching her deal with whoever Mrs. Simister is.

In the old days, he used to enjoy sitting in Scarpetta’s office for hours, listening to her while he drank coffee and smoked. He didn’t mind asking her to explain what he didn’t understand, didn’t mind waiting when she was interrupted, which was often. He didn’t mind when she was late.

Things are different now, and it’s her damn fault. He doesn’t intend to wait for her. He doesn’t want her to explain anything and would rather remain ignorant than ask her a medical question, professional or personal, even if he was dying, and he used to ask her whatever he wanted. Then she betrayed him. She humiliated him and meant to, and is doing it again and means to, no matter what she says. She has always rationalized whatever suits her, done hurtful things in the name of logic and science, as if she thinks he is so stupid he’ll never see through it.

It’s no different than what happened to Doris. She came home one day crying, and he couldn’t tell if she was angry or sad but he knew she was upset, maybe as upset as he had ever seen her.

What’s the matter? He going to have to pull your tooth? Marino asked her as he drank beer in his favorite chair and watched the news.

Doris sat down on the sofa and sobbed.

Shit. What is it, baby?

She covered her face and cried as if someone were about to die, so Marino sat next to her and put his arm around her. He held her for a few minutes, and when no information was forthcoming, he demanded she tell him what the hell was wrong.

He touched me, she said, crying. I knew it wasn’t right and I kept asking him why, but he said to relax, that he’s a doctor, and a part of me knew what he was doing but I was scared. I should have known better, should have said no but I just didn’t know what to do, and she went on to explain that the dentist or root canal specialist or whatever the hell he called himself said Doris possibly had a systemic infection because of a root fracture and he needed to check her glands. That was the word he used, according to Doris.

Glands.

“Hold on,” Scarpetta is saying to whoever Mrs. Simister is. “Let me put you on speakerphone. I have an investigator sitting right here.”

She gives Marino a look, indicating she is concerned about what she is hearing, and he tries to chase Doris out of his thoughts. He still thinks about her often, and it seems the older he gets, the more he remembers what went on between them and the way he felt when the dentist touched her and the way he felt when she left him for that car salesman, that fucking loser car salesman. Everybody leaves him. Everybody betrays him. Everybody wants what he has. Everybody thinks he’s too stupid to figure out their plots and manipulations. The last few weeks, it has been almost more than he can stand.

Now this. Scarpetta lies about the study up there. Excludes him. Degrades him. Helps herself to whatever she wants when it suits her, treats him like he’s nothing.

“I wish I had more information.” Mrs. Simister’s voice enters the room, and she sounds as old as Methuselah. “I certainly hope something bad hasn’t happened, but I fear it. It’s just awful when the police don’t care.”

Marino has no idea what Mrs. Simister is talking about or who she is or why she is calling the National Forensic Academy, and he can’t exorcise Doris from his head. He wishes he had done more than threaten the damn dentist or root canal specialist or whatever the hell he was. He should have destroyed the asshole’s face and maybe broken a few of his fingers.

“Explain to Investigator Marino what you mean by the police not caring,” Scarpetta says over speakerphone.

“The last I saw any sign of life over there was this past Thursday night, and when I realized everybody was gone without a trace, I called nine-one-one right away and they sent a police officer to the house and then he called a detective. She obviously doesn’t care.”

“You’re talking about the Hollywood police,” Scarpetta says, looking at Marino.

“Yes. A Detective Wagner.”

Marino rolls his eyes. This is unbelievable. With all his bad luck of late, he doesn’t need this.

He asks from the doorway, “You talking about Reba Wagner?”

“What?” the querulous voice asks.

He steps closer to the phone on the desk and repeats his question.

“All I know is the initials on her card are R.T. So I suppose it could be Reba.”

Marino rolls his eyes again and taps his head, indicating that Detective R. T. Wagner is as dumb as a rock.

“She looked around the yard and the house and said there was no sign of foul play. She felt they ran off on their own and said there’s nothing the police can do about it.”

“Do you know these people?” Marino asks.

“I live right across the water from them. And I go to their church. I just know something bad has happened.”

“All right,” Scarpetta says. “What is it you’re asking us to do, Mrs. Simister?”

“To at least look at the house. You see, the church rents it, and they’ve kept it locked up since they disappeared. But the lease is up in three months, and the landlord says he’ll let the church out of it without a penalty because he’s got someone else to rent it. Some of the ladies at the church plan to go over there first thing in the morning and start packing up. Then what happens to any clues?”

“All right,” Scarpetta says again. “I tell you what we’ll do. We’re going to call Detective Wagner. We can’t go in the house without permission from the police. We don’t have jurisdiction unless they ask for our help.”

“I understand. Thank you very much. Please do something.”

“All right, Mrs. Simister. We’ll get back to you. We need your phone number.”

“Huh,” Marino says when Scarpetta hangs up. “Probably some mental case.”

“How about you call Detective Wagner, since it seems you’re familiar with her,” Scarpetta says.

“She used to be a motorcycle cop. Dumb as dirt but handled her Road King pretty good. I can’t believe they made her a detective.”

He gets out his Treo and dreads hearing Reba’s voice and wishes Doris would get out of his mind. He tells Hollywood police dispatch to have Detective Wagner contact him immediately. He ends the call and looks around Scarpetta’s office, looks everywhere but at her as he thinks about Doris and the dentist, or whatever the hell he was, and the car salesman. He thinks about how satisfying it would have been to beat the dentist, or whatever the hell he was, senseless instead of getting drunk and barging into his office and demanding he step out of an examination room and in front of a lobby full of patients asking why he thought it was necessary to examine his wife’s tits and to please explain how tits might be relevant in a root canal case.

“Marino?”

Why that incident should still bother him all over again after all these years is a mystery. He doesn’t understand why a lot of things have started bothering him again. The last few weeks have been hell.

“Marino?”

He comes to and looks at Scarpetta at the same time he realizes his cell phone is buzzing.

“Yeah,” he answers.

“Detective Wagner here.”

“Investigator Pete Marino,” he says, as if he doesn’t know her.

“What do you need, Investigator Pete Marino.” She sounds as if she doesn’t know him, either.

“I understand you got a family that’s disappeared from the West Lake area. Apparently last Thursday night.”

“How did you hear about that?”

“Apparently there’s some concern foul play might be involved. And the word is you aren’t being very helpful.”

“We’d be investigating the hell out of it if we thought there was anything to it. What’s the source of your information?”

“A lady from their church. You got the names of these people who supposedly have vanished?”

“Let me think. They’re kind of odd names, Eva Christian and Crystal or Christine Christian. Something like that. I can’t think of the boys’ names.”

“Could you mean Christian Christian?”

Scarpetta and Marino look at each other.

“Something a whole lot like that. I don’t have my notes in front of me. You want to look into it, be my guest. My department’s not going to devote a lot of resources to something when there’s absolutely no evidence…”

“I got that part,” Marino says rudely. “Supposedly the church is going to start packing up that house tomorrow and if we’re gonna take a look, now’s the time.”

“They’ve not even been gone for a week and the church is already packing up the house? Sounds to me they know they’ve skipped town and aren’t coming back. What’s it sound like to you?”

“Sounds like we ought to make sure,” Marino says.

The man behind the counter is older and more distinguished than Lucy imagined. She expected someone who looks like a has-been surfer, someone leathery and covered in tattoos. That’s the sort of person who ought to be working in a shop called Beach Bums.

She sets down a camera case, and her fingers flutter through big, loud shirts printed with sharks, flowers, palm trees and other tropical designs. She peruses stacks of straw hats and bins of flip-flops and displays of sunglasses and lotions, not interested in buying any of it but wishing she were. For a moment she browses, waiting for two other customers to leave. She wonders how it would feel to be like everybody else, to care about souvenirs and gaudy things to wear and days in the sun, to feel good about the way she looks half-naked in a swimsuit.

“You got any of that stuff with zinc oxide in it?” one of the customers is asking Larry, who is seated behind the counter.

He has thick, white hair and a neatly trimmed beard, is sixty-two, was born in Alaska, drives a Jeep, has never owned a home, didn’t go to college and in 1957 was arrested for drunk and disorderly. Larry has managed Beach Bums for about two years.

“Nobody likes that anymore,” he is telling the customer.

“I do. It doesn’t break out my skin like all these other lotions. I think I’m allergic to aloe.”

“These sunblocks don’t have aloe.”

“You carry Maui Jim’s?”

“Too expensive, my dear. The only sunglasses we got are the ones you’re looking at.”

This goes on for a while, both customers making minor purchases, finally leaving. Lucy wanders up to the counter.

“Can I help you with something?” Larry asks, looking at the way she is dressed. “Where’d you just come from, a Mission Impossible movie?”

“I rode my motorcycle here.”

“Well, you’re one of the few with any sense. Look out the window. Every one of them in shorts and T-shirts, no helmet. Some of them in flip-flops.”

“You must be Larry.”

He looks surprised and says, “You been in here before? I don’t remember you, and I’m pretty good with faces.”

“I’d like to talk to you about Florrie and Helen Quincy,” she says. “But I need you to lock the door.”

The Harley-Davidson Screamin’ Eagle Deuce with its flames over blue paint and chrome is parked in a far corner of the faculty lot, and as Marino gets closer to it, he picks up his pace.

“Goddamn son of a bitch.” He starts to run.

He yells his obscenities loudly enough for Link the maintenance man, who is weeding a flower bed, to stop what he is doing and jump to his feet. “You all right over there?”

“Fucking motherfucker!” Marino yells.

The front tire of his new bike is flat. Flat all the way down to the shiny chrome rim. Marino gets down to look at the tire, upset and furious, looks for a nail or a screw, anything sharp he might have picked up on his ride in to work this morning. He rolls the bike backward and forward and discovers the puncture. It is about an eighth of an inch cut that appears to have been made with something sharp and strong, possibly a knife.

Possibly a stainless-steel surgical knife, and his eyes dart around, looking for Joe Amos.

“Yeah, I was noticing that,” Link says, walking toward him, wiping his dirty hands on his blue coveralls.

“Nice of you to let me know,” Marino says angrily as he angrily digs through a saddlebag for his tire-plug kit as he angrily thinks of Joe Amos, getting angrier with each thought.

“Must have picked up a nail somewhere,” Link supposes, getting down for a closer inspection. “That looks bad.”

“You see anybody around here looking at my bike? Where the hell’s my tire-plug kit?”

“I’ve been right here all day and haven’t seen anyone anywhere near your bike. It’s quite a bike. What? About fourteen hundred CCs? I used to have a Springer until some no-nuts pulled in front of me and I ended up flying over his hood. I started working on the flower beds around ten this morning. The tire was already flat by then.”

Marino thinks back. He got here between nine fifteen and nine thirty.

“A puncture like this and the tire would have gone flat so fast I’d never have gotten it into the damn lot and it sure as hell wasn’t flat when I stopped to get donuts,” he says. “It had to have happened after I parked in here.”

“Well, I don’t like the sound of it.”

Marino looks around, thinking about Joe Amos. He’ll kill him. If he touched his bike, he’s dead.

“I hate to think it,” Link is saying. “Awfully bold to come right into this lot in the middle of the morning and do something like that. If that’s what happened.”

“Goddamn it, where is it?” Marino says, going through the other saddlebag. “You got anything to plug this thing? Shit! What the hell.” He quits rummaging. “Probably not going to work anyway, not with a hole this big, damn it!”

He’s going to have to change the tire. There are extra ones in the hangar.

“What about Joe Amos? You seen him? You seen his ugly ass anywhere within a mile of here?”

“No.”

“None of the students?”

The students hate him. Every one of them does.

“No,” Link says. “I would have noticed if someone went into this lot and started fooling with your bike or any of the cars.”

“Nobody?” Marino keeps pushing, then entertains the suspicion that maybe Link had something to do with it.

Probably nobody at the Academy likes Marino. Probably half the world is jealous of his tricked-out Harley. He certainly gets enough people staring at it, following him into gas stations and rest stops to get a better look.

“You’re going to have to roll it to the garage down there by the hangar,” Link says, “unless we want to get it on one of those trailers Lucy uses for all those new V-Rods of hers.”

Marino thinks about the gates at both the back and front entrances of the Academy grounds. No one can get in without a code. It had to be an inside job. He thinks about Joe Amos again and realizes an important fact. Joe was in staff meeting. He was already sitting in there, shooting off his big mouth, when Marino showed up.

25

The orange-colored house with its white roof was built in the same decade that Scarpetta was born, the fifties. She imagines the people who live here and feels their absence as she walks around the backyard.

She can’t stop thinking about the person who said his name is Hog, about his cryptic reference to Johnny Swift and what Marino thought was Christian Christian. Scarpetta feels certain what Hog actually said was Kristin Christian. Johnny is dead. Kristin is missing. It has often occurred to Scarpetta that there are plenty of places to dispose of dead bodies in South Florida, plenty of wet-lands, canals, lakes and vast pine forests. Flesh decomposes quickly in the subtropics, and insects gorge themselves, and animals gnaw on bones and scatter them like sticks and stones. Flesh doesn’t last long in the water, and salt in the sea leaches the minerals from skeletons, dissolving them completely.

The waterway behind the house is the color of putrid blood. Dead leaves float in the brown, stagnant water like debris from an explosion. Green and brown coconuts bob like decapitated heads. The sun slips in and out of mounting storm clouds, the warm air heavy and humid, the wind gusting.

Detective Wagner prefers to be called Reba. She is attractive and rather sexy in an overblown, sun-weathered way, her shaggy hair dyed platinum, her eyes bright blue. She doesn’t have the brains of a maggot. She isn’t as dumb as a cow and has yet to come across as a bitch on ten-spoke custom wheels, to quote Marino, who also called her a cock stalker, although Scarpetta isn’t clear on what that means. Most assuredly, Reba is inexperienced, but she seems to be trying. Scarpetta debates whether to tell her about the anonymous phone call that referenced Kristin Christian.

“They’ve lived here for a while but aren’t citizens,” Reba is saying of the two sisters who live in this house with two boys, a foster situation. “They’re originally from South Africa. The two boys are, too, which is probably why they took them in to begin with. You ask me, the four of them are back over there somewhere.”

“And they would have decided to disappear, perhaps flee to South Africa, for what reason?” Scarpetta asks, staring across the narrow, dark waterway as humidity presses down on her like a warm, sticky hand.

“I understand they wanted to adopt the boys. And it’s unlikely they were going to get to.”

“Why not?”

“Seems like relatives of the boys back there in South Africa want them but just couldn’t take them at first, not until they move into a bigger house. And the sisters are religious kooks, which might have weighed against them.”

Scarpetta is aware of the houses on the other side of the water, aware of patches of bright green grass and small, pale-blue swimming pools. She’s not certain which house is Mrs. Simister’s, and wonders if Marino is talking with her yet.

“The boys are how old?” she asks.

“Seven and twelve.”

Scarpetta glances at her notebook and flips back several pages. “Eva and Kristin Christian. I’m not clear on why they are taking care of them.”

She is careful to speak of the missing people in the present tense.

“No, not Eva. There’s no ‘a,’” Reba says.

“Ev or Eve?”

“It’s Ev, as in Evelyn, only her name is just Ev. No ‘e’ or ‘a.’ Just Ev.”

Scarpetta writes down “Ev” in her black notebook and thinks, What a name. She stares at the waterway, and sunlight on the water has turned it the color of strong tea. Ev and Kristin Christian. What names for religious women who have vanished like ghosts. Then the sun slips behind clouds again and the water is dark.

“Ev and Kristin Christian are their real names?” Scarpetta asks. “We’re sure they’re not aliases? We’re sure they didn’t change their names at some point, perhaps to give them religious connotations?” she asks, staring across the waterway at houses that look sketched in pastel chalk.

She watches a figure in dark pants and a white shirt walking into someone’s backyard, possibly Mrs. Simister’s backyard.

“As far as we know, it’s their real names,” Reba replies, looking where Scarpetta is looking. “Damn canker inspectors are all over the map. Politics. It’s all about preventing people from growing their own citrus fruit so they have to buy it.”

“Actually, it’s not. Citrus canker is a terrible blight. If it’s not controlled, nobody will be growing citrus fruit in their yards.”

“It’s a conspiracy. I’ve been listening to what all these commentators are saying on the radio. You ever listen to Dr. Self on the radio? You should hear what she has to say about it.”

Scarpetta never listens to Dr. Self if she can avoid it. She watches the figure across the waterway squat in the grass and dig inside what appears to be some sort of dark bag. He pulls out something.

“Ev Christian’s a reverend or priest or whatever you want to call it in some offbeat little church…. Okay, I’m gonna have to read this to you. It’s too much to remember,” Reba says, flipping through her notepad. “The True Daughters of the Seal of God.”

“Never heard of that denomination,” Scarpetta comments rather ironically as she writes it down. “And Kristin? What does she do?”

The inspector stands up, screwing together what looks like a fruit picker. He raises it high up in a tree, pulling down a grapefruit that lands on the grass.

“Kristin also works at the church. An assistant who does readings and meditations during the services. The kids’ parents got killed in a scooter accident about a year ago. You know, one of those Vespas.”

“Where?”

“South Africa.”

“And this information came from?” Scarpetta asks.

“Someone at the church.”

“You have a report on the accident?”

“Like I said, it happened in South Africa,” Detective Wagner replies. “We’re trying to track it down.”

Scarpetta continues to deliberate over when she should tell her about the disturbing phone call from Hog.

“What are the boys’ names?” Scarpetta asks.

“David and Tony Luck. Kind of funny, when you think about it. Luck.”

“You’re not getting cooperation from the South African authorities? Where in South Africa?”

“Capetown.”

“Where the sisters are also from?”

“That’s what I’m told. After the parents got killed, the sisters took the kids in. Their church is maybe twenty minutes from here on Davie Boulevard, right next to one of these alternative pet stores, kind of figures.”

“Have you checked with the medical examiner’s office in Capetown?”

“Not yet.”

“I can help you with that.”

“That would be great. Kind of figures, doesn’t it? Spiders, scorpions, poisonous frogs, all these little white rat pups you can buy to feed to your snakes,” Reba says. “Sounds like some sort of cultville over there.”

I’ve never let anybody come in and photograph a business of mine unless it’s a genuine police matter. I was robbed once. That was a while back,” Larry explains from the stool behind the counter.

Through the window is the constant traffic along A1A, then the ocean beyond. A light rain has begun to fall, a storm moving in, heading south. Lucy thinks about what Marino told her a few minutes ago, about the house and the missing people, and of course his flat tire, which was his bigger complaint. She thinks of what her aunt must be doing right now, of the storm heading her way.

“Of course I’ve heard quite a lot about it.” Larry gets back to the subject of Florrie and Helen Quincy after a long digression about how much South Florida has changed, how much he has been seriously considering moving back to Alaska. “It’s like everything else. The details get more exaggerated with time. But I don’t think I want you videotaping,” he says again.

“This is a police matter,” Lucy reiterates. “I’ve been asked to privately investigate the case.”

“How do I know you aren’t a reporter or something?”

“I’m former FBI, former ATF. You ever heard of the National Forensic Academy?”

“That big training camp out there in the Everglades?”

“It’s not exactly in the Everglades. We have private labs and experts and an agreement with most of the police departments in Florida. We help them out as needed.”

“Sounds expensive. Let me guess, taxpayers like me.”

“Indirectly. Grants, quid pro quo—services for services. They help us, we train them. All sorts of things.”

She reaches into a back pocket and works out a black wallet and hands it to him. He studies her credentials, a fake ID, an investigator shield that isn’t worth the brass it’s made from because it’s also fake.

“There’s no picture on it,” he says.

“It’s not a driver’s license.”

He reads her fictitious name out loud, reads that she’s Special Operations.

“That’s right.”

“Well, if you say so.” He hands the wallet back to her.

“Tell me what you’ve heard,” Lucy says, setting the video camera on top of the counter.

She looks at the locked front door, at a young couple in skimpy swimsuits trying to open it.

They peer through the glass and Larry shakes his head. No, he’s not open.

“You’re losing me business,” he says to Lucy, but he doesn’t seem to care very much. “When I had a chance to take over this space, I got quite an earful about the Quincys disappearing. The story I heard is she always got here at seven thirty in the morning so she could get the little electric trains running on their tracks and light up the trees, turn on the Christmas music and do all this other stuff. It appears she never opened up that day. The closed sign was still on the door when her son finally got worried and came looking for her and the daughter.”

Lucy reaches inside a pocket of her cargo pants and removes a black ballpoint pen from the holder of a concealed tape recorder. She slips out a small notebook.

“Mind if I take a few notes?” she asks.

“Don’t take everything I say as gospel. I wasn’t here when it happened, just passing along what I’ve been told.”

“I understand Mrs. Quincy called in a take-out order,” Lucy says. “There was something in the paper about it.”

“At the Floridian, that old diner on the other side of the drawbridge. A pretty nifty place, if you’ve never eaten there. It’s my understanding she didn’t call it in, didn’t need to. They always had the same thing ready for her. A tuna plate.”

“Something for the daughter, too? Helen?”

“I don’t remember that.”

“Mrs. Quincy usually pick it up herself?”

“Unless her son was in the area. He’s one of the reasons I know a few things about what happened.”

“I’d like to talk to him.”

“I haven’t seen him in a year. For a while early on, I did. He would drop by, look around, chat. I guess you could say he was obsessed for maybe the first year after they disappeared. Then, it’s my opinion, he couldn’t bear to think about it. He lives in a real nice house in Hollywood.”

Lucy looks around the store.

“There’s no Christmas stuff here,” Larry says, in case that’s what she is wondering.

She doesn’t ask anything about Mrs. Quincy’s son, Fred. She already knows from HIT that Fred Anderson Quincy is twenty-six years old. She knows his address and that he’s self-employed, into computer graphics, a Web designer. Larry goes on to say that on the day Mrs. Quincy and Helen disappeared, Fred tried numerous times to reach them and finally drove to the shop and found it closed, his mother’s Audi still parked in back.

“We’re sure they actually had unlocked the shop that morning?” Lucy asks. “Any possibility something happened to them after they got out of the car?”

“I suppose anything’s possible.”

“Were Mrs. Quincy’s pocketbook, her car keys, inside the shop? Had she made coffee, used the phone, done anything at all that might indicate she and Helen had been there? For example, were the trees lit up, the toy trains running? Was there Christmas music playing? Were the shop lights on?”

“I heard they never did find her pocketbook and car keys. I’ve heard different stories about things being turned on inside the shop. Some say they were. Others say they weren’t.”

Lucy’s attention wanders to the doorway in the back of the store. She thinks about what Basil Jenrette told Benton. She doesn’t see how it’s possible that Basil raped and murdered anybody in the storage area. It’s hard to believe he could clean up and remove the body from the shop, place it in a car and drive off without being seen. It was daylight. It is a populated area, even during the off-season of July, and such a scenario certainly wouldn’t explain what happened to the daughter unless he abducted her, perhaps killed her elsewhere, as he did to his other victims. A gruesome thought. A seventeen-year-old girl.

“What happened to this place after they disappeared?” Lucy asks. “Did it reopen?”

“Nope. Wasn’t much of a market for Christmas stuff anyway. You ask me, it was more an eccentric hobby of hers than anything else. Her shop never reopened, and her son cleared out the merchandise a month or two after they disappeared. Beach Bums moved in that September and hired me.”

“I’d like to take a look in back,” Lucy says. “Then I’ll get out of your hair.”

Hog pulls down two more oranges, then grabs at grapefruits with the clawlike basket on the end of the long-handled picker. He looks across the waterway, watching Scarpetta and Detective Wagner walk around the pool.

The detective gestures a lot. Scarpetta takes notes, looking at everything. It gives Hog extreme pleasure to watch the show. Fools. None of them are as smart as they think. He can outsmart all of them, and he smiles as he imagines Marino running a little late, delayed by an unexpected flat tire that could have been remedied easily and quickly by driving here in an Academy vehicle. But not him. He couldn’t stand it, would have to fix it right then. Big, stupid redneck. Hog squats in the grass, breaks down the picker by unscrewing its aluminum segments, tucks them back into the big black nylon bag. The bag is heavy, and he props it on his shoulder like a lumberjack shouldering an ax, like the lumberjack in The Christmas Shop.

He takes his time walking through the yard, toward the tiny white stucco house next door. He sees her rocking on her sunporch, looking through binoculars at the pale orange house on the other side of the waterway. She’s been watching the house for days. How entertaining is that. Hog has been in and out of the pale orange house three times now, and no one has noticed. In and out to remember what happened, to relive it, to take all the time he wants in there. No one can see him. He can make himself disappear.

He enters Mrs. Simister’s yard and begins to examine one of her lime trees. She trains the binoculars on him. In a moment, she opens the slider but doesn’t walk out into the yard. He’s never once seen her in her yard. The yard man comes and goes, but she never leaves the house or speaks to him. Her groceries are delivered, the same man each time. It might be a relative, maybe a son. All he does is carry in the bags. He never stays long. Nobody bothers with her. She should be grateful to Hog. Pretty soon she’ll get plenty of attention. A lot of people will hear about her when she ends up on Dr. Self’s show.

“Leave my trees alone,” Mrs. Simister says loudly with a thick accent. “You people have been out here two times this week and it’s harassment.”

“Sorry, ma’am. I’m almost finished up here,” Hog says politely as he pulls a leaf off the lime tree, looks at it.

“Get off my property or I’m calling the police.” Her voice gets more shrill.

She is frightened. She’s angry because she is terrified that she will lose her precious trees, and she will, but by then, it won’t matter. Her trees are infected. They are old trees, at least twenty years old, and they’re ruined. It was easy. Wherever the big orange trucks roll in to cut down canker-infected trees and grind them up, there are leaves on the road. He picks them up, tears them, puts them in water and watches the bacteria stream up like tiny bubbles. He fills a syringe, the one God gave him.

Hog unzips his black bag and pulls out a can of red spray paint. He sprays a red stripe around the trunk of the lime tree. Blood painted over the door, like the angel of death, but no one will be spared. Hog hears preaching in a dark place somewhere in his head, like a box hidden way out of reach somewhere in his head.

A false witness shall not be unpunished.

I won’t say anything.

Liars are punished.

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t.

Punishment from my hand is endless.

I didn’t. I didn’t!

“What are you doing? Leave my trees alone, you hear me!”

“I’m happy to explain it to you, ma’am,” Hog says politely, sympathetically.

Mrs. Simister shakes her head. She angrily closes the sliding glass door and locks it.

26

It has been unseasonably hot and raining a lot lately, and the grass is spongy and coarse beneath Scarpetta’s shoes, and when the sun emerges from the dark clouds again, the sunlight feels flat and hot against her head and shoulders as she walks around the backyard.

She notices the pink-and-red hibiscus bushes, the palm trees, notices several citrus trees with red-painted stripes around their trunks, and she stares across the waterway at the inspector zipping up his bag after the old woman just yelled at him. She wonders if the old woman is Mrs. Simister and assumes Marino hasn’t gotten to her house yet. He is always late, never in a hurry to do what Scarpetta asks if he bothers to do it at all. She walks closer to a concrete wall that drops precipitously to the waterway. This one probably doesn’t have alligators, but it has no fence, and any child or dog could easily fall over the edge and drown.

Ev and Kristin took custody of two children and didn’t bother putting up a fence along the backyard. Scarpetta imagines the property after dark and how easy it would be to forget where the dark yard ends and the dark waterway begins. It runs east–west and is narrow behind the house but gets wider farther off. In the distance, handsome sailboats and motorboats are docked behind much finer homes than the one where Ev, Kristin, David and Tony lived.

According to Reba, the sisters and the boys were last seen on Thursday night, February 10. Early the next morning, Marino got the phone call from the man who said his name was Hog. By then, the people had disappeared.

“Was there anything in the news about their disappearance?” Scarpetta asks Reba, wondering if the anonymous caller might have gotten Kristin’s name that way.

“Not that I know of.”

“And you filled out a police report.”

“Not something that would have gone into the press basket. I’m afraid people disappear down here all the time, Dr. Scarpetta. Welcome to South Florida.”

“Tell me what else you know about the last time they were allegedly seen, last Thursday night.”

Reba replies that Ev preached at her church and Kristin gave several readings from the Bible. When the two women didn’t show up at the church the following day for a prayer meeting, an associate tried to call them and got no answer, so this associate, a woman, drove to the house. She had a key and let herself in. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary except Ev, Kristin and the boys were gone and the stove had been left on low, an empty skillet on top of it. The detail about the stove is important, and Scarpetta will turn her attention to it when she goes inside the house, but she isn’t ready yet, her approach to a scene similar to a predator’s. She moves from the outer edge to the inside, saving the worst for last.

Lucy asks Larry if the storeroom is different from how it was when he moved in approximately two years ago.

“Didn’t do a thing to it,” he says.

She scans big cardboard boxes and shelves of T-shirts, lotions, beach towels, sunglasses, cleaning equipment and other inventory in the glare of a single naked lightbulb overhead.

“No point in caring what it looks like back here,” Larry says. “What exactly are you interested in?”

She makes her way into the bathroom, a cramped, windowless space with a sink and a toilet. The walls are cinderblock with a light coat of pale green paint, the floor brown asphalt tile. Overhead is another bare lightbulb.

“You didn’t repaint, retile?” she asks.

“It was exactly like this when I took over the place. You’re not thinking something happened in here?”

“I’d like to come back and bring somebody with me,” she says.

On the other side of the waterway, Mrs. Simister watches.

She rocks on her glass-enclosed sunporch, pushing the glider with her feet, rocking back and forth, her slippers barely touching the tile floor as she makes a quiet sliding sound. She looks for the blonde woman in the dark suit who was walking around the yard of the pale orange house. She looks for the inspector who was trespassing, daring to bother Mrs. Simister’s trees again, daring to spray red paint on them. He’s gone. The blonde woman’s gone.

At first, Mrs. Simister thought the blonde woman was a religious nut. There have been plenty of those visiting that house. Then she looked through binoculars and wasn’t so sure. The blonde woman was taking notes and had a black bag slung over her shoulder. She’s a banker or a lawyer, Mrs. Simister was about to decide when the other woman appeared, this one quite tan, with white hair and wearing khaki pants and a gun in a shoulder holster. Maybe she’s the same one who was over there the other day. Friday. She was tan with white hair. Mrs. Simister isn’t sure.

The two women talked and then walked out of sight along the side of the house, toward the front. Maybe they’ll be back. Mrs. Simister watches for the inspector, that same one who was so nice the first time, asking her all about her trees and when they were planted and what they mean to her. Then he comes back and paints them. It made her think about her gun for the first time in years. When her son gave it to her, she said all that would happen is the bad person would get hold of it and use it against her. She keeps the gun under the bed, out of sight.

She wouldn’t have shot the inspector. She wouldn’t have minded scaring him, though. All these citrus inspectors getting paid to rip out trees that people have had for half their lives. She hears talk about it on the radio. Her trees will probably be next. She loves her trees. The yard man takes care of them, picks fruit and leaves it on the stoop. Jake planted a yard full of trees for her when he bought the house right after they got married. She is lost in her past when the phone on the table by her glider rings.

“Hello?” she answers.

“Mrs. Simister?”

“Who is this?”

“Investigator Pete Marino. We talked earlier.”

“We did? You’re who?”

“You called the National Forensic Academy a few hours ago.”

“I most certainly did not. Are you selling something?”

“No, ma’am. I’d like to stop by and talk to you, if that’s all right.”

“It’s not all right,” she says, hanging up.

She grips the cool metal armrests so tightly that her big knuckles blanch beneath the loose, sun-spotted skin of her useless old hands. People call all the time and they don’t even know her. Machines call and she can’t imagine why people sit there and listen to tape recordings made by solicitors after money. The phone rings again, and she ignores it as she picks up the binoculars to peer at the pale orange house where the two ladies live with the two little hoodlums.

She sweeps the binoculars over the waterway, then over the property on the other side of it. The yard and pool are suddenly big and bright green and blue. They are sharply defined, but the blonde woman in the dark suit and the tan lady with the gun are nowhere to be seen. What are they looking for over there? Where are the two ladies who live there? Where are the hoodlums? All children are hoodlums these days.

The doorbell rings and she stops rocking as her heart begins to pound. The older she gets, the more easily she is startled by sudden movements and sounds, the more she fears death and what it means, if it means anything. Several minutes pass, and the bell rings again and she sits still and waits. It rings again and someone knocks loudly. Finally, she gets up.

“Hold on, I’m coming,” she mutters, annoyed and anxious. “You’d better not be someone selling something.”

She walks into the living room, her slow feet brushing over the carpet. She can’t pick up her feet the way she once could, can hardly walk.

“Hold on, I’m coming as fast as I can,” she says impatiently when the bell rings again.

Maybe it’s UPS. Sometimes her son orders things for her on the Internet. She looks through the peephole in the front door. The person on her porch certainly isn’t wearing a brown or blue uniform or carrying mail or a package. It’s him again.

“What is it this time?” she says angrily, her eye against the peephole.

“Mrs. Simister? I’ve got some forms for you to fill out.”

27

The gate leads to the front yard, where Scarpetta pays attention to thick hibiscus barricading the property from the sidewalk that dead-ends at the waterway.

There are no broken twigs or branches, nothing to indicate that anyone has entered the property by pushing his way through the hedge. Reaching inside the black nylon shoulder bag she routinely carries to scenes, she pulls out a pair of white cotton examination gloves as she looks at the car on the cracked concrete driveway, an old, gray station wagon parked haphazardly, one tire partially on the lawn, where it has gouged the grass. She works her hands into the gloves and wonders why Ev or Kristin parked the car like that, assuming one or the other was driving.

She looks through the car windows at gray vinyl bench seats and the SunPass transponder neatly affixed to the inside of the windshield. She makes more notes. Already a pattern is becoming apparent. The backyard and pool are meticulous. The screened-in patio and lawn furniture are meticulous. She sees no trash or clutter inside the car, nothing but a black umbrella on the mat in back. Yet the car is parked sloppily, carelessly, as if someone couldn’t see well or was in a hurry. She bends down to take a closer look at dirt and bits of dead vegetation caked in the tire tread. She looks at thick dust that has turned the undercarriage the grayish tan of old bones.

“It appears this was driven off-road somewhere,” Scarpetta says, getting up as she continues to study the dirty tires, walking from one to the other.

Reba follows her around the car, looking, a curious expression on her lined, tan face.

“The dirt in the tread makes me think the ground was damp or wet when the car was driven over it,” Scarpetta says. “Is the church parking lot paved?”

“Well, it dug up the grass here,” Reba says, looking at the gouged yard beneath a back tire.

“That wouldn’t explain it. All four tires are caked with dirt.”

“The strip mall where the church is has a big parking lot. Nothing unpaved in the area that I noticed.”

“Was the car here when the lady from the church showed up looking for Kristin and Ev?”

Reba walks around, interested in the dirty tires. “They said so, and I can tell you for sure it was here when I arrived that afternoon.”

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea to check the SunPass, see what tollbooths it’s gone through and when. Have you opened the doors?”

“Yes. They were unlocked. I didn’t see anything significant.”

“So it’s never been processed.”

“I can’t ask the crime-scene techs to process something when there’s no evidence a crime’s been committed.”

“I understand the problem.”

Reba’s dark, tanned face watches her peer through the windows again. They are covered with a fine film of dust. Scarpetta steps back and walks around the station wagon, taking in every inch.

“Who owns it?” Scarpetta says.

“The church.”

“Who owns the house?”

“Same thing.”

“I was told the church leases the house.”

“No, the church definitely owns the house.”

“Do you know someone named Simister?” Scarpetta says as she begins to get a strange feeling, the sort that starts in her stomach and works its way up her throat, the same feeling she got when Reba mentioned the name Christian Christian to Marino.

“Who?” Reba frowns as a muffled explosion sounds from the other side of the waterway.

She and Scarpetta stop talking. They step closer to the gate, looking at the houses on the other side of the water. There is no one in sight.

“Car backfire,” Reba decides. “People drive a lot of junkers around here. Most of them shouldn’t be driving at all. Old as the Grim Reaper and blind as bats.”

Scarpetta repeats the name Simister.

“Never heard of her,” Reba says.

“She said she’s talked to you several times. I believe she said three times, to be exact.”

“I never heard of her, and she’s never talked to me. I guess she’s the one who bad-mouthed me, said I didn’t care about the case.”

“Excuse me,” Scarpetta then says, and she tries Marino on his cell phone and gets his voicemail.

She tells him to call her immediately.

“When you find out who this Mrs. Simister is,” Reba says, “I’d like to know about it. There’s something weird about all this. Maybe we should at least dust the inside of the car for prints. If nothing else, for exclusionary purposes.”

“Unfortunately, you probably won’t get the boys’ prints from inside the car,” Scarpetta says. “Not after four days. You probably won’t get them from inside the house, either. Certainly not the young boy’s prints, the seven-year-old boy’s prints.”

“I don’t get why you would say that.”

“The prints of prepubescent children don’t survive long. Hours, maybe a few days at most. We’re not entirely sure why, but it probably has to do with the oils people secrete when they reach puberty. David is twelve? You might get his prints. I emphasize might.”

“Well, that sure is news to me.”

“I suggest you get this station wagon into the lab, process it for trace evidence and fume the inside of it ASAP with superglue for possible fingerprints. We can do it at the Academy, if you want. We have a bay for processing vehicles and can take care of it.”

“Maybe that’s not a bad idea,” Reba says.

“We should find Ev’s and Kristin’s prints inside the house. And DNA, including the boys’ DNA. Their toothbrushes, hairbrushes, shoes, clothing,” and then she tells Reba about the anonymous caller who mentioned Kristin Christian’s name.

Mrs. Simister lives alone in a small white rancher built of stucco that by South Florida standards is a tear-down.

She has an aluminum carport that is empty, which doesn’t mean she isn’t home, since she no longer owns a car or has a valid driver’s license. Marino also notices that the curtains are drawn in the windows to the right of the front door and there are no newspapers on the sidewalk. She has daily delivery of The Miami Herald, implying she can see well enough to read as long as she is wearing her glasses.

Her phone has been busy for the past half-hour. Marino cuts the engine of his motorcycle and climbs off as a white Chevy Blazer with tinted windows drives past on the street. It is a quiet street. Probably a lot of the people who live in this neighborhood are elderly and have been here a long time and can no longer afford the property taxes. It angers him to think of living in the same place for twenty or thirty years, to have your house finally paid for, only to discover you can’t pay the taxes because of rich people who want places on the water. Mrs. Simister’s tear-down house is assessed at almost three quarters of a million dollars, and she will have to sell it, probably soon, if she doesn’t end up in an assisted-living facility first. She has only three thousand dollars in savings.

Marino learned quite a lot about Dagmara Schudrich Simister. After talking to who he now suspects was someone claiming to be her, on speakerphone in Scarpetta’s office, he ran a search in HIT. Mrs. Simister goes by the name Daggie and is eighty-seven years old. She is Jewish and a member of a local synagogue that she hasn’t attended in years. She has never been a member of the same church as the missing people across the waterway, so what she said on the phone isn’t true, assuming it was Daggie Simister on the phone, and Marino doesn’t believe it was.

She was born in Lublin, Poland, and survived the Holocaust, remaining in Poland until she was almost thirty, explaining the strong accent Marino heard when he tried to call her a few minutes ago. The woman he talked to on speakerphone had no accent he could discern. She simply sounded old. Mrs. Simister’s only child, a son, lives in Fort Lauderdale and has been charged with two DUIs and three moving violations over the past ten years. Ironically, he is a contractor and developer, one of the very sorts of people responsible for causing his mother’s mounting property taxes.

Mrs. Simister is under the care of four physicians for arthritis, cardiac and foot problems, and her eyesight. She doesn’t travel, at least not on commercial airlines. It appears she stays home most of the time and possibly is aware of what goes on around her. Often in neighborhoods like this one, many homebound people are snoops and he hopes she is one them. He hopes she has noticed whatever has gone on across the waterway in the pale orange house. He hopes she might have some idea who called Scarpetta’s office claiming to be her, assuming that is what happened.

He rings the bell, his wallet ready to display his badge, which isn’t exactly honest because he is retired from policing, was never a cop in Florida and was supposed to turn in his credentials and pistol when he left the last police department he worked for, a modest-sized one in Richmond, Virginia, where he always felt the outsider, unappreciated and underestimated. He rings the bell again and tries again to reach Mrs. Simister by phone.

It’s still busy.

“Police! Anybody home?” he calls out loudly as he knocks on the door.

28

Scarpetta is hot in her dark suit but doesn’t consider doing anything about it. If she takes off her jacket, she will have to drape or hang it somewhere, and she doesn’t make herself at home at crime scenes, not even ones the police don’t believe are crime scenes.

Now that she is inside the house, she is about to decide that one of the sisters suffers from an obsessive-compulsive disorder. The windows, tile floors and furniture are spotless and immaculately arranged. A rug is perfectly centered, and the fringe border is so neat it looks combed. She checks a thermostat on the wall and jots in her notebook that the air-conditioning is on, the temperature in the living room seventy-two degrees.

“Has the thermostat been adjusted?” she asks. “Was it like this?”

“Everything’s been left the way it was,” Reba says, in the kitchen with Academy crime-scene investigator Lex. “Except the stove. It was turned off. The lady who came over here when Ev and Kristin didn’t show up at the church. She turned it off.”

Scarpetta makes a note that there is no alarm system.

Reba opens the refrigerator. “I’d go ahead and dust the cabinet doors,” she tells Lex. “May as well dust the heck out of everything while you’re at it. There’s not much food in here for two growing boys.” She directs this to Scarpetta. “Not much to eat at all. I think they’re vegetarians.”

She shuts the refrigerator door.

“The powder will ruin the wood,” Lex says.

“That’s up to you.”

“Do we know what time they got home from church last Thursday night? Allegedly got home?” Scarpetta asks.

“It ended at seven, and Ev and Kristin stayed over for a while, talking to people. Then they went back to Ev’s office and had a meeting. It’s just a small office. It’s a very small church. The room where they have the services can’t hold more than fifty people, looked like to me.”

Reba leaves the kitchen and walks into the living room.

“A meeting with whom, and where were the boys?” Scarpetta asks as she lifts up a cushion from the floral-printed couch.

“Some of the women met. I don’t know what you call them. They’re the women who run things in the church, and as I understand it, the boys weren’t in the meeting, were doing whatever, horsing around. Then they left with Ev and Kristin at around eight p.m.”

“Are there always meetings after church on Thursday nights?”

“I believe so. Their regular services are Friday night, so they meet the night before. Something about Good Friday being when God died for our sins. They don’t talk about Jesus, just God, and are sure into sin and going to hell. It’s an oddball church. Like a cult, you ask me. Probably into snake-handling and the likes.”

Lex taps a small amount of Silk Black oxide powder onto a sheet of paper. The white countertop is chipped but clean and completely bare, and she dabs a fiberglass brush into the powder on the paper and begins to gently swirl the brush over the Corian, turning it an uneven, sooty black wherever the powder adheres to oils or other latent residues.

“I didn’t find a wallet, a pocketbook, anything like that,” Reba tells Scarpetta. “Which just adds to my suspicion they ran off.”

“You can be abducted and bring your pocketbook,” Scarpetta says. “People are abducted with their wallets, their keys, their cars, their children. A few years ago, I worked an abduction-homicide in which the victim was allowed to pack a suitcase.”

“I know about cases, too, ones where the whole thing is faked to look like a crime, when all that really happened is the people ran off. Maybe that weird phone call you told me about was some crank caller from the church.”

Scarpetta walks into the kitchen to look at the stove. On a back burner is a copper pan covered with a lid, and the metal is dark gray and streaked.

“This is the burner that was on?” she asks, removing the lid.

The stainless-steel lining inside the pan is discolored dark gray.

Lex tears off a segment of lifting tape with a loud snap.

“When the church lady got here, that left back burner was on simmer, and the pot was hot as hell with nothing in it,” Reba says. “So I was told.”

Scarpetta notices a sprinkling of fine, whitish-gray ash inside the pan.

“There might have been something in it. Perhaps cooking oil. Not food. No food was out on the counter?” she asks.

“What you see is the way things looked when I got here. And the lady from the church said she didn’t find any food out.”

“A little ridge detail, but mostly smudges,” Lex says, peeling the tape off several inches of countertop. “I’m not going to bother with the cabinets. The wood’s not a great surface. No point in ruining it for no reason.”

Scarpetta pulls open the refrigerator door and cold air touches her face as she takes in one shelf at a time. What is left of a turkey breast suggests someone at least isn’t a vegetarian. There is lettuce, fresh broccoli, spinach, celery and carrots, plenty of carrots, nineteen bags of the small, peeled kind that are an easy, low-calorie snack.

The sliding glass door to Mrs. Simister’s sunporch is unlocked, and Marino waits outside it, standing in the grass, looking around.

He stares across the waterway at the pale orange house and wonders if Scarpetta is finding anything. Maybe she’s cleared the scene. He’s late. Getting his motorcycle onto a trailer, then to the hangar, then changing the tire took a while. Then it took a little longer for him to talk to other maintenance people and a few students in the area and the faculty members whose cars were in the same lot, hoping somebody saw something. Nobody did. Or at least that’s what they said.

He opens Mrs. Simister’s slider a little and calls out to her.

No one answers, and he knocks loudly on the glass.

“Anybody home?” he yells. “Hello?”

He tries her phone again, and it’s still busy. He sees that Scarpetta tried to call him a little while ago, probably when he was on his motorcycle, heading this way. He calls her back.

“What’s going on over there?” he asks right off.

“Reba says she’s never heard of Mrs. Simister.”

“Someone’s fucking with us,” he replies. “She’s not a member of the church, either. The missing people’s church. And she’s not answering her door. I’m going inside.”

He looks back across the waterway at the pale orange house. He opens the slider and steps inside the sunporch.

“Mrs. Simister?” he calls out loudly. “Anybody home? Police!”

A second set of sliders is also unlocked, and he steps inside the dining room, pauses, then calls out again. In a back area of the house a television is on, the volume turned up high, and he heads toward the sound as he continues to announce himself loudly, and now he has his gun out. He follows a hallway and can make out a talk show and a lot of laughter.

“Mrs. Simister? Anybody here?”

The television is inside a back room, probably a bedroom, and the door is shut. He hesitates, calls out again. He knocks, then bangs on the door, then goes inside and sees blood, a small body on the bed and what is left of the head.

29

Inside a desk drawer are pencils, ballpoint pens and Magic Markers. Two of the pencils and one pen are chewed, and Scarpetta looks at the indentations made by teeth in wood and plastic, wondering which of the boys nervously chews things.

She places the pencils, pens and markers in separate evidence bags. Shutting the drawer, she looks around, thinking about the lives of these orphaned South African boys. There are no toys in the room, no posters on the walls, no hint that the brothers like girls, cars, movies, music or sports, or have heroes or simply have fun.

Their bathroom is one door down, and it is an old bathroom with unattractive green tile and a white toilet and tub. Her face appears in the mirrored medicine cabinet as she opens the door. She scans narrow metal shelves lined with dental floss, aspirin and small bars of wrapped soap, the type found in motel bathrooms. She picks up an orange plastic prescription bottle by its white cap, looks at the label and is surprised by the name Marilyn Self, M.D.

The celebrity psychiatrist Dr. Self prescribed Ritalin hydrochloride to David Luck. He is supposed to take ten milligrams three times daily, and one hundred tablets were refilled last month, exactly three weeks ago to the day. Scarpetta removes the cap and pours the scored green tablets into her hand. She counts forty-nine of them. Three weeks at the prescribed dosage and there should be thirty-seven left, she calculates. He supposedly disappeared Thursday night. That’s five days ago, fifteen tablets ago. Fifteen plus thirty-seven is fifty-two. Close enough. If David’s disappearance was voluntary, why was his Ritalin left behind? Why was the stove left on?

She returns the tablets to their bottle and seals it inside an evidence bag. She walks down the hallway and at the end is the only other bedroom, one the sisters obviously shared. There are two beds, both covered with emerald-green spreads. The wallpaper and carpet are green. The furniture is lacquered green. The lamps and ceiling fan are green, and green draperies are drawn, blocking the daylight completely. The bedside lamp is on, and its low light and the light from the hall are the only light in the room.

There is no mirror, no artwork and only two photographs, framed and on the dresser, one of the sun setting over the ocean and two boys on the beach, in swim trunks and smiling, both of them towheads. They look like brothers, one older than the other. The other photograph is of two women with walking sticks, squinting in the sun, surrounded by a huge, blue sky. Behind them is an odd-shaped mountain that hulks over the horizon, the top of it obscured by an unusual layer of clouds that rise from the rocks like thick, white steam. One woman is short and full-figured with long, graying hair pulled back, while the other is taller and thinner with very long, wavy black hair she is pushing out of her face because of the wind.

Scarpetta gets a lens out of her shoulder bag and studies the photographs more closely, looking carefully at the boys’ exposed skin, their faces. She studies the women’s faces and their exposed skin, looking for scars, tattoos, physical anomalies, jewelry. She moves the lens over the thinner woman with the long black hair, noting that her complexion is unhealthy. Maybe it is the lighting or an artificial tanning product that has given her skin a slight yellowish tint, but she looks almost jaundiced.

She opens the closet. Inside it are inexpensive casual clothes and shoes, and dressier suits in sizes eight and twelve. Scarpetta pulls out everything white or off-white and checks the fabric for yellowish sweat stains, finding them under the arms of several blouses that are size eight. She returns her attention to the photograph of the woman with long dark hair and jaundiced-looking skin and thinks of the raw vegetables inside the refrigerator, the carrots, and she thinks of Dr. Marilyn Self.

There are no books inside the bedroom except a brown leather Bible on a bedside table. It is old and open to the Apocrypha, and light from the lamp falls on fragile pages that are dry and browned by the passing of many years. She puts on her reading glasses and leans closer, writing in her notebook that the Bible is open to the Wisdom of Solomon, and verse twenty-five of chapter twelve is marked with three small X’s in pencil.

Therefore unto them, as to children without the use of reason, thou dids’t send a judgment to mock them.

She tries Marino’s cell phone and it goes directly to voicemail. She opens the draperies to see if the sliders behind them are locked as she tries Marino again and leaves another urgent message. It has begun to rain, and raindrops pockmark the pool and the waterway, and thunderclouds are piled up like anvils. Palms flutter in fits, and low hedges of hibiscus on either side of the sliders are thick with pink and red blossoms that shake in the wind. She notices two smudges on the glass. They have a distinctive shape that she recognizes, and she finds Reba and Lex in the laundry room, checking to see what’s inside the washer and dryer.

“There’s a Bible in the master bedroom,” Scarpetta says. “It’s open to the Apocrypha and a lamp is on, a lamp by the bed.”

Reba seems confused.

“My question is, was the bedroom exactly like that when the lady from the church came into the house? Was the bedroom exactly like that the first time you saw it?”

“When I went into the bedroom, it looked undisturbed. I remember the curtains were shut. I didn’t see a Bible or anything like that, and I don’t remember a lamp on,” Reba says.

“There’s a photograph of two women. Ev and Kristin?”

“The lady from the church said so.”

“The other one Tony and David?”

“I think so.”

“Does one of the women have some sort of eating disorder? Is she sick? Do we know if one or both of them is under the care of a physician? And do we know which woman is which in the photograph?”

Reba is at a loss for answers. Before now, answers didn’t seem very important. No one thought there might be questions like the ones Scarpetta is asking now.

“Did you or anyone open the sliding glass doors in their bedroom, the green one?”

“No.”

“They aren’t locked, and I noticed smudges on the outside of the glass. Earprints. I’m wondering if they were there when you looked around the property last Friday.”

“Earprints?”

“Two of them made by someone’s right ear,” Scarpetta says as her phone rings.

30

It is raining hard when she pulls up to Mrs. Simister’s house, and there are three police cruisers and an ambulance parked in front.

Scarpetta gets out of her car and doesn’t bother with an umbrella as she concludes a conversation with the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office, which has jurisdiction over all sudden, unexpected and violent deaths that occur between Palm Beach and Miami. She will examine the body on site because she is already here, she is saying, and as soon as possible she needs a removal service to transport the body to the morgue. She recommends the autopsy be done right away.

“You don’t think it can wait until morning? I understand it might be a suicide, that she has a history of depression,” the administrator points out cautiously because he doesn’t want to sound as if he is questioning Scarpetta’s judgment.

He doesn’t want to come right out and say that he isn’t sure the case is urgent. He is careful how he words it, but she knows what he is thinking.

“Marino says there’s no weapon at the scene,” she explains, hurrying up the steps to the front porch, getting soaked.

“Okay. Didn’t know that.”

“I’m not aware anyone is assuming it’s a suicide.”

She thinks of the so-called backfire she and Reba heard earlier. She tries to remember when.

“You coming in, then?”

“Of course,” she says. “Tell Dr. Amos to come in and get everything ready.”

Marino is waiting for her as she reaches the door and goes inside, pushing her wet hair out of her eyes.

“Where’s Wagner?” he asks. “I assume she’s coming. Unfortunately. Shit, we don’t need a moron like her handling this.”

“She left a few minutes after I did. I don’t know where she is.”

“Probably lost. Got the worse sense of direction I’ve ever seen.”

Scarpetta tells him about the Bible inside Ev and Kristin’s bedroom, about the verse that was marked with X’s.

“The same thing the caller said to me,” Marino exclaims. “Jesus Christ. What the hell’s going on? Damn moron,” he exclaims, and he’s talking about Reba again. “I’m going to have to do an end run around her and get a real detective so this doesn’t get screwed up.”

Scarpetta has heard enough of his disparaging comments. “Do me a favor, help her as best you can and tuck your grudges out of sight. Tell me what you know.”

She looks past him through the partially opened front door. Two emergency medical technicians are carrying cases of their equipment, finished with an effort that was a waste of time.

“Shotgun wound to the mouth, blew the top of her head off,” Marino says, moving out of the way as the EMTs walk out the door, heading to the ambulance. “She’s on the bed in back, fully clothed, TV on. Nothing to imply forced entry, robbery or sexual assault. We found a pair of latex gloves in the bathroom sink. One of them is bloody.”

“Which bathroom?”

“The one in her bedroom.”

“Any other sign the killer might have cleaned up afterwards?”

“No. Just the gloves in the sink. No bloody towels, no bloody water.”

“I’ll need to look. We sure who she is?”

“We know whose residence it is. Daggie Simister’s. I can’t say for a fact who’s back there on the bed.”

Scarpetta digs inside her bag for a pair of gloves and steps into the foyer. She stops to look around as she thinks of the unlocked sliders in the master bedroom in the house across the waterway. She scans the terrazzo floor, the pale blue walls, then the small living room. It is crowded with furniture, photographs and porcelain birds and other figurines from an earlier era. Nothing seems disturbed. Marino leads her through the living room, past the kitchen and to the other side of the house, where the body is inside a bedroom that faces the water.

She is clothed in a pink warm-up suit and pink slippers and is lying on her back on top of the bed. Her mouth gapes open, her dull eyes staring below a massive wound that has opened the top of her head like an egg cup. Her brain is eviscerated, chunks of it and fragments of bone on a pillow soaked with blood that is a deep red, just beginning to coagulate. Bits of brain and skin adhere to the blood-spattered and streaked headboard and wall.

Scarpetta slides her hand inside the bloody warm-up jacket and feels the chest and belly, then touches the hands. The body is warm, and rigor mortis isn’t apparent yet. She unzips the jacket and tucks a chemical thermometer under the right arm. While she waits for a reading on the body temperature, she looks for any injury besides the obvious one to the head.

“How long you think she’s been dead?” Marino asks.

“She’s still very warm. Rigor’s not even present yet.”

She thinks about what she and Reba assumed was a backfire, decides it was about an hour ago. She walks over to a thermostat on the wall. The air-conditioning is on, the bedroom a chilly sixty-eight degrees. She writes it down and looks around, taking her time, scanning. The small bedroom has a terrazzo floor, and a dark-blue throw rug covers almost half of it from the foot of the blue duvet–covered bed to the window that overlooks the waterway. The blinds are shut. On a bedside table is a glass of what looks like water, a large-print edition of a Dan Brown novel and a pair of glasses. At first glance, there is no sign of a struggle.

“So maybe she got killed right before I got here,” Marino is saying, and he is agitated, trying not to show it. “So it could have happened minutes before I got here on my bike. I was running late. Someone punctured my front tire.”

“Deliberately?” she says, wondering about the coincidence of that happening when it did.

If he had gotten here earlier, this lady might not be dead, and she tells him about what she now assumes was a gunshot while a uniformed officer emerges from the bathroom, his hands full of prescription bottles that he sets on a dresser.

“Yeah, it was deliberate all right,” Marino says.

“Obviously, she hasn’t been dead long. What time did you find her?”

“I’d been here maybe fifteen minutes when I called you. I wanted to make sure the house was clear before I did anything. Make sure whoever killed her wasn’t hiding in a closet or something.”

“The neighbors didn’t hear anything?”

He says there is nobody home in the houses on either side of this one. One of the uniformed officers already checked. He is sweating profusely, his face deep red, his eyes wide, half crazy.

“I just don’t know what’s going on,” he says again as the rain drums the roof. “I feel like we’ve been set up somehow. You and Wagner were right across the water. I was late because of a flat tire.”

“There was an inspector,” she says. “Someone inspecting citrus trees over here.” She tells him about the fruit picker he disassembled and tucked inside a big black bag. “I’d check into that right away.”

She withdraws the thermometer from under the dead woman’s arm and writes down ninety-seven-point-two degrees. She walks into the tiled bathroom and looks inside the shower. She looks in the toilet and the waste paper basket. The sink is dry, with no blood, not the slightest residue, which makes no sense. She looks at Marino.

“The gloves were in this sink?” she asks.

“That’s right.”

“If he—or she, I suppose—took them off after killing her and dropped them into the sink, they should have left a bloody residue. The bloody one should have.”

“Unless the blood was already dry on the glove.”

“It shouldn’t have been,” Scarpetta says, opening the medicine cabinet and finding the usual alchemies for aches and pains and troublesome bowels. “Not unless the killer had them on long enough for the blood to dry.”

“Wouldn’t take all that long.”

“It might not. You got them handy?”

They walk out of the bathroom, and Marino retrieves a large brown-paper evidence envelope from a crime-scene case. He opens the envelope so she can look inside without touching the gloves. One is clean, the other partially inside out and stained with dark-brown dried blood. The gloves aren’t talc-lined, and the clean glove looks as if it has never been worn.

“We’ll want to do DNA on the inside, too. And prints,” she says.

“He must not know you can leave prints on the inside of latex gloves,” Marino says.

“Then he must not watch TV,” an officer says.

“Don’t talk to me about the crap on TV. It’s ruining my life,” another officer comments from halfway under the bed. Then, “Well, well.”

He gets up holding a flashlight and a small, stainless-steel revolver with rosewood grips. He opens the cylinder, touching as little of the metal as possible.

“Unloaded. So that did her a lot of good. Doesn’t look like it’s been fired since it was cleaned last, if it was ever fired at all,” he says.

“We’ll check it for prints anyway,” Marino tells him. “A weird place to hide a gun. How far under the bed?”

“Too far to reach without getting down on the floor and crawling under it like I just did. Twenty-two caliber. What the hell’s a Black Widow?”

“You’re kidding,” Marino says, taking a look. “North American Arms, single-action. Sort of a stupid gun for a little old lady with gnarly, arthritic hands.”

“Someone must have given it to her for home protection and she never bothered.”

“See a box of ammo anywhere?”

“Not so far.”

The officer drops the gun into an evidence bag, which he places on a dresser where another officer begins taking an inventory of prescription bottles.

“Accuretic, Diurese and Enduron,” he reads labels. “Got no idea.”

“An ace inhibitor and diuretics. For hypertension,” Scarpetta says.

“Verapamil, an old one. Dates back to July.”

“Hypertension, angina, arrhythmia.”

“Apresoline and Loniten. Try to pronounce this stuff. Over a year old.”

“Vasodilators. Again, for hypertension.”

“So maybe she died of a stroke. Vicodin. I know what that is. And Ultram. These are more recent prescriptions.”

“Pain medications. Possibly for arthritis.”

“And Zithromax. That’s an antibiotic, right? Date on it’s December.”

“Nothing else?” Scarpetta asks.

“No, ma’am.”

“Who told the Medical Examiner’s Office she has a history of depression?” she asks, looking at Marino.

No one answers at first.

Then Marino says, “I sure as hell didn’t.”

“Who called the Medical Examiner’s Office?” she asks.

The two officers and Marino look at each other.

“Shit,” Marino says.

“Hold on,” Scarpetta says, and she calls the Medical Examiner’s Office and gets the administrator on the phone. “Who notified you about the shotgun death?”

“Hollywood police.”

“But which officer?”

“Detective Wagner.”

“Detective Wagner?” Scarpetta puzzles. “What time’s on the call sheet?”

“Uh, let me see. Two eleven.”

Scarpetta looks at Marino again and asks him, “Do you know exactly what time you called me?”

He checks his cell phone and replies, “Two twenty-one.”

She glances at her watch. It is almost three thirty. She won’t be on her six-thirty flight.

“Is everything all right?” the administrator asks her over the phone.

“Anything come up on caller ID when you got that call, the one supposedly from Detective Wagner?”

“Supposedly?”

“And it was a woman who called.”

“Yes.”

“Anything unusual about the way she sounded?”

“Not at all,” he says, pausing. “She sounded credible.”

“What about an accent?”

“What’s going on, Kay?”

“Nothing good,” she says.

“Let me scroll through. Okay, two eleven. Came in as unavailable.”

“Of course it did,” Scarpetta says. “See you in about an hour.”

She leans closer to the bed and looks carefully at the hands, turning them gently. She is always gentle, doesn’t matter that her patients can’t feel anything anymore. She notices no abrasions, cuts or bruises that might suggest binding or defense injuries. She checks again with a lens and finds fibers and dirt adhering to the palms of both hands.

“She might have been on the floor at some point,” she says as Reba walks into the room, pale and wet from the rain and obviously shaken.

“The streets are like a maze back here,” Reba says.

“Hey,” Marino says to her, “what time did you call the ME?”

“About what?”

“About the price of eggs in China.”

“What?” she says, staring at the gore on the bed.

“About this case,” Marino says gruffly. “What the hell do you think I meant? And why don’t you get a damn GPS.”

“I didn’t call the ME. Why would I when she was standing right next to me?” she replies, looking at Scarpetta.

“Let’s bag her hands and her feet,” Scarpetta says. “And I want her wrapped in the quilt and a clean plastic sheet. The bed linens need to come in, too.”

She goes to a window that overlooks the backyard and the waterway. She looks at citrus trees pommeled by rain and thinks about the inspector she saw earlier. He was in this yard, she’s pretty sure, and she tries to pinpoint the exact time she saw him. She knows it wasn’t long before she heard what she now suspects was a gunshot. She looks around the bedroom again and notices two dark stains on the rug near the window that overlooks the citrus trees, the water.

The stains are very hard to see against the dark blue background, and she gets a presumptive blood kit out of her bag, gets chemicals and medicine droppers out of it. There are two stains several inches apart. Each is about the size of a quarter and oval-shaped, and she swabs one of them, then drips isopropyl alcohol, then phenolphthalein, then hydrogen peroxide on the swab and it turns bright pink. That doesn’t mean the stains are human blood, but there’s a very good chance they are.

“If it’s her blood, what’s it doing way over here?” Scarpetta talks to herself.

“Maybe back spatter,” Reba volunteers.

“Not possible.”

“Drips and not exactly round,” Marino says. “Looks like whoever was bleeding was upright, almost.”

He looks around for any other stains.

“Kind of unusual they’re here and nowhere else. If someone was bleeding a lot, you’d expect more drips,” he then says, as if Reba isn’t in the room.

“It’s hard to see them on a dark textured surface like this,” Scarpetta replies. “But I don’t see any others.”

“Maybe we should come back with luminol.” Marino talks around Reba and anger begins to flicker on her face.

“We need a sample of these carpet fibers when the techs get here,” Scarpetta says to everyone.

“Vacuum the rug, check for trace,” Marino adds, avoiding Reba’s stare.

“I’ll need to get a statement from you before you leave, seeing as how you’re the one who found her,” Reba says to him. “I’m not sure what you were doing just walking in her house.”

He doesn’t answer her. She doesn’t exist.

“So how about you and me step outside for a few minutes so I can hear what you’ve got to say,” she says to him. “Mark?” she says to one of the officers. “How about checking Investigator Marino for gunshot residue?”

“Fuck off,” Marino says.

Scarpetta recognizes the low rumble in his voice. It is usually the prelude to a major eruption.

“It’s just pro forma,” Reba replies. “I know you wouldn’t want anybody accusing you of something.”

“Uh, Reba,” the officer named Mark says. “We don’t carry GSR stubs. The crime-scene techs got to do that.”

“Where the hell are they, anyway?” Reba asks irritably, embarrassed, still so new on the job.

“Marino,” Scarpetta says. “How about checking on the removal service. See where they are.”

“I’m just curious,” Marino says, getting so close to Reba she is forced to back up a step. “How many scenes you been the only detective at a scene where there’s a dead body?”

“I’m going to need you to clear out,” she replies. “You and Dr. Scarpetta both. So we can start processing.”

“The answer’s none.” He keeps talking. “Not a single goddamn one.” He gets louder. “Well, if you go back and take a look at your Detective for Dummies notes, you might find out that the body is the medical examiner’s jurisdiction, meaning right now the Doc here’s in charge, not you. And since I just so happen to be a certified death investigator in addition to all my other fancy titles and assist the Doc as needed, you can’t order my ass around, either.”

The uniformed officers are struggling not to laugh.

“All of which adds up to one very important fact,” Marino goes on. “Me and the Doc are in charge at the moment and you don’t know chicken shit and are in the goddamn way.”

“You can’t talk to me like that!” Reba exclaims, near tears.

“Could one of you please get a real detective here?” Marino asks the uniformed cops. “Because I’m not leaving until you do.”

31

Benton sits in his office on the ground floor of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory, one of few contemporary buildings on a two-hundred-and-thirty-seven-acre campus graced with century-old brick and slate, and fruit trees and ponds. Unlike most offices at McLean, his has no view, just a handicapped-parking space directly beyond his window, then a road, then a field that is popular with Canada geese.

His office is small and cluttered with papers and books, and is located in the middle of the H-shaped lab. At each corner is an MR scanner, and collectively, their electromagnetic fields are powerful enough to pull a train off its tracks. He is the only forensic psychologist whose office is located in the lab. He has to be easily accessible to the neuroscientists because of PREDATOR.

He buzzes his study coordinator.

“Has our newest normal called back yet?” Benton stares out the window at two geese wandering along the road. “Kenny Jumper?”

“Hold on, that might be him now.” Then, “Dr. Wesley? He’s on the line.”

“Hello,” Benton says. “Good afternoon, Kenny. It’s Dr. Wesley. How are you today?”

“Not too bad.”

“You sound as if you have a bit of a cold.”

“Maybe allergies. I petted a cat.”

“I’m going to ask you some more questions, Kenny,” Benton says, looking at a secondary phone screening form.

“You already asked me all those questions.”

“These are different ones. Routine questions, the same ones we ask everybody who participates in our study.”

“Okay.”

“First of all, where are you calling from?” Benton asks.

“A pay phone. You can’t call me back on it. I have to call you.”

“You don’t have a phone where you’re staying?”

“Like I told you, I’m at a friend’s house here in Waltham, and he don’t have a phone.”

“All right. Let me just confirm a few things you told me yesterday, Kenny. You’re single.”

“Yeah.”

“Twenty-four years old.”

“Yeah.”

“White.”

“Yeah.”

“Kenny, are you right-or left-handed?”

“Right-handed. I don’t have a driver’s license, if you want an ID.”

“That’s all right,” Benton says. “It’s not required.”

Not only that, but to ask for proof of identification, to photograph patients or make any effort whatsoever to verify who they really are is a violation of HIPPA’s Protected Health Information Restriction. Benton goes through the questions on the form, asking Kenny about dentures or braces, medical implants, metal plates or pins, and how he supports himself. He inquires about any allergies in addition to cats, any breathing problems, any illnesses or medications, and whether he has ever suffered a head injury or had thoughts of harming himself or others or is currently in therapy or on probation. Typically, the answers are no. More than a third of the people who volunteer as normal control subjects have to be removed from the study because they’re anything but normal. However, so far, Kenny seems promising.

“What is your drinking pattern over the last month?” Benton continues down the list, hating every minute of it.

Telephone screening is tedious and pedestrian. But if he doesn’t do it himself, he’ll end up on the phone anyway, because he doesn’t trust information gathered by research assistants and other untrained personnel. It’s not helpful to bring in a potential study subject off the street and find out after countless hours of valuable staff time spent in screening, diagnostic interviews, rating scales, neurocognitive testing, brain imaging and lab work that he is unsuitable or unstable or potentially dangerous.

“Well, maybe a beer or two now and then,” Kenny is saying. “You know, I don’t drink much. I don’t smoke. When can I start? The ad says I get paid eight hundred dollars and you pay for the taxi. I don’t got a car. So I don’t got transportation, and I could use the money.”

“Why don’t you come in this Friday? At two o’clock in the afternoon. Would that work for you?”

“For the magnet thing?”

“That’s right. Your scan.”

“No. Thursday at five. I can do Thursday at five.”

“All right, then. Okay. Thursday at five.” Benton writes it down.

“And you can send a taxi.”

Benton says he will send a taxi and asks for an address and is puzzled by Kenny’s answer. He tells Benton to send a cab to the Alpha & Omega Funeral Home in Everett, a funeral home he has never heard of in a not-so-nice area just outside of Boston.

“Why a funeral home?” Benton inquires, tapping the pencil on the form.

“It’s close to where I’m staying. It has a pay phone.”

“Kenny, I’d like you to call me back tomorrow so we can confirm you’re coming in the next day, Thursday at five. Okay?”

“Okay. I’ll call you on this same pay phone.”

Wesley hangs up and checks directory assistance to see if there is such a place as the Alpha & Omega Funeral Home in Everett. There is. He calls it and is put on hold and subjected to Hoobastank’s The Reason.

The reason for what? he thinks impatiently. Dying?

“Benton?”

He looks up and sees Dr. Susan Lane in his doorway, holding a report.

“Hi,” he says, hanging up.

“Have some news about your friend Basil Jenrette,” she says, looking closely at him. “You look stressed.”

“When don’t I? The analysis already done?”

“Maybe you should go home, Benton. You look exhausted.”

“Preoccupied. Staying up too late. Tell me how our boy Basil’s brain works. I’m on pins and needles,” Benton says.

She hands him his copy of the structural and functional imaging analysis and begins to explain, “Increased amygdalar activity in response to affective stimuli. Especially faces, overt or masked that were fearful or had any negative content.”

“Continues to be an interesting point,” Benton says. “May eventually tell us something about how they select their victims. An expression on someone’s face that we might interpret as surprise or curiosity, they might interpret as anger or fear. And it sets them off.”

“Rather unnerving to think about.”

“I need to pursue that more vigorously when I talk to them. Starting with him.”

He opens a drawer and takes out a bottle of aspirin.

“Let’s see. During the Stroop interference task,” she says, looking at the report, “he has decreased activity of the anterior cingulate in both dorsal and subgenual regions, accompanied by increased dorsolateral prefrontal activity.”

“Give me the upshot, Susan. I’ve got a headache.”

He shakes three aspirin into his palm and swallows them without water.

“How in the world do you do that?”

“Practice.”

“So.” She resumes the analysis of Basil’s brain. “Over-all, the findings certainly reflect anomalous connectivity of frontal-limbic structures, suggesting anomalous response inhibition that may be due to deficits in a number of frontally mediated processes.”

“Implicating his ability to monitor and inhibit behavior,” Benton says. “We’re seeing a lot of that with our lovely guests from Butler. Consistent with bipolar disorder?”

“Certainly can be. That and other psychiatric disorders.”

“Excuse me a minute,” Benton says as he picks up his phone and dials his study coordinator’s extension.

“Can you check your in-log and tell me the number Kenny Jumper called from?” he asks.

“No ID.”

“Hmmm,” he says. “I’m not aware that pay phones show up as No ID.”

“Actually I just got off the line with Butler,” she says. “Apparently, Basil isn’t doing well. He wonders if you could come see him.”

It is half past five p.m. and the parking lot of the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Laboratory & Office is almost empty. Employees, particularly nonmedical ones, rarely linger at the morgue after hours.

This one is on Southwest 31st Avenue, in the midst of relatively undeveloped land thick with palms, live oak trees and pines, and scattered with mobile homes. Typical of South Florida architecture, the one-story building is stucco and coral stone. It backs up to a narrow brackish canal where mosquitoes are a menace and alligators sometimes wander where they don’t belong. Next door to the morgue is the county Fire and Rescue service where emergency medical technicians are constantly reminded of where their less-fortunate patients end up.

The rain has almost stopped, and there are puddles everywhere as Scarpetta and Joe walk out to a silver H2 Hummer, not her choice but quite adept at handling off-road death scenes and hauling bulky equipment. Lucy is fond of Hummers. Scarpetta always worries where to park them.

“I just can’t understand how someone managed to walk in with a shotgun in the middle of the day,” Joe says, and he has been saying it for the past hour. “Must be a way to tell if it was sawed off.”

“If the barrel wasn’t smoothed after it was sawn, there could be tool marks on the wad,” Scarpetta replies.

“But the absence of tool marks doesn’t mean it wasn’t sawn.”

“Correct.”

“Because he might have smoothed off the sawed-off barrel. If he did that, there’s no way for us to tell without recovering the weapon. A twelve-gauge. We know that much.”

They know that much from the Remington plastic four-petaled Power Piston wad that Scarpetta recovered from the inside of Daggie Simister’s devastated head. Beyond that fact, there are only a few more Scarpetta can state with certainty, such as the nature of the attack on Mrs. Simister, which the autopsy revealed to be different from what everyone presumed. Had she not been shot, there is a good chance she would have died anyway. Scarpetta is fairly certain Mrs. Simister was unconscious when her killer stuck the shotgun barrel into her mouth and pulled the trigger. It wasn’t an easy conclusion to determine.

Examinations of massive gaping injuries to the head can mask wounds that may have occurred before the final mutilating trauma. Sometimes forensic pathology requires plastic surgery, and in the morgue, Scarpetta did what she could to repair Mrs. Simister’s head, fitting pieces of bone and scalp back together, then shaving off the hair. What she found was a laceration on the back of the head and a skull fracture. The point of impact correlated with a subdural hematoma in an underlying part of her brain that had been left relatively intact after the shotgun blast.

If the stains on the carpet by the window in Mrs. Simister’s bedroom turn out to be her blood, then it’s likely this was where she was first attacked and would also explain the dirt and bluish fibers on the palms of her hands. She was struck hard from behind with a blunt object and went down. Then her assailant picked her up, all eighty-six pounds of her, and placed her on the bed.

“I mean, you could easily carry a sawed-off shotgun in a knapsack,” Joe is saying.

Scarpetta points the remote at the Hummer and unlocks the doors and replies wearily, “Not necessarily.”

Joe makes her tired. He annoys her more each day.

“Even if you sawed twelve or even eighteen inches off the barrel and six inches off the stock,” she remarks, “you’re still left with an eighteen-inch-long gun, at least. Assuming we’re talking about an autoloader.”

She thinks of the big black bag the citrus inspector was carrying.

“If we’re talking about a pump, you’re likely to have a longer gun than that,” she adds. “Neither scenario works with a knapsack, unless it’s a big one.”

“A tote bag, then.”

She thinks of the citrus inspector, of the long picker that he disassembled and packed inside his black bag. She’s seen citrus inspectors before and never noticed them using pickers. Usually, they look at what they can reach.

“I bet he had a tote bag,” Joe says.

“I’ve got no idea.” She’s about to snap at him.

Throughout the entire autopsy, he prattled and divined and pontificated until she could scarcely think. He found it necessary to announce everything he was doing, everything he was writing on the protocol attached to his clipboard. He felt it necessary to tell her the weight of every organ and deduce when Mrs. Simister ate last based on the partially digested meat and vegetables in her stomach. He made sure Scarpetta heard the crunching sound of calcium deposits when he opened partially occluded coronaries with the scalpel and announced that maybe atherosclerosis killed her.

Ha, ha.

And, well, Mrs. Simister didn’t have much to look forward to, anyway. She had a bad heart. Her lungs had adhesions, probably from old pneumonia, and her brain was somewhat atrophied, so she probably had Alzheimer’s.

If you have to be murdered, Joe said, you may as well be in bad health.

“I’m thinking he hit her in the back of the head with the butt of the gun,” now he is saying. “You know, like this.”

He rams an imaginary head with the imaginary stock of a shotgun.

“She wasn’t even five feet tall,” he continues his scenario. “So for him to slam her head with the butt of a gun that weighs maybe six or seven pounds, assuming it wasn’t sawed off, he would need to be reasonably strong and taller than her.”

“We can’t say that at all,” Scarpetta replies, driving out of the parking lot. “So much depends on his position in relation to her. So much depends on a lot of things. And we don’t know that she was struck with the gun. We don’t know that the killer was a he. Be careful, Joe.”

“Of what?”

“In your great enthusiasm to reconstruct exactly how and why she died, you run the risk of confusing the theoretical with the truth and turning fact into fiction. This isn’t a hell scene. This is a real human being who is really dead.”

“Nothing wrong with creativity,” he says, staring straight ahead, his thin mouth and long, pointed chin set the way they always are when he gets petulant.

“Creativity is good,” she replies. “It should suggest where to look and for what, but not necessarily choreograph the sort of reenactments you see in movies and on TV.”

32

The small guesthouse is tucked behind a Spanish-tile swimming pool amid fruit trees and flowering shrubs. It is not a normal place to see patients, probably not the best place to see them, but the setting is poetic and full of symbols. When it rains, Dr. Marilyn Self feels as creative as the warm, wet earth.

She tends to interpret the weather as a manifestation of what happens when patients walk through her door. Repressed emotions, some of them torrential, are released in the safety of her therapeutic environment. Weather volatilities happen all around her and are unique to her and intended for her. They are full of meaning and instruction.

Welcome to my storm. Now let’s talk about yours.

It’s a good line, and she uses it often in her practice and on her radio show and now her new television show. Human emotions are internal weather systems, she explains to her patients, to her multitude of listeners. Every storm front is caused by something. Nothing comes from nothing. Talking about the weather is neither idle nor mundane.

“I see the look on your face,” she says from her leather chair in her cozy living-room setting. “You got the look again when the rain stopped.”

“I keep telling you I don’t have a look.”

“It’s interesting that you get the look when the rain stops. Not when it starts or is even at its worst, but when it suddenly stops as it did just now,” she says.

“I don’t have a look.”

“Just now the rain stopped and you got that look on your face,” Dr. Self says again. “It’s the same look you get when our time is up.”

“No it isn’t.”

“I promise it is.”

“I don’t pay three hundred dollars a damn hour to talk about storms. I don’t have a look.”

“Pete, I’m telling you what I see.”

“I don’t have a look,” Pete Marino replies from the reclining chair across from hers. “That’s crap. Why would I care about a storm? I’ve seen storms all my life. I didn’t grow up in a desert.”

She studies his face. He is rather handsome in a very rough, masculine way. She probes the dusky gray eyes behind the wire-rimmed glasses. His balding head reminds her of a newborn’s bottom, pale and naked in the soft lamplight. His fleshy, rounded pate is a tender buttock waiting to be spanked.

“I think we’re having a trust issue,” she says.

He glowers at her from his chair.

“Why don’t you tell me why you care about rain-storms, about them ending, Pete. Because I believe you do. And you have the look even as we speak. I promise. You still have it,” she says to him.

He touches his face as if it is a mask, as if it is something that doesn’t belong to him.

“My face is normal. There’s nothing about it. Nothing.”

He taps his massive jaw. He taps his big forehead.

“If I had a look, I could tell. I don’t have a look.”

For the past few minutes they have driven in silence, heading back to the Hollywood Police Department parking lot, where Joe can retrieve his red Corvette and get out of her way for the rest of the day.

Then he suddenly says, “Did I tell you I got my scuba-diving license?”

“Good for you,” Scarpetta says, not pretending to care.

“I’m buying a condo in the Cayman Islands. Well, not exactly. My girlfriend and I are buying it. She makes more money than me,” he says. “How about that. I’m a doctor and she’s a paralegal, not even a real lawyer, and she earns more than me.”

“I never assumed you chose forensic pathology for the money.”

“I didn’t go into it intending to be poor.”

“Then maybe you should consider doing something else, Joe.”

“Doesn’t look to me like you’re wanting for much.”

He turns toward her as they stop at a red light. She feels his stare.

“I guess it doesn’t hurt to have a niece who’s as rich as Bill Gates,” he adds. “And a boyfriend from some rich New England family.”

“What exactly is it that you’re implying?” she says, and she thinks of Marino.

She thinks of his hell scenes.

“That it’s easy to not care about money if you’ve got plenty. And maybe that you didn’t exactly earn it yourself.”

“Not that my finances are any of your business, but if you work as many years as I have and are smart, you can manage just fine.”

“Depends on what you mean by ‘manage.’”

She thinks of how impressive Joe was on paper. When he applied for the Academy’s fellowship, she thought he just might be the most promising fellow she had ever had. She doesn’t understand how she could have been so wrong.

“Nobody I’m watching in your camp is merely managing,” he says, his voice turning more snide. “Even Marino makes more than I do.”

“How would you know how much he makes?”

The Hollywood Police Department is just ahead on the left, a four-story precast building so close to a public golf course it’s not uncommon for misguided balls to fly over the fence and pelt police cars. She spots Joe’s precious red Corvette in a distant spot, tucked out of the path of anything that might so much as ding it.

“Everybody sort of knows what everybody makes,” Joe is saying. “It’s public knowledge.”

“It’s not.”

“You can’t keep secrets in a place so small.”

“The Academy’s not that small, and there should be plenty that’s confidential. Such as salaries.”

“I should be paid more. Marino’s not a damn doctor. He barely finished high school and he makes more than I do. All Lucy does is run around playing secret agent in her Ferraris, helicopters, jets, motorcycles. I want to know what the hell she does to have all that. Big shot, superwoman, what arrogance, what an attitude. It’s no wonder the students dislike her so much.”

Scarpetta stops behind his Corvette and turns to him, her face as serious as he has probably ever seen it.

“Joe?” she says. “You have one month left. Let’s get through it.”

In Dr. Self’s professional opinion, the cause of Marino’s biggest difficulties in life is the look he has on his face just now.

It is the subtlety of this negative facial expression, as opposed to the facial expression itself, that makes matters worse for him, as if he needs anything to make matters worse. If only he weren’t subtle about his secret fears, loathing, abandonments, sexual insecurities, bigotries and other repressed negativities. While she recognizes the tension in his mouth and eyes, other people probably don’t, not consciously. But unconsciously, they pick up on it and react.

Marino frequently is the victim of verbal abuse, rude behavior, dishonesty, rejection and betrayal. He gets into his share of fights. He claims to have killed several people during his demanding and dangerous career. Clearly, whoever is unwise enough to go after him gets quite a lot more than he bargains for, but Marino doesn’t look at it that way. People pick on him for no good reason, according to him. Some of the hostility is related to his job, according to him. Most of his problems stem from prejudice because he grew up poor in New Jersey. He doesn’t understand why people have been shitty to him all of his life, he frequently says.

The last few weeks he has been much worse. This afternoon, he is worse yet.

“Let’s talk about New Jersey for the few minutes we have left.” Dr. Self deliberately reminds him that the session is about to end. “Last week, you mentioned New Jersey several times. Why do you think New Jersey still matters?”

“If you grew up in New Jersey, you’d know why,” he says, and the look on his face intensifies.

“That’s not an answer, Pete.”

“My father was a drunk. We was on the wrong side of the tracks. People still look at me like I’m from New Jersey and that starts it.”

“Maybe it’s the look on your face, Pete, and not theirs,” she says again. “Maybe you’re the one who starts it.”

The answering machine clicks from the table next to Dr. Self’s leather chair and Marino gets the look on his face, very intense now. He doesn’t like it when a call interrupts their session, even if she doesn’t answer it. He doesn’t understand why she still relies on old technology instead of voicemail that is silent, that doesn’t click when someone leaves a message, that isn’t annoying and intrusive. He reminds her of this often. Discreetly, she glances at her watch, a large, gold watch with Roman numerals that she can see without her reading glasses.

In twelve minutes, the session will end. Pete Marino has difficulties with endings, with codas, with anything that is over, finished, spent or dead. It isn’t coincidental that Dr. Self schedules his appointments for late afternoons, preferably around five, when it is beginning to get dark or afternoon thundershowers stop. He is an intriguing case. She wouldn’t see him if he wasn’t. It is just a matter of time before she coaxes him to be a guest patient on her nationally broadcast radio show or maybe her new television show. He would be impressive in front of the camera, so much better than that unattractive and foolish Dr. Amos.

She hasn’t had a cop yet. When she was the guest lecturer at the National Forensic Academy’s summer session and sat next to Marino one night at a dinner in her honor, it entered her mind then that he would be a fascinating guest on her show, possibly a frequent guest. Certainly, he needed therapy. He drank too much. He did so right in front of her, had four bourbons. He smoked. She could smell it on his breath. He was a compulsive eater, helped himself to three desserts. When she met him, he was brimming with self-destructiveness and self-hate.

I can help you, she said to him that night.

With what? He reacted as if she had grabbed him under the table.

With your storms, Pete. Your internal storms. Tell me about your storms. I’ll say the same thing to you I’ve been saying to all these bright young students. You can master your weather. You can make it what you want. You can have storms or sunshine. You can duck and hide or walk out in the open.

In my line of work, you got to be careful about walking out in the open, he said.

I don’t want you to die, Pete. You’re a big, smart, good-looking man. I want you around for a long time.

You don’t even know me.

I know you better than you think.

He started seeing her. Within a month, he cut back on the booze and cigarettes and lost ten pounds.

“I don’t have the look right now. I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Marino says, feeling his face with his fingertips like a blind person.

“You have it. The instant the rain stopped, you got the look. Whatever you’re feeling is on your face, Pete,” she says with emphasis. “I’m wondering if the look doesn’t trace all the way back to New Jersey. What do you think?”

“I think this is garbage. I came to see you originally because I couldn’t quit smoking and was eating and drinking a little bit too much. I didn’t come see you because I got some stupid look on my face. No one’s ever complained about some stupid look on my face. Now my wife, Doris, she complained about me being fat and smoking and drinking a little bit too much. She never complained about a look on my face. She didn’t walk out on me because of a look. None of my women did.”

“What about Dr. Scarpetta?”

He tenses, a part of him always retreating when the subject of Scarpetta comes up. It isn’t accidental that Dr. Self has waited until the session is almost over before introducing the subject of Scarpetta.

“I should be at the morgue right now,” he says.

“As long as you’re not in the morgue,” she says lightly.

“I ain’t got a sense of humor today. I work a case and get cut out of it. The story of my life these days.”

“Did Scarpetta exclude you?”

“She didn’t get a chance. I didn’t want a conflict of interest, so I stayed away from the autopsy in case somebody wants to accuse me of something. Besides, it’s pretty obvious what killed the lady.”

“Accuse you of what?”

“People are always accusing me of something.”

“Next week, we’ll talk about your paranoia. It all goes back to the look on your face, it really does. You don’t think Scarpetta’s ever noticed the look on your face? Because I’m betting she has. You should ask her.”

“This is fucking bullshit.”

“Remember what we said about profanity. Remember our agreement. Profanity is acting out. I want you to tell me about your feelings, not act them out.”

“I feel this is fucking bullshit.”

Dr. Self smiles at him as if he is a naughty boy who needs to be spanked.

“I didn’t come see you because of a look on my face, a look you think I have that I don’t.”

“Why don’t you ask Scarpetta about it?”

“I feel a fucking hell no coming over me.”

“Let’s talk it out, don’t act it out.”

It pleases her to hear herself say it. She thinks of the way her radio shows are promoted: Talk It Out with Dr. Self.

“What really happened today?” she asks Marino.

“Are you kidding me? I walked in on an old lady who had her head blown off. And guess who the detective is?”

“I would assume it’s you, Pete.”

“I’m not exactly in charge,” he retorts. “If it was the old days I sure as hell would be. I told you before. I can be the death investigator and help out the Doc. But I can’t be in charge of the entire case unless the jurisdiction involved hands it over to me and no way Reba’s going to do that. She don’t know shit but she’s got a thing about me.”

“As I recall it, you had a thing about her until she was disrespectful, tried to put you down, based on what you told me.”

“She shouldn’t be a damn detective,” he exclaims, his face turning red.

“Tell me about it.”

“I can’t talk about my work. Not even with you.”

“I’m not asking for details about cases or investigations, although you can tell me anything you like. What goes on in this room never leaves this room.”

“Unless you’re on the radio or that new TV show you’re doing.”

“We’re not on the radio or TV,” she says with another smile. “If you want to be on either, I can arrange that. You would be so much more interesting than Dr. Amos.”

“Star fucker. Monkey ass.”

“Pete?” she warns him—nicely, of course. “I’m well aware you don’t like him, either, have paranoiac thoughts about him, too. Right now, there is no microphone, no camera in this room, just you and me.”

He looks around as if he’s not sure he believes her, then says, “I didn’t like that she talked to him right in front of me.”

“Him being Benton. She being Scarpetta.”

“She makes me have a meeting with her and then gets on the phone with me sitting right there.”

“Rather much the way you feel when my answering machine clicks.”

“She could have called him while I wasn’t there. She did it on purpose.”

“It’s a habit of hers, isn’t it,” Dr. Self says. “Introducing her lover into the mix right in front of you when she must know the way you feel about it, about your jealousy.”

“Jealous? Of fucking what? He’s a rich-boy has-been FBI fortune-cookie profiler.”

“That’s not true, now is it. He’s a forensic psychologist on the faculty at Harvard, comes from a distinguished New England family. Sounds pretty impressive to me.”

She hasn’t met Benton. She would like to, would love to have him on her show.

“He’s a has-been. People who are has-beens teach.”

“I believe he does more than teach.”

“He’s a goddamn has-been.”

“Seems like most people you know are has-beens. Including Scarpetta. You’ve said that about her as well.”

“I call it like I see it.”

“I’m wondering if you might feel like a has-been.”

“Who me? You kidding? I can bench-press more than twice my body weight now and was running on the treadmill the other day. First time in twenty damn years.”

“We’re almost out of time,” she reminds him again. “Let’s talk about your anger towards Scarpetta. It’s about trust, isn’t it.”

“It’s about respect. About her treating me like shit and lying.”

“You feel she doesn’t trust you anymore because of what happened last summer at that place in Knoxville where they do all that research on dead bodies. What’s it called? The Decay Research something or other.”

“The Body Farm.”

“Oh, yes.”

What an intriguing topic for discussion on one of her shows: The Body Farm Isn’t a Health Spa. What Is Death? Talk It Out with Dr. Self.

She has already composed the promo.

Marino looks at his watch, makes a big production of lifting his thick wrist to see what time it is, as if it doesn’t bother him that their time is about up, as if he is looking forward to its being up.

She isn’t fooled.

“Fear,” Dr. Self begins her summary. “An existential fear of not counting, of not mattering, of being left utterly alone. When the day ends, when the storm ends. When things end. It’s scary when things end, isn’t it? Money ends. Health ends. Youthfulness ends. Love ends. Maybe your relationship with Dr. Scarpetta will end? Maybe she’ll finally reject you?”

“There’s nothing to end except work and that will go on forever because people are shits and will keep killing each other long after I got my little angel wings. I’m not coming here anymore and listening to this bullshit. All you do is talk about the Doc. I think it’s pretty obvious my problem isn’t her.”

“We do have to stop now.”

She rises from her chair and smiles at him.

“I quit taking that medicine you prescribed. A couple weeks ago, forgot to tell you.”

He gets up and his big presence seems to fill the room.

“It didn’t do nothing, so why bother,” he says.

When he is on his feet, she is always a bit startled by what a big man he is. His sun-darkened hands remind her of baseball mitts, of baked hams. She can imagine him crushing someone’s skull or neck, of smashing another person’s bones like potato chips.

“We’ll talk about the Effexor next week. I’m seeing you…” She picks up the appointment book from her desk. “Next Tuesday at five.”

Marino stares through the open doorway, scanning the small sunroom with its one table and two chairs and potted plants, several of them palms that are almost as high as the ceiling. There are no other patients waiting. There never are this time of day.

“Huh,” he says. “Good thing we hurried up and finished on time. Hate for you to keep someone waiting.”

“Would you like to pay me at our next appointment?”

It is Dr. Self’s way of reminding him that he owes her three hundred dollars.

“Yeah, yeah. I forgot my checkbook,” he replies.

Of course he did. He isn’t about to owe her money. He will be back.

33

Benton parks his Porsche in a visitor’s slot outside tall metal fencing that is curved like a breaking wave and topped with coils of razor wire. Guard towers rise starkly against the cold, overcast sky from each corner of the grounds. Parked in a side lot are unmarked white vans with steel dividers, no windows and no interior locks, mobile holding cells used to transport prisoners like Basil off-grounds.

Butler State Hospital is eight stories of precast and steel-mesh-covered windows on twenty acres amid woods and ponds less than an hour southwest of Boston. Butler is where offenders are committed by reason of insanity and is considered a model of enlightenment and civility with pods called cottages, each one housing patients requiring different levels of security and attention. D Cottage stands alone not far from the administration building, and houses approximately one hundred dangerous predatory inmates.

Segregated from the rest of the hospital population, they spend most of the day, depending on their status, in single cells, each with its own shower that can be used ten minutes per day. Toilets can be flushed twice an hour. A team of forensic psychiatrists is assigned to D Pod, and other mental health and legal professionals such as Benton are in and out regularly. Butler is supposed to be humane and constructive, a place to get well. To Benton, it is nothing more than attractive maximum-security confinement for people who can never be repaired. He has no illusions. People like Basil have no lives and never did. They ruin lives and always will, given the chance.

Inside the beige-painted lobby, Benton approaches a bulletproof window and speaks through an intercom.

“How you doing, George?”

“No better than last time you asked.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Benton says as a loud metallic click grants him entrance through the first set of airlocked doors. “That mean you haven’t gotten around to seeing your doctor yet?”

The door shuts behind him and he places his briefcase on a small metal table. George is in his sixties and never feels well. He hates his job. He hates his wife. He hates the weather. He hates politicians and, when he can, removes the photograph of the governor from the wall in the lobby. For the past year, he has struggled with extreme fatigue, stomach problems and achiness. He also hates doctors.

“I’m not taking medicine, so what’s the point? That’s all doctors do anymore is throw drugs at you,” George says as he searches Benton’s briefcase and returns it to him. “Your pal’s in the usual spot. Have fun.”

Another click and Benton steps through a second steel door, and a guard in a tan-and-brown uniform, Geoff, leads him along a polished hallway, passing through another set of airlock doors into the high-security unit where lawyers and mental-health workers meet with inmates in small, windowless rooms made of cinder block.

“Basil says he’s not getting his mail,” Benton says.

“He says a lot of things,” Geoff replies without smiling. “All he does is run his mouth.”

He unlocks a gray steel door and holds it open.

“Thanks,” Benton says.

“I’ll be right outside.” Geoff fires a look at Basil, shuts the door.

Basil sits at a small wooden table and doesn’t get up. He is unrestrained and wears his usual prison garb of blue pants, white T-shirt and flip-flops with socks. His eyes are bloodshot and distracted, and he stinks.

“How are you, Basil?” Benton asks, taking a seat across from him.

“I had a bad day.”

“That’s what I hear. Tell me.”

“I’m feeling anxious.”

“How are you sleeping?”

“I was awake most of the night. I kept thinking about our talk.”

“You seem fidgety,” Benton says.

“I can’t sit still. It’s because of what I told you. I need something, Dr. Wesley. I need some Ativan or something. Have you looked at the pictures yet?”

“What pictures?”

“The ones of my brain. You must have. I know you’re curious. Everybody over there is curious, right?” he says with a nervous smile.

“Is that what you wanted to see me about?”

“Pretty much. And I want my mail. They won’t give it to me and I can’t sleep or eat, I’m so upset and stressed. Maybe some Ativan, too. I hope you’ve thought about it.”

“About?”

“What I told you about that lady who got killed.”

“The lady in The Christmas Shop.”

“Ten-four.”

“Yes, I have been thinking quite a lot about what you told me, Basil,” Benton says, as if he accepts that what Basil told him is true.

He can never let on when he thinks a patient is lying. In this instance, he’s not sure Basil is, not at all.

“Let’s go back to that day in July, two and a half years ago,” Benton says.

It bothers Marino that Dr. Self shut the door behind him and wasted no time flipping the deadbolt, as if he is the one she is locking out.

He is insulted by the gesture and what it implies. He always is. She doesn’t care about him. He’s just an appointment. She is glad he is out of her way and she won’t have to subject herself to his company for another week, and then it will be for fifty minutes and fifty minutes only, not a second more, even if he’s quit his medicine.

That stuff is shit. He couldn’t have sex. What good is an antidepressant if you can’t have sex. You want to be depressed, take an antidepressant that ruins sex.

He stands outside the locked door on her sunporch, staring rather dazedly at the two pale-green cushioned chairs and the green glass table with its stack of magazines. He has read the magazines, all of them, because he is always early for his appointments. That bothers him, too. He would prefer to be late, to stroll in as if he has better things to do than show up for a shrink, but if he is late, he loses those minutes, and he can’t afford to lose even one minute when every minute counts and is costly.

Six dollars a minute, to be exact. Fifty minutes and not a minute more, not a second more. She isn’t going to add a minute or two for good measure or goodwill or for any reason. He could threaten to kill himself and she is going to glance at her watch and say, We’ve got to stop. He could tell her about killing someone and be right in the middle of it, about to pull the trigger, and she is going to say, We’ve got to stop.

Aren’t you curious? he has asked her in the past. How can you just end it right here when I haven’t even gotten to the good part yet?

You’ll tell me the rest of the story next time, Pete. She always smiles.

Maybe I won’t. You’re lucky I’m telling you, period. A lot of people would pay money to hear the whole story, the God’s-truth story.

Next time.

Forget it. There ain’t gonna be a next time.

She won’t argue with him when it is time to stop. No matter what he does to steal another minute or two, she gets up and opens the door and waits for him to walk out so she can lock it behind him. There is no negotiating when it is time to stop. Six dollars a minute for what? To be insulted. He doesn’t know why he comes back.

He stares at the small, kidney-shaped pool with its colorful Spanish-tile border. He stares at orange and grapefruit trees heavy with fruit, stares at the red-painted stripes around the trunks of them.

Twelve hundred dollars each month. Why does he do it? He could buy one of those Dodge trucks with the V-10 Viper engine. He could buy a lot of things for twelve hundred bucks a month.

He hears her voice behind the shut door. She is on the phone. He pretends to be looking at a magazine, listening.

“I’m sorry, who is this?” Dr. Self is saying.

She has a big voice, a radio voice, a voice that projects and carries as much authority as a gun or a badge. Her voice really gets to him. He likes her voice and it really does something to him. She looks good, really good, so good it’s hard to sit across from her and imagine other men sitting in his same chair and seeing what he sees. Her dark hair and delicate features, her bright eyes and perfect white teeth. He isn’t happy that she’s started a television show, doesn’t want other men to see what she looks like, see how sexy she is.

“Who is this, and how did you get this number?” she says from behind the locked door. “No, she’s not, and she doesn’t take those kinds of calls directly. Who is this?”

Marino listens, getting anxious and overheated as he stands on the sunporch outside her locked door. The early evening is steamy, and water drips from trees and is beaded on the grass. Dr. Self doesn’t sound happy. She seems to be talking to someone she doesn’t know.

“I understand your privacy concerns, and I’m sure you understand it isn’t possible to verify the validity of your claim if you won’t say who you are. Things like this have to be followed up on and verified or Dr. Self can’t have anything to do with them. Well, that’s a nickname, not a real name. Oh, it is, I see. All right, then.”

Marino realizes she is pretending to be someone else. She doesn’t know the person on the line and is uneasy about it.

“Yes, all right,” says the person Dr. Self pretends to be. “You can do that. Certainly you can talk to the producer. I must admit it’s interesting if it’s true, but you need to call the producer. I suggest you do so right away, since Thursday’s show is on that topic. No, not radio. Her new television show,” she says in the same firm voice, a voice that easily penetrates the wooden door and flows right into the sunporch.

She talks much louder on the phone than she does in her sessions. It’s a good thing. It wouldn’t be good if some other patient were sitting on the sunporch and could hear every word Dr. Self says to Marino during their brief but expensive fifty minutes together. She doesn’t talk this loudly when they are together behind that shut door. Of course, there is never anyone waiting on the sunporch when he has a session. He is always the last one, all the more reason she ought to cut him some slack and throw in a few extra minutes. It isn’t like she would keep anyone waiting, because there isn’t anyone. There never is after his appointment. One of these days, he will say something so moving and important, she will give him a few extra minutes. It might be the first time she has ever done it in her life, and she will do it with him. She will want to do it. Maybe it will be him who doesn’t have the extra time on that occasion.

I’ve got to go, he imagines himself saying.

Please finish. I really want to hear what happened.

Can’t do it. Got to be somewhere. He will get up from his chair. Next time. I promise I’ll tell you the rest of it when…let’s see…Next week, whenever. Just remind me, okay?

Marino realizes Dr. Self has gotten off the phone, and he moves across the sunporch as silently as a shadow and lets himself out the glass door. He shuts it without a sound and follows the walkway around the pool, through the garden with its fruit trees that have the red stripes around them, and along the side of the small, white, stucco house where Dr. Self lives but shouldn’t live, simply has no business living. Anybody could walk right up to her front door. Anybody could walk right up to her office in back by the palm-shaded pool. It isn’t safe. Millions of people listen to her every week and she lives like this. It isn’t safe. He should go back and knock on her door and tell her.

His tricked-out Screamin’ Eagle Deuce is parked on the street, and he walks around it once to make sure nobody has done anything to it while he was in his appointment. He thinks about his flat tire. He thinks about getting his hands on whoever did it. A light film of dust coats the flames over blue paint and the chrome, and he is more than a little irritated. He detailed the motorcycle early this morning, polished every inch of trim and then had a flat tire and now there is dust. Dr. Self should have covered parking. She should have a damn garage. Her fancy white Mercedes convertible is in the driveway and no other car will fit, so her patients park on the street. It isn’t safe.

He unlocks the bike’s front fork and ignition and swings his leg over the warrior seat, thinking how much he loves not living like the poor city cop he was most of his life. The Academy supplies him with an H2 Hummer, black with a turbo-diesel V8, 250-horsepower engine, four-speed overdrive transmission, a load-bearing exterior rack, winch and off-road adventure package. He bought the Deuce and tricked it out to his heart’s content, and he can afford a psychiatrist. Imagine that.

He shifts the bike into neutral and presses the starter button as he stares at the attractive white house where Dr. Self lives but shouldn’t live. He holds in the clutch and gives the bike some gas, the ThunderHead pipes making plenty of noise as lightning flashes in the distance and a dark army of retreating clouds wastes its artillery over the sea.

34

Basil smiles again. “I can’t find anything about a murder,” Benton is saying to him, “but two and a half years ago, a woman and her daughter disappeared from a business called The Christmas Shop.”

“Didn’t I tell you that?” Basil says, smiling.

“You didn’t say anything about people disappearing or a daughter.”

“They won’t give me my mail.”

“I’m checking on it, Basil.”

“You said you’d check on it a week ago. I want my mail. I want it today. They quit giving it to me right after I had the disagreement.”

“When you got angry at Geoff and called him Uncle Remus.”

“And for that I don’t get my mail. I think he spits in my food. I want all of it, all the old mail that’s been sitting around for a month. Then you can move me to a different cell.”

“That I can’t do, Basil. It’s for your own good.”

“I guess you don’t want to know,” Basil says.

“How about I promise you’ll have all your mail by the end of the day.”

“I better get it or that’s the end of our friendly conversation about The Christmas Shop. I’m getting rather bored with your little science project.”

“The only Christmas shop I could find was in Las Olas on the beach,” Benton says. “July fourteenth, Florrie Quincy and her seventeen-year-old daughter, Helen, disappeared. Does that mean anything to you, Basil?”

“I’m not good with names.”

“Describe for me what you remember about The Christmas Shop, Basil.”

“Trees with lights, little trains and ornaments everywhere,” he says, no longer smiling. “I already told you all that. I want to know what you found inside my brain. You see their pictures?” He points at his head. “You should see everything you want to know. Now you’re wasting my time. I want my damn mail!”

“I promised, didn’t I?”

“And there was a trunk in back, you know, a big foot-locker. It was stupid as shit. I made her open it and she had these collector’s ornaments made in Germany in painted wooden boxes. Stuff like Hansel and Gretel and Snoopy and Little Red Riding Hood. She kept them locked up because of how expensive they were, and I said, ‘What the fuck for? All someone has to do is steal the trunk. You really think locking them up in there is going to stop someone from stealing them?’”

He falls silent, staring off at the cinder-block wall.

“What else did you talk about with her before you killed her?”

“I told her, ‘You’re going down, bitch.’”

“At what point did you talk to her about the trunk in the back of the store?”

“I didn’t.”

“I thought you said…”

“I never said I talked to her about it,” Basil says impatiently. “I want to be put on something. Why can’t you give me something. I can’t sleep. I can’t sit still. I feel like fucking everything and then get depressed and can’t get out of bed. I want my mail.”

“How many times a day are you masturbating?” Benton asks.

“Six or seven. Maybe ten.”

“More than usual.”

“Then you and me had our little talk last night and that’s all I’ve done all day. Didn’t get out of bed except to pee, barely ate, haven’t bothered with a shower. I know where she is,” he then says. “Get me my mail.”

“Mrs. Quincy?”

“See, I’m in here.” Basil leans back in the chair. “What do I have to lose? What incentive do I have to do the right thing? Favors, a little special treatment, maybe cooperation. I want my fucking mail.”

Benton gets up and opens the door. He tells Geoff to go to the mail room, find out about Basil’s mail. Benton can tell by the guard’s reaction that he knows all about Basil’s mail and isn’t happy about doing anything that might make his life more pleasant. So it’s probably true. He hasn’t been getting it.

“I need you to do it,” Benton tells Geoff, meeting his eyes. “It’s important.”

Geoff nods, walks off. Benton shuts the door again and sits back down at the table.

Fifteen minutes later, Benton and Basil are finishing their conversation, a tangled mess of misinformation and convoluted games. Benton is annoyed. He doesn’t show it and is relieved to see Geoff.

“Your mail will be waiting on your bed,” Geoff says from the doorway, his eyes flat and cold as they stare at Basil.

“You better not have stolen my magazines.”

“Nobody’s interested in your fucking fishing magazines. Excuse me, Dr. Wesley.” And to Basil, “There are four of them on your bed.”

Basil casts an imaginary fly rod. “The one that got away,” he says. “It’s always the biggest one. My father used to take me fishing when I was a little boy. When he wasn’t beating my mother.”

“I’m telling you,” Geoff says. “I’m telling you right in front of Dr. Wesley. You mess with me again, Jenrette, and your mail and fishing magazines won’t be your only problem.”

“See, this is what I mean,” Basil tells Benton. “This is how I’m treated around here.”

35

In the storage area, Scarpetta opens a crime-scene case that she carried in from the Hummer. She removes vials of sodium perborate, sodium carbonate and luminol, mixes them with distilled water in a container, shakes it and transfers the solution into a black pump spray bottle.

“Not exactly how you thought you’d spend your week off,” Lucy says as she attaches a thirty-five-millimeter camera to a tripod.

“Nothing like a little quality time,” Scarpetta says. “At least we get to see each other.”

Both of them are shrouded in disposable white coveralls, shoe covers, safety glasses, face masks and caps, the door to the storage room shut. It is almost eight p.m., and Beach Bums is once again locked up before closing time.

“Give me just a minute to get the context,” Lucy says, screwing a cable release on the camera’s power switch. “Remember the days when you had to use a sock?”

It is important that the spray bottle stay out of the photograph, and that’s not possible unless the bottle and nozzle are black or covered with something black. If nothing else is available, a black sock works fine.

“Nice to have a bigger budget, isn’t it,” Lucy adds, the shutter opening as she presses the cable-release button. “We haven’t done something together like this in a while. Anyway, money problems are no fun.”

She captures an area of shelving and concrete flooring, the camera fixed in place.

“I don’t know,” Scarpetta says. “We always managed. In many ways, it was better, because defense attorneys didn’t have an endless list of no questions: Did you use a Mini-Crime scope? Did you use super sticks? Did you use laser trajectory? Did you use ampules of sterile water? What? You used bottled distilled water and you bought it where? A 7-Eleven? You bought evidence-collecting items at a convenience store?”

Lucy takes another photograph.

“Did you test the DNA of the trees, birds and squirrels in the yard?” Scarpetta goes on, pulling a black rubber glove over the cotton examination glove covering her left hand. “What about vacuuming the entire neighborhood for trace evidence?”

“I think you’re in a really bad mood.”

“I think I’m tired of your avoiding me. The only time you call is at times like this.”

“No one better.”

“That’s all I am to you? A member of your staff?”

“I can’t believe you’d even ask that. You ready for me to cut the lights?”

“Go.”

Lucy pulls a string, clicking off the overhead lightbulb, casting them into total darkness. Scarpetta starts by spraying luminol on a control sample of blood, a single dried drop on a square of cardboard, and it glows greenish-blue and fades. She begins spraying in sweeps, misting areas of the floor and they begin to glow vividly as if the entire floor is on fire, a neon greenish-blue fire.

“Good God,” Lucy says, and the shutter clicks again and Scarpetta sprays. “I’ve never seen that.”

The bright greenish-blue luminescence glows and fades to the slow, eerie rhythm of the spraying and when the spraying stops, the glow vanishes in the dark and Lucy turns on the light. She and Scarpetta look closely at the concrete floor.

“I don’t see anything except dirt,” Lucy says, getting frustrated.

“Let’s sweep it up before we walk on it any more than we have.”

“Shit!” Lucy says. “I wish we’d tried the Mini-Crime scope first.”

“Not now, but we can,” Scarpetta says.

With a clean paintbrush, Lucy sweeps dirt from the floor into a plastic evidence bag, then repositions the camera and tripod. She takes more context photographs, these of wooden shelving, cuts the lights and this time the luminol reacts differently. Splotchy areas light up an electric blue and dance like popping sparks, and the shutter clicks and clicks and Scarpetta sprays, and the blueness pulses rapidly, fading in and out much more quickly than is typical of blood and most other substances that react to chemiluminescence.

“Bleach,” Lucy says, because a number of substances result in false positives, and bleach is a common one, and the way it looks is distinctive.

“Something with a different spectra, certainly reminiscent of bleach,” Scarpetta replies. “Could be any cleanser containing a hypochlorite-based bleach. Clorox, Drano, Fantastic, The Works, Babo Cleanser, to name a few. I wouldn’t be surprised to find something like that back here.”

“You got it?”

“Next.”

The lights go on and both of them squint in the harsh glare of the overhead bulb.

“Basil told Benton he cleaned up with bleach,” Lucy says. “But luminol’s not going to react to bleach after two and a half years, is it?”

“Maybe if it soaked into wood and was left alone. I say maybe because I don’t know one way or the other, don’t know of anyone who’s ever done tests like that,” Scarpetta says, reaching into her scene bag for a lighted magnifier.

She moves it over the edges of plyboard shelving stacked with snorkel equipment and T-shirts.

“If you look closely,” she adds, “you can barely make out a lightening of the wood here and here. Possibly a splash pattern.”

Lucy gets next to her and takes the magnifier.

“I think I see it,” she says.

Today, he has been in and out and has ignored her except to bring a grilled cheese sandwich and more water. He doesn’t live here. He is never here at night, or if he is, he is as quiet as the dead.

It is late, but she doesn’t know how late, and the moon is trapped behind clouds on the other side of the broken window. She hears him move about the house. Her pulse quickens as his feet sound in her direction, and she tucks the small, pink tennis shoe behind her back because he will take it from her if it means anything to her, and then he is a dark shadow with a long finger of light. He has the spider with him. It covers his hand. It is the biggest spider she has ever seen.

She listens for Kristin and the boys as the light probes her raw, swollen ankles and wrists. He probes the filthy mattress and the soiled bright-green robe draped over her lower legs. She draws up her knees and arms, trying to cover herself as the light touches private parts of her body. She recoils as she feels him staring at her. She can’t see his face. She has no idea what he looks like. He always wears black. During daylight, he covers his face with the hood and wears black, everything black, and at night she can’t see him at all, just a shape. He took her glasses.

That was the first thing he did when he forced his way into the house.

Give me your glasses, he said. Now.

She stood paralyzed in the kitchen. Her terror and disbelief were numbing. She couldn’t think, felt as if the blood was completely draining from her body, and then olive oil in the pan on the stove began to smoke and the boys began to cry and he pointed the shotgun at them. He pointed it at Kristin. He had on the hood, the black clothing, when Tony opened the back door and then he was inside and it happened fast.

Give me your glasses.

Give them to him, Kristin said. Please don’t hurt us. Take whatever you want.

Shut up or I’ll kill every one of you right now.

He ordered the boys to lie facedown on the living-room floor and hit them in the back of the head, hit them hard with the butt of the gun so they wouldn’t try to run. He turned out all the lights and ordered Kristin and Ev to carry and drag the boys’ limp bodies down the hall and out the master-bedroom slider, and blood dripped and smeared along the floor and she keeps thinking that someone should have seen the blood. By now somebody should have been to the house, trying to figure out what happened to them, and they should have seen the blood. Where are the police?

The boys didn’t move on the grass by the pool, and he tied them up with phone cords and gagged them with dish towels even though they weren’t moving or making a sound, and he forced Kristin and Ev to walk through the dark to the station wagon.

Ev drove.

Kristin sat in the front seat and he was in the back with the barrel of the gun pointed at her head.

His cold, quiet voice told Ev where to go.

I’m taking you somewhere, then I’ll go back for them, his cold, quiet voice said as she drove.

Just call someone, Kristin begged. They need to get to the hospital. Please don’t leave them there to die. They’re children.

I said I’d go back for them.

They need help. They’re just little boys. Orphans. Both their parents are dead.

Good. Nobody to miss them, then.

His voice was cold and flat and inhuman, a voice with no feeling or personality.

She remembers seeing signs for Naples. They were heading west toward the Everglades.

I can’t drive without my glasses, Ev said, her heart pounding so hard she thought it might break her ribs. She couldn’t catch her breath. When she ran off on the shoulder, he gave her the glasses, then took them away again when they reached the dark, hellish place where she has been since.

Scarpetta sprays the cinder-block walls inside the bathroom, and they glow in a pattern of sweeps and swipes and spatters that aren’t visible when the lights are on.

“Someone cleaned up,” Lucy says in the dark.

“I’m going to stop, don’t want to risk destroying blood, if it is. You got it on film?”

“Right.” She turns on the light.

Scarpetta gets out a presumptive blood kit and swabs areas of the wall where she saw the luminol react, working the cotton tip into the porous concrete where blood might lurk, even after washing. With medicine droppers, she drips her chemical concoction on a swab and it turns bright pink, reaffirming that what is lighting up on the wall could be blood, possibly human blood. It will have to be verified in the lab.

If it’s blood, it wouldn’t surprise her if it is old, two and a half years old. Luminol reacts to the hemoglobin in red blood cells, and the older the blood, the more it oxidizes and the stronger the reaction. She continues swabbing with sterile water, gathering samples and sealing them inside evidence boxes that she labels, tapes and initials.

This has been going on for an hour, and she and Lucy are hot inside their protective clothing. They can hear Larry on the other side of the door, moving about his store. Several times, his phone rings.

They return to the storage area, and Lucy opens a sturdy black carrying case and removes a Mini-Crime scope forensic light source, a portable boxy metal unit with side intakes, a high-intensity halide lamp with a flexible arm that looks like a shiny steel hose fitted with a light guide that allows her to change wavelengths. She plugs in the scope and turns on the power switch and a fan begins to whir. She adjusts the intensity knob, setting the wavelength at 455 nanometers. They put on orange-tinted goggles that improve contrast and protect their eyes.

Lights out, and Scarpetta carries the unit by its handle and slowly sweeps the blue light over walls, shelving and the floor. Blood and other substances that react to luminol don’t necessarily react to an alternate light source, and the areas that luminesced earlier are dark. But several small smears on the floor pop up a bright, hot red. Lights on, and Lucy positions the tripod again and places an orange filter over the camera lens. Lights out, and she photographs the fluorescing red smears. Lights back on, and the smears are barely visible. They are nothing more than a dirty discoloration of a dirty, discolored floor, but under magnification, Scarpetta detects a very faint blush of red. Whatever the substance is, it doesn’t dissolve in sterile water, and she doesn’t want to use a solvent and run the risk of destroying whatever it is.

“We need to get a sample.” Scarpetta studies the concrete.

“I’ll be right back.”

Lucy opens the door and calls out for Larry. He is behind the counter again, talking on the phone, and when he looks up and sees her from head to toe in white plasticized paper, he is visibly startled.

“Did someone just beam me to the Mir space station?” he says.

“You got any tools around this joint so I don’t have to go out to the car?”

“There’s a small toolbox in back. Up on the shelf against the wall.” He indicates which wall. “A small, red toolbox.”

“I may have to mess up your floor. Just a little.”

He starts to say something but changes his mind, shrugs, and she shuts the door. She retrieves a hammer and a screwdriver from the toolbox, and with a few blows, chips out small samples of the dirty red stains and seals them inside evidence bags.

She and Scarpetta remove their white clothing and stuff it into a trash can. They pack up their equipment and leave.

Why are you doing this?” Ev asks the same question she asks every time he comes in, asks it hoarsely as he points the light and it shoots through her eyes like knives. “Please get that light out of my face.”

“You’re the ugliest fat pig I’ve ever seen,” he says. “No wonder nobody likes you.”

“Words can’t hurt me. You can’t hurt me. I belong to God.”

“Look at you. Who would have you. You’re thankful I pay attention to you, aren’t you.”

“Where are the others?”

“Say you’re sorry. You know what you did. Sinners must be punished.”

“What have you done with them?” She asks the same question she always does. “Let me go. God will forgive you.”

“Say you’re sorry.”

He nudges her ankles with his boots and the pain is horrific.

“Dear God, forgive him,” she prays out loud. “You don’t want to go to hell,” she says to him, the evil one. “It’s not too late.”

36

It is very dark, the moon like a shadowy shape on an x-ray, vague behind clouds. Small insects swarm in the light of streetlamps. The traffic never quits on A1A, and the night is filled with noise.

“What’s bothering you?” Scarpetta asks as Lucy drives. “This is the first alone time you and I have had since I can’t remember when. Please talk to me.”

“I could have called Lex. I didn’t mean to drag you out.”

“And I could have told you to. I didn’t have to be your partner in crime tonight.”

Both of them are tired and in humorless moods.

“So, here we are,” Lucy says. “Maybe I used this as an opportunity for us to catch up. I could have called Lex,” she says again, staring straight ahead as she drives.

“I can’t tell if you’re making fun of me.”

“I’m not.” Lucy looks over at her without smiling. “I’m sorry about things.”

“You should be.”

“You don’t have to be so quick to agree. Maybe you don’t always know what my life is like.”

“The problem is, I want to. You consistently shut me out.”

“Aunt Kay, you really don’t want to know as much as you think you do. Did it ever occur to you that maybe I’m doing you a favor? That maybe you should enjoy me as you know me and leave the rest of it alone?”

“What is the rest of it?”

“I’m not like you.”

“In the important ways, you are, Lucy. We’re both intelligent, decent, hard-working women. We try to make a difference. We take risks. We’re honest. We try, we really try.”

“I’m not as decent as you think. All I do is hurt people. I’m good at it, getting better at it all the time. And every time I do it, I care less. Maybe I’m turning into a Basil Jenrette. Maybe Benton ought to enroll me in his study up there. I bet my brain looks like Basil’s, like all the other fucking psychopaths.”

“I don’t know what’s going on with you,” Scarpetta says quietly.

“I think it’s blood.” Lucy makes one of her fast breaks again, changing the subject so abruptly, it’s jolting. “I think Basil’s telling the truth. I think he killed her in the back of the shop. I have a feeling it will turn out to be blood, what we found back there.”

“Let’s wait and see what the labs say.”

“The entire floor lit up. That was weird.”

“Why would Basil say anything about it? Why now? Why to Benton?” Scarpetta says. “That bothers me. Worries me, actually.”

“There’s always a reason with these people. Manipulation.”

“It worries me.”

“So he’s talking to get something he wants, to get his rocks off. How could he make it up?”

“He could know about the missing people from The Christmas Shop. It was in the paper, he was a Miami cop. Maybe he heard about it from other cops,” Scarpetta says.

The more they talk about it, the more she worries that Basil really did have something to do with what happened to Florrie and Helen Quincy. But she can’t imagine how he could have raped and murdered the mother in the back of the store. How did he get her bloody, dead body out of there, or get both dead bodies out of there, assuming he killed Helen, too.

“I know,” Lucy says. “I can’t envision it, either. And if he did kill them, why didn’t he just leave them there? Unless he didn’t want anyone to know they were murdered, wanted them presumed missing, presumed missing of their own volition.”

“That suggests motive to me,” Scarpetta says. “Not compulsive sexual homicide.”

“I forgot to ask you,” Lucy says. “I’m assuming I’m taking you to your house.”

“At this hour, yes.”

“What are you going to do about Boston?”

“We’ve got to deal with the Simister scene, and I just can’t do it now. I’ve had it for the night. Reba’s probably had it.”

“She agreed to let us in, I assume.”

“As long as she’s with us. We’ll do it in the morning. I’m thinking about not going to Boston at all, but it’s not fair to Benton. Not fair to either of us,” she says, unable to keep the frustration and disappointment out of her voice. “Of course, it’s the same thing. I suddenly have urgent cases. He suddenly has an urgent case. All we’ll do is work.”

“What’s his case?”

“A woman dumped near Walden Pond, nude, bizarre fake tattoos on her body that I suspect were done after her murder. Red handprints.”

Lucy grips the steering wheel harder.

“What do you mean, fake tattoos?”

“Painted ones. Body art, Benton says. A hood over her head, a shotgun shell inserted in her rectum, posed, degrading, all the rest. I don’t know much, but I’m sure I will.”

“Do they know who she is?”

“They know very little.”

“Anything similar happen in the area? Similar homicides? With the red handprints?”

“You can divert the conversation all you want, Lucy, but it won’t work. You’re not yourself. You’ve gained weight, and for that to happen means something is off, very off. Not that you look bad, not at all, but I know what you’re like. You’re tired a lot and don’t look well. I hear about it. I haven’t said anything, but I know something’s wrong. I’ve known it for a while. Are you going to tell me?”

“I need to know more about the handprints.”

“I’ve told you what I know. Why?” Scarpetta keeps her eyes on Lucy’s tense face. “What’s going on with you?”

She stares straight ahead and seems to struggle with how to put the right answer together. She’s good at that, so bright, so quick, she can rearrange information until her concoctions are more believable than the truth, and rarely does anybody doubt or question. What saves her is that she doesn’t believe her misinformation and manipulations, doesn’t for a moment forget the facts and fall headlong into her own traps. Lucy always has a rational reason for what she does, and sometimes it’s a good one.

“You must be hungry,” Scarpetta then says. She says it quietly, gently, the way she used to talk when Lucy was an impossible child, always acting out because she hurt so much.

“You always feed me when you can’t do anything else with me,” Lucy says in a subdued way.

“It used to work. When you were a little girl, I could get you to do anything in exchange for my pizza.”

Lucy is silent, her face grim and unfamiliar in the red glow of a traffic light.

“Lucy? Are you going to smile or look at me even once this night?”

“I’ve been doing stupid things. One-night stands. I hurt people. Just the other night in Ptown, I did it again. I don’t want to be close to anybody. I want to be left alone. I can’t seem to help it. This time, it may have been really stupid. Because I haven’t been paying attention. Because maybe I don’t give a shit.”

“I didn’t even know you were in Ptown,” Scarpetta remarks, and she isn’t judgmental.

Lucy’s sexual orientation isn’t what bothers her.

“You used to be careful,” Scarpetta says. “More careful than anyone I’ve ever met.”

“Aunt Kay, I’m sick.”

37

The black shape of the spider covers the back of his hand, floating toward her, passing through the beam of light, inches from her face. He has never moved the spider this close to her. He has placed a pair of scissors on the mattress and illuminates them briefly with the light.

“Say you’re sorry,” he says. “This is all your fault.”

“Give up your evil ways before it’s too late,” Ev says, and the scissors are within reach.

Maybe he is tempting her to grab them. She can barely see them, even in the light. She listens for Kristin and the boys, the spider a blur in front of her face.

“None of this would have happened. You’ve brought it upon yourself. Now comes punishment.”

“This can be undone,” she says.

“Time for the punishment. Say you’re sorry.”

Her heart pounds, her fear so intense she might vomit. She won’t apologize. She has committed no sin. If she says she’s sorry, he will kill her. Somehow, she knows it.

“Say you’re sorry!” he says.

She refuses to say it.

He orders her to say she’s sorry and she won’t. She preaches. She preaches her stupid, mindless garbage about her feeble god. If her god were so powerful, she wouldn’t be on the mattress.

“We can pretend it never happened,” she says in her hoarse, demanding voice.

He can feel her fear. He demands she say she’s sorry. No matter how much she preaches at him, she’s scared. The spider makes her tremble, her legs jumping on the mattress.

“You will be forgiven. You will be forgiven if you repent and let us go. I’ll never tell the police.”

“No, you won’t. You’ll never tell. People who tell get punished, punished in ways you can’t imagine. His fangs can go all the way through a finger, right through the nail,” he says of the spider. “Some tarantulas are repeat biters.”

The spider is almost touching her face. She jerks her head back, gasping.

“They strike and strike. They won’t stop until you rip them off you. If they bite you in a major artery, you die. They can shoot their hairs into your eyes and blind you. It’s very painful. Say you’re sorry.”

Hog told her to say it, say she was sorry, and he sees the door shutting, old wood with peeling paint, the mattress on the dirty, old floor. Then the sound of the shovel digging because he told her not to tell after he did the bad thing and said that people who tell get punished by God, get punished in unthinkable ways until they learn their lesson.

“Ask forgiveness. God will forgive you.”

“Say you’re sorry!” He shines the light in her eyes and she clamps them shut and jerks her face away from the light, but he finds her with it.

She won’t cry.

When he did the bad thing, she cried. He told her she would cry, all right, if she ever told. Then she finally did. She told, and Hog had no choice but to confess because it was true, he did the bad thing, and Hog’s mother didn’t believe a word of it, said Hog didn’t, couldn’t possibly have, that he obviously was sick and delusional.

It was cold and snowing. He didn’t know there was weather like that, had seen it on TV and in the movies but he didn’t know about it from his own experience. He remembers old brick buildings, seeing them through the window of the car when he was driven there, remembers the small lobby where he sat with his mother before the doctor came, a brightly lit place where a man sat in a chair moving his lips, rolling his eyes upward, having a conversation with someone who wasn’t there.

His mother went in and talked to the doctor, leaving him alone in the lobby. She told the doctor the bad thing Hog said he did, that it wasn’t true and he was very sick, that it was a private matter and all she cared about was that Hog got well, that he didn’t go around talking like that, ruining the family’s good name with his lies.

She didn’t believe he did the bad thing.

She told Hog what she intended to say to the doctor. You’re not well, she told Hog. You can’t help it. You imagine things and lie and are easily influenced. I’ll pray for you. You’d best pray for yourself, ask God to forgive you, say you’re sorry for hurting people who have been nothing but kind to you. I know you’re sick, but shame on you.

“I’m going to put him on you,” Hog says, moving the light closer to her. “If you hurt him like she did”—he pokes her forehead with the barrel of the shotgun—“you’ll learn the true meaning of punishment.”

“Shame on you.”

“I told you not to say that.”

He pokes her harder, the barrel of the shotgun striking bone, and she cries out. He presses the pressure light, shines it on her ugly, puffy, blotchy face. She bleeds. Blood runs down her face. When the other one brushed the spider to the floor, his abdomen ruptured and he bled his yellow blood. Hog had to glue him back together.

“Say you’re sorry. She said she was sorry. Do you know how many times she said it?”

He imagines her feeling the furry legs on her bare right shoulder, imagines her feeling the spider move on her skin and stop, lightly gripping her. She sits against the wall and shakes violently, glancing at the scissors on the mattress.

“All the way to Boston. That was a long trip, and it was cold in the back, her naked and tied up. There’s no seat back there, just a cold metal floor. She was cold. I gave them something to think about up there.”

He remembers the old brick buildings with grayish-blue slate roofs. He remembers when his mother drove him up there after he did the bad thing, and then years later, when he went back on his own and lived in the midst of the old brick and slate and didn’t last long. Because of the bad thing, he didn’t last long.

“What have you done with the boys?” She tries to sound strong, tries to sound unafraid. “Let them go.”

He pokes her private places and she jumps and he laughs and calls her ugly and fat and stupid, says no one would ever want her, the same thing he said when he did the bad thing.

“No wonder,” he keeps on, staring at her sagging breasts, her thick, flabby body. “You’re lucky I’m doing this to you. No one else would. You’re too disgusting and stupid.”

“I won’t tell anyone. Just let me go. Where are Kristin and the boys?”

“I went back and got them, poor little orphans. Just like I said. I even returned your car. I’m so pure of heart, not a sinner like you. Don’t worry. I brought them here just like I said.”

“I don’t hear them.”

“Say you’re sorry.”

“Did you drive them up to Boston, too?”

“No.”

“You didn’t really take Kristin…”

“I gave them something to think about up there. I’m sure he’s impressed. I hope he knows. He will soon, one way or other. There isn’t much time left.”

“Who? You can talk to me. I don’t hate you,” and now she sounds sympathetic.

He knows what she’s trying to do. She thinks they’ll be friends. If she talks to him enough and pretends she’s not afraid, even acts as if she likes him, they’ll be friends and he won’t punish her.

“It won’t work,” Hog says. “They all tried that and it didn’t work. It was quite the special delivery. He’d have been impressed if he knew. I’m keeping people busy up there. There isn’t much time left. You’d better make the most of it. Say you’re sorry!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says in the same hypocritical voice.

The spider stirs on her shoulder, and he reaches out his hand in the dark and the spider crawls back on it. He walks across the room, leaving the scissors on the mattress.

“Cut your filthy hair,” he says. “Cut all of it off. If you haven’t done it by the time I get back, it will be worse for you. Don’t try to cut the ropes. There’s no place for you to run.”

38

The snow is full of moonlight beyond Benton’s upstairs office window, and the lamps are switched off. He sits at his computer, displaying photographs on the screen until he finds the ones he wants.

There are one hundred and ninety-seven photographs—disturbing, grotesque photographs—and it has been an ordeal to find these particular ones because he is disconcerted by what is before him. He is unsettled. He feels that something beyond the obvious has happened and is happening, and he is personally upset by the case, and at this stage of his vast experience, that is hard to imagine. Distracted, he didn’t jot down the sequence numbers, and it took him the better part of half an hour to find the photographs in question, numbers 62 and 74. He is impressed with Detective Thrush, with the Massachusetts State Police. In a homicide, especially a homicide like this, one can never do too much.

In violent deaths, nothing improves with time. The scene vanishes or is contaminated and one can’t go back. The body changes after death, especially after the autopsy, and one can’t go back, not really. So state police investigators went into high alert and were aggressive with their cameras, and now Benton is overwhelmed with photographs and video recordings and has been studying them since he got home from his visit with Basil Jenrette. During Benton’s twenty-some years with the FBI, he thought he had seen it all. As a forensic psychologist, he assumed he had seen just about every permutation of bizarreness. But he has never seen anything quite like this.

Photographs 62 and 74 aren’t as explicit as most, because they don’t show what is left of the unidentified woman’s destroyed head. They don’t show her in all her faceless, gory horror. She reminds him of a spoon, a hollowed-out shell on the stalk of a neck, her black, raggedly cut hair matted with bits of brain, tissue and dried blood. Photographs 62 and 74 are close-ups of her body from the neck to the knees, and they give him a feeling he can’t describe, the sensation he has when something reminds him of something disturbing he can’t remember. The images are trying to tell him something he already knows but can’t reach. What? What is it?

In 62, the torso is face-up on the autopsy table. In 74, it is facedown, and he clicks back and forth between the two images, studying her naked torso, trying to make sense of the bright red handprints and the angry, abraded skin between her shoulderblades, a six-by eight-inch area of flesh rubbed raw and embedded with what appears to be “wood-like splinters and dirt,” according to the autopsy report.

He has been contemplating the possibility that the red handprints were painted before the woman died, that it has nothing to do with her murder. Maybe for some reason she already had gotten the bodypainting before she encountered her assailant. He has to consider it, but he doesn’t believe it. More likely, it was the killer who turned her torso into a work of art, one that is degrading and suggestive of sexual violence, suggestive of hands grabbing her breasts and forcing open her legs, symbols he painted on her while he held her hostage, possibly when she was incapacitated or dead. Benton doesn’t know. He can’t tell. He wishes the case were Scarpetta’s, that she had gone to the scene and done the autopsy. He wishes she were here. As usual, something came up.

He reviews more photographs and reports. The victim is presumed to be in her mid-thirties or early forties, and her postmortem findings reiterate what Dr. Lonsdale said in the morgue: She hadn’t been dead long when her body was discovered on an easement that leads through Walden Woods, not far from Walden Pond, in the wealthy town of Lincoln. Swabs from the physical evidence recovery kit are negative for seminal fluid, and it is Benton’s preliminary assessment that whoever killed her and posed her body in the woods is driven by sadistic fantasies, the sort of sexual fantasies that objectify the victim.

Whoever she is, she was nothing to him. She wasn’t a person, just a symbol, just a thing for him to do with as he pleased, and what pleased him was to degrade and terrorize, to punish, to make her suffer, to force her to face her own impending violent and humiliating death, to taste the shotgun barrel in her mouth and watch him pull the trigger. He might have known her, or she might have been a stranger to him. He might have stalked her and abducted her. No one fitting her description has been reported missing from New England, say the Massachusetts State Police. No one fitting her description has been reported missing from anywhere.

Beyond the pool is the seawall. It is big enough to moor a sixty-foot boat, although Scarpetta doesn’t have one and has never wanted one of any size or description.

She watches the boats, especially at night when bow and stern lights move like aircraft along the dark waterway, silent but for the rumbling of their engines. If the lights are on in the cabins, she watches people moving around or sitting and lifting glasses, laughing or serious or just there, and she doesn’t want to be them or be like them or be with them.

She was never like them. She never wanted anything to do with them. When she was growing up poor and isolated, she wasn’t like them and couldn’t be with them, and that was their choice. Now the choice is hers. She knows what she knows, is on the outside looking into lives that are irrelevant, depressing, empty and scary. She has always feared something tragic would happen to her niece. It is natural for her to entertain morbid thoughts about anyone she loves, but the inclination has always been more extreme with Lucy. Scarpetta has always worried that Lucy would die a violent death. Never did it occur to her that she might get sick, that biology might turn on her, not because it’s personal but because it isn’t.

“I started having symptoms that didn’t make sense,” Lucy says in the dark, between two wooden pilings, where they sit in teak chairs.

There is a table, and on it are drinks and cheese and crackers. They haven’t touched the cheese and crackers. This is their second round of drinks.

“Sometimes I wish I smoke,” Lucy adds, reaching for her tequila.

“That’s a strange thing to say.”

“You didn’t think it strange when you did it all those years. You still want it.”

“It doesn’t matter what I want.”

“That is something you would say, as if you’re exempt from the same feelings other people have,” Lucy replies in the dark to the water. “Sure it matters. Whatever you want matters. Especially when you can’t have it.”

“Do you want her?” Scarpetta asks.

“Which her?”

“Whatever her you were with last,” she reminds her. “Your most recent conquest. In Ptown.”

“I don’t look at them as conquests. I look at them as brief escapes. Like smoking pot. I guess that’s the most disappointing part. It means nothing. Only this time it may mean something. Something I don’t understand. I may have walked into something. Been really blind and stupid.”

She tells Scarpetta about Stevie, about her tattoos, the red handprints. She has a difficult time talking about it but tries to sound detached, as if she is talking about what somebody else did, as if she is discussing a case.

Scarpetta is silent. She picks up her drink and tries to think about what Lucy has just said.

“Maybe it means nothing,” Lucy goes on. “A coincidence. A lot of people are into weird body art, all kinds of weird stuff in acrylics and latex that they airbrush all over themselves.”

“I’m getting tired of coincidences. There seem to have been a lot of them lately,” Scarpetta says.

“This is pretty good tequila. I wouldn’t mind a joint right now.”

“Are you trying to shock me?”

“Pot’s not as bad for you as you think.”

“So you’re the doctor now.”

“Really. It’s true.”

“Why do you seem to hate yourself so much, Lucy?”

“You know what, Aunt Kay?” Lucy turns toward her, her face strong and sharp in the soft glow of lights along the seawall. “You really don’t have a clue about what I do or what I’ve done. So don’t pretend to.”

“That sounds like an indictment of some sort. Most of what you’ve said tonight sounds like an indictment. If I’ve somehow failed you, I’m sorry. Sorrier than you’ll ever imagine.”

“I’m not you.”

“Of course you’re not. And you keep saying that.”

“I’m not looking for something permanent, someone who really matters, someone I can’t live without. I don’t want a Benton. I want people I can forget. One-night stands. Do you want to know how many I’ve had? Because I don’t.”

“You’ve had virtually nothing to do with me this past year. Is that why?”

“It’s easier.”

“Are you afraid I’d judge you?”

“Maybe you should.”

“It’s not who you’re sleeping with that bothers me. It’s the rest of it. You keep to yourself at the Academy, have nothing to do with the students, are virtually never there, or when you are you’re killing yourself in the gym or up in a helicopter or out on the range or testing something, preferably a machine, a dangerous one.”

“Maybe machines are the only thing I get along with.”

“Whatever you fail begins to fail, Lucy. Just so you know.”

“Including my body.”

“What about your heart and soul? How about we start with that.”

“That’s pretty cold. So much for my health.”

“I feel anything but cold. Your health means more to me than my own.”

“I think she set me up, knew I was in the bar, had something in mind.”

She is back to that woman again, the one with the handprints that are similar to the ones in Benton’s case.

“You need to tell Benton about Stevie. What’s her last name? What do you know about her?” Scarpetta asks.

“I know very little. I’m sure it has nothing to do with anything, but it’s strange, isn’t it. She was up there the same time the woman was murdered and dumped. In the general area.”

Scarpetta is quiet.

“Maybe there’s some cult thing up there in that area,” Lucy then says. “Maybe there are a lot of people painting red handprints all over themselves. Don’t judge me. I don’t need to hear how stupid and reckless I am.”

Scarpetta looks at her and is quiet.

Lucy wipes her eyes.

“I’m not judging you. I’m trying to understand why you’ve turned your back on everything you care about. The Academy is yours. It’s your dream. You hated organized law enforcement, the Feds in particular. So you started your own force, your own posse. Now your riderless horse wanders the parade ground. Where are you? And all of us—all of the people you have brought together in your cause—feel pretty much abandoned. Most of last year’s students never met you, and some of the faculty don’t know you and wouldn’t recognize you on sight.”

Lucy watches a sailboat with furled sails putter past in the night. She wipes her eyes.

“I have a tumor,” she says. “In my brain.”

39

Benton enlarges another photograph, this one taken at the scene.

The victim looks like a hideous work of violent pornography, on her back, legs and arms splayed, bloody white slacks wrapped around her hips like a diaper, a pair of fecal-stained slightly bloody white panties covering her destroyed head like a mask, with two holes cut out for her eyes. He leans back in his chair, thinking. It would be too simple to assume that whoever posed her in the Walden Woods did so only to shock. There is something else.

The case reminds him of something.

He ponders the diaper-folded slacks. They are inside out, suggesting several possibilities: At some point, she might have taken them off under duress, then put them back on. The killer might have removed them after she was dead. They are linen. Most people don’t wear white linen in New England this time of year. In a photograph that shows the slacks laid out on a paper-covered autopsy table, the pattern of the bloodstains is telling. The slacks are stiff with dark brown blood in front, from the knee up. From the knee down, there are a few smears and that’s all. Benton imagines her on her knees when she was shot. He envisions her kneeling. He tries Scarpetta’s phone. She doesn’t answer.

Humiliation. Control. Complete degradation, rendering the victim absolutely powerless, as powerless as an infant. Hooded like somebody about to be executed, possibly. Hooded like a prisoner of war, to torture, to terrorize, possibly. The killer is reenacting something from his own life, probably. His childhood, probably. Sexual abuse, probably. Sadism, possibly. So often that is the case. Do unto others as was done unto you. He tries Scarpetta again and doesn’t get her.

Basil slips into his mind. He posed some of his victims, leaned them up against things, in one case a wall in a rest-stop ladies’ room. Benton conjures up the scene and autopsy photographs of Basil’s victims, the ones anybody knows about, and sees the gory, eyeless faces of the dead. Maybe that’s the similarity. The eyeholes in the panties are suggestive of Basil’s eyeless victims.

Then again, it might be about the hood. Somehow, it seems more about the hood. Hooding someone is to overpower that person completely, to obviate any possibility of fight or flight, to torment, to terrify, to punish. None of Basil’s victims were hooded, not that anybody knows of, but there is always so much nobody knows about what really happened during a sadistic homicide. The victim isn’t around to tell.

Benton worries that maybe he has been spending too much time in Basil’s head.

He tries Scarpetta again.

“It’s me,” he says when she answers.

“I was getting ready to call you,” she says tersely, coldly, in an unsteady voice.

“You sound upset.”

“You go first, Benton,” she says in the same voice, one that barely sounds like her.

“Have you been crying?” He doesn’t understand why she is acting like this. “I wanted to talk to you about this case up here,” he says.

She is the only person who can make him feel this way. Scared.

“I was hoping to talk to you about it. I’m looking at the case right now,” he says.

“I’m glad you want to talk to me about something.” She emphasizes something.

“What’s wrong, Kay?”

“Lucy,” she says. “That’s what’s wrong. You’ve known about it for a year. How could you do this to me.”

“She told you,” he says, rubbing his jaw.

“She was scanned at your damn hospital, and you never said a thing to me. Well, guess what? She’s my niece, not yours. You have no right…”

“She made me promise.”

“She had no right.”

“Of course she did, Kay. No one could talk to you without her consent. Not even her doctors.”

“But she told you.”

“For a very good reason…”

“This is serious. We’re going to have to deal with it. I’m not sure I can trust you anymore.”

He sighs, his stomach as tight as a fist. They rarely fight. When they do, it’s awful.

“I’m getting off the phone now,” she says. “We’ve got to deal with this,” she says again.

She hangs up without saying good-bye, and Benton sits in his chair, unable to move for a moment. He stares blankly at a gruesome photograph on his screen and idly starts clicking through the case again, reading reports, scanning the narrative Thrush wrote up for him, trying to divert his thoughts from what just happened.

There were drag marks in the snow leading from a parking area to where the body was found. There are no footprints in the snow that might have been the victim’s, only her killer’s. Approximately size nine, maybe ten, big tread, some type of hiking boot.

It’s not fair that Scarpetta should blame him. He had no choice. Lucy swore him to secrecy, said she would never forgive him if he told anyone, especially her aunt, especially Marino.

There are no blood drips or smears along the trail the killer left, suggesting he wrapped her body in something, dragged her wrapped up. Police recovered some fibers from the drag marks.

Scarpetta is projecting; she’s attacking him because she can’t attack Lucy. She can’t attack Lucy’s tumor. She can’t get angry at someone who is sick.

Trace evidence on the body includes fibers and microscopic debris under the fingernails and adhering to blood and to abraded skin and hair. A preliminary lab analysis indicates most of the trace is consistent with carpet and cotton fibers, and there are minerals, the fragments of insects and vegetation and pollen found in soil, or what the medical examiner so eloquently called “dirt.”

When the telephone rings on Benton’s desk, the call is identified as unavailable, and he assumes it is Scarpetta. He snaps up the phone.

“Hello,” he says.

“This is the McLean Hospital operator.”

He hesitates, disappointed deeply and hurt. Scarpetta could have called him back. He doesn’t remember the last time she hung up on him.

“I’m trying to reach Dr. Wesley,” the operator says.

It still sounds strange when people call him that. He has had his Ph.D. for many years, as far back as his career with the FBI, but never insisted on or wanted people to call him doctor.

“Speaking,” he says.

Lucy sits up in bed in her aunt’s guest room. The lights are out. She had too many tequilas to drive. She looks at the number on the illuminated display of her Treo, the one with the 617 exchange. She’s a little woozy, a little drunk.

She thinks about Stevie, remembers her acting upset and insecure as she abruptly left the cottage. She thinks of Stevie following her to the Hummer in the parking lot and acting like the same seductive, mysterious and self-assured woman Lucy had met in Lorraine’s, and as she thinks about that first meeting in Lorraine’s, she feels what she felt then. She doesn’t want to feel anything but she does and it unsettles her.

Stevie unsettles her. She might know something. She was in New England around the same time the lady was murdered and dumped at Walden Pond. Both of them had red handprints on their bodies. Stevie claims she didn’t paint the handprints, someone else did.

Who?

Lucy hits send, a little bleary, a little scared. She should have traced the 617 number Stevie gave her, see who it really comes back to, see if it really is Stevie’s number or if her name is Stevie.

“Hello?”

“Stevie?” So it is her number. “You remember me?”

“How could I forget you? No one could.”

She sounds seductive. Her voice is soothing and rich, and Lucy feels what she felt at Lorraine’s. She reminds herself why she is calling.

The handprints. Where did she get them? Who?

“I was sure I’d never hear from you again,” Stevie’s seductive voice is saying.

“Well, you have,” Lucy says.

“Why are you talking so quietly?”

“I’m not in my own house.”

“I suppose I shouldn’t ask what that means. But I do quite a lot of things I shouldn’t. Who are you with?”

“No one,” Lucy says. “You still up in Ptown?”

“I left right after you did. Drove straight through. I’m back home.”

“Gainesville?”

“Where are you?”

“You never have told me your last name,” Lucy says.

“What house are you in if it’s not yours? I assume you live in a house. I guess I don’t know.”

“You ever come south?”

“I can go anywhere I want. South of where? Are you in Boston?”

“I’m in Florida,” Lucy says. “I’d like to see you. We need to talk. How about telling me your last name, you know, like maybe we’re not strangers.”

“You want to talk about what.”

She’s not going to tell Lucy her full name. There’s no point in asking again. She’s probably not going to tell Lucy anything, at least not over the phone.

“Let’s talk in person,” Lucy says.

“That’s always better.”

She asks Stevie to meet her in South Beach tomorrow night at ten.

“You heard of a place called Deuce?” Lucy asks.

“It’s quite famous,” Stevie’s seductive voice says. “I know it well.”

40

The round, brass head shines like a moon on the screen.

Inside the Massachusetts State Police firearms lab, Tom, a firearms examiner, sits amid computers and comparison microscopes in a low-lighted room where the National Integrated Ballistics Information Network, NIBIN, has finally answered his query.

He stares at the magnified images of fine striations and gouges transferred from the metal parts of a shotgun to the brass heads of two shells. The two images are superimposed, the two halves joined in the middle, the microscopic signatures, as Tom calls them, lining up perfectly.

“Of course, officially, I’m calling it a possible match until I can validate it on the comparison scope,” he is explaining to Dr. Wesley over the phone, the legendary Benton Wesley.

This is cool, Tom can’t help but think.

“Which means the examiner down in Broward County needs to send me his evidence, and fortunately, that’s not a problem,” Tom goes on. “Preliminarily, let me just say that I don’t think there’s going to be a question about this one being a hit in the computer. It’s my opinion—again, preliminarily—that the two shells were fired by the same shotgun.”

He waits for the reaction and feels charged-up, excited, as high as if he’s had two whisky sours. To say there’s a hit is like telling the investigator he won the lottery.

“What do you know about the Hollywood case?” Dr. Wesley says without so much as a hint of gratitude.

“For one thing, it’s solved,” Tom answers, insulted.

“I’m not sure I understand,” Dr. Wesley says in the same ungracious tone.

He’s unappreciative and high-handed, and that figures. Tom has never met him, never talked to him and had no idea what to expect. But he’s heard of him, heard about his past career with the FBI, and everyone knows the FBI throws its considerable weight around, exploits the local investigators while treating them like inferiors and then takes credit for anything good that comes of a case. He’s an arrogant prick. That figures. No wonder Thrush made him talk directly to the legendary Dr. Benton Wesley. Thrush doesn’t want to deal with him or anyone that is or was or even knows the FBI.

“Two years ago,” Tom is saying, his friendliness withdrawn.

He sounds obtuse, dull. That’s what his wife tells him when his ego is bruised and he justifiably reacts. He has a right to react, but he doesn’t want his affect to become obtuse and dull, as if he’s been hit on the head with a wooden plank, as his wife puts it.

“Hollywood had a robbery in a convenience store,” he is saying, trying not to sound obtuse and dull. “Guy comes in wearing a rubber mask and pointing a shotgun. He shoots this kid who’s sweeping the floor, and then the night manager shoots him in the head with the pistol he kept under the counter.”

“And they ran the shotgun shell through NIBIN?”

“Apparently, to see if this same masked guy might have been connected to some other unsolved cases.”

“I don’t understand,” Dr. Wesley impatiently says again. “What happened to the weapon after the masked guy was killed? It should have been recovered by the police. And now it’s just been used again in a homicide up here in Massachusetts?”

“I asked the Broward County examiner the same thing,” he replies, trying with all his might not to sound obtuse and dull. “He said after he test-fired the gun, he returned it to Hollywood PD.”

“Well, I can promise you it’s not there now,” Dr. Wesley says as if Tom is a simpleton.

Tom chews on a hangnail, making his cuticle bleed, an old habit that annoys the hell out of his wife.

“Thanks,” Dr. Wesley says, getting off the phone, dismissing him.

Tom’s attention wanders to the NIBIN microscope where the shotgun shell in question is mounted, a red, plastic twelve-gauge shell with a brass head that has an unusual drag mark made by the firing pin. He made the case a priority. He has been sitting in his chair the entire day and now into the night, using ring lighting and side lighting and proper orientations of three o’clock and six o’clock positions and saving each picture as a file, doing this repeatedly with breech marks, the firing pin impression and the ejector mark before searching the NIBIN database.

Then he had to wait four hours for the results while his family went to the movies without him. Then Thrush was out to dinner and asked him to call Dr. Wesley but forgot to give him a direct phone number, and Tom had to call the McLean Hospital answering service and be handled, at first, as if he were a patient. A little appreciation is in order, he thinks. Dr. Wesley couldn’t bother to say “job well done” or “I can’t believe you got results so fast or got them at all.” Does he have any idea how hard it is to run a shotgun shell through NIBIN? Most examiners won’t even try.

He stares at the shell. He’s never had one that was recovered from a dead person’s ass.

He glances at his watch and calls Thrush at home.

“Just tell me one thing,” he says when Thrush answers. “How come you made me talk to Dr. Fuck-B-I. And a thank-you would be nice.”

“You talking about Benton?”

“No, I’m talking about Bond. James Bond.”

“He’s a nice guy. I don’t know what you’re talking about except you got such a thing about the Feds, you constitute what I call a bigot. And you want to know what else, Tom?” Thrush goes on, and he sounds slightly drunk. “Let me give you a word to the wise. NIBIN belongs to the Feds, meaning you do, too. Where the hell you think you got all that pretty equipment to work on and all that training so you could sit there and do what you do every day? Well, guess who? The Feds.”

“I don’t need this right now,” Tom says, the phone tucked under his chin as he types on the keyboard, closing out files, getting ready to go home to his empty house while his family enjoys the movies without him.

“Besides, just so you know, Benton quit the Bureau a long time ago, doesn’t have anything to do with them.”

“Well, he should be grateful. That’s all. It’s the first time we got a hit in NIBIN on a shotgun shell.”

“Grateful? Are you fucking kidding me? Grateful for what? That the shell from this dead lady’s ass matches up with a dead man’s gun that’s supposed to be in the custody of the fucking Hollywood police or sold as scrap metal by now?” Thrush says loudly, and he tends to say fuck a lot when he’s been drinking. “Let me tell you, he ain’t fucking grateful. Like me, all he probably wants to do right now is get shit-faced drunk.”

41

It is hot inside the ruined house, and the air is heavy and doesn’t move. It smells like mildew, mold and rancid food, and stinks like a latrine.

Hog moves with self-assuredness through the dark, from room to room, knowing by feel and smell exactly where he is. He can pick his way nimbly from one corner to the next, and when the moon is bright as it is tonight, his eyes hold the moonlight and he can see as clearly as if it is midday. He can see beyond the shadows, so far beyond them they may as well not exist. He can see the red welts on the woman’s neck and face, see the sweat shining on her dirty, white skin, see the fear in her eyes, see her cut hair all over the mattress and the floor, and she can’t see him.

He walks toward her, toward the stinking stained mattress on the rotting wooden floor where she sits up, leaning against the wall, her shiny, green-draped legs straight out in front of her. What is left of her hair stands straight up, as if she’s got her finger in a wall socket, as if she’s seen a ghost. She was wise enough to leave the scissors on the mattress. He picks them up and with the toe of his boot rearranges the bright-green robe, hears her breathing, feels her eyes on him, like damp spots on him.

He took the beautiful green robe that was draped over the sofa. She had just carried it into the house from the car, from the church, where she’d had it on hours earlier. He took the robe because it pleased him. Now it is wilted and wrinkled and reminds him of a slain dragon in a crumpled heap. He captured the dragon. It is his, and his disappointment in what has become of it makes him edgy and violent. The dragon has failed him. It has betrayed him. When the brilliant green dragon moved freely and beautifully through the air and people listened to it and could not take their eyes off it, he coveted it. He wanted it. He almost loved it. Now look at it.

He drifts closer to her and kicks her green-draped wire-bound ankles. She barely moves. She was more alert a while ago, but the spider seems to have worn her out. She hasn’t preached the usual lowbrow drivel to him. She has said nothing. She has pissed since he was in here not even an hour ago. The ammonia smell is sharp in his nostrils.

“Why are you so disgusting?” Hog says, looking down at her.

“Are the boys asleep? I don’t hear them.” She sounds delirious.

“Shut up about them.”

“I know you don’t want to hurt them. I know you’re a nice person.”

“It won’t do any good,” he says. “You can just shut up about it. You don’t know a damn thing and never will. You’re so stupid and ugly. You’re disgusting. No one would believe you. Say you’re sorry. This is all your fault.”

He kicks her ankles again, this time harder, and she cries out in pain.

“What a joke. Look at you. Who’s my little pretty now? You’re filth. Spoiled little brat, ungrateful little smart aleck. I’ll teach you humility. Say you’re sorry.”

He kicks her ankles harder, and she screams and tears fill her eyes and they shine like glass in the moonlight.

“You’re not so high and mighty now, are you. Think you’re so much better, so much smarter than everybody else? Look at you now. Obviously, I’m going to have to find some more effective way to punish you. Put your shoes back on.”

Confusion touches her eyes.

“We’re going back outside. It’s the only thing you listen to. Say you’re sorry!”

Her glassy, wide eyes stare at him.

“You want the snorkel again? Say you’re sorry!”

He pokes her with the shotgun and her legs jerk.

“You’re going to tell me how much you want it, aren’t you. Thank me because you’re so ugly no one would ever touch you. You’re honored, aren’t you.” He lowers his voice, knows how to make it scarier.

He pokes her again, pokes her breasts.

“Stupid and ugly. Let’s get your shoes. You’ve left me no choice.”

She doesn’t say anything. He kicks her ankles, kicks them hard, and tears roll down her blood-caked face. Her nose is probably broken.

She broke Hog’s nose, slapped him so hard his nose bled for hours and he knew it was broken. He can feel the bump in the bridge of his nose. She slapped him when he did the bad thing, when she struggled at first, the bad thing that happened in the room behind the paint-peeled door. Then his mother took him to that place where the buildings are old and it snows. He had never seen snow before, he had never been so cold. She took him there because he lied.

“Hurts, doesn’t it?” he says. “Hurts like hell when you’ve got coat hangers biting into your anklebones and someone kicks them. That’s what you get for disobeying me. For lying. Let’s see, where’s the snorkel.”

He kicks her again and she moans. Her legs shake beneath the wilted green robe, beneath the dead green dragon draped over her.

“I don’t hear the boys,” she says, and her voice is getting weaker, her fire going out.

“Say you’re sorry.”

“I forgive you,” she says with wide, shiny eyes.

He raises the shotgun and points it at her head. She stares straight at the barrel, stares as if she doesn’t care anymore, and he seethes.

“You can say forgive all you want, but God is on my side,” he says. “You deserve punishment. That’s why you’re here. Do you understand? It’s your fault. You have heaped these burning coals on top of your own head. Do what I say! Tell me you’re sorry!”

His big boots creak very little as he moves through the thick, hot air and stands in the doorway, staring back into the room. The slain green dragon stirs and warm air moves through the broken window. The room faces west, and in the late afternoon the low sun seeps in through the gaping broken window, and light touches the shiny green dragon and it shimmers and glows like emerald-green fire. But it doesn’t move. It is nothing now. It is broken and ugly and it is her fault.

He looks at her pale flesh, her doughy, sour flesh covered with insect bites and rashes. He can smell her stench halfway down the hallway. The dead green dragon stirs when she stirs, and it incenses him when he thinks of capturing the dragon and discovering what was under it. She was under it. He was tricked. It’s her fault. She wanted this to happen, tricked him. It’s her fault.

“Say you’re sorry!”

“I forgive you.” Her wide, shiny eyes stare at him.

“I guess you know what happens now,” he says.

She barely moves her mouth and no sound emerges.

“I guess you don’t know.”

He stares at her, ruined and disgusting in her foulness on the filthy mattress, and feels coldness in his chest, and the coldness feels quiet and indifferent like death, as if anything he has ever felt is as dead as the dragon.

“I guess you really don’t know.”

The shotgun’s pump slides back with a loud crack in the empty house.

“Run,” he says.

“I forgive you,” she mouths, her wide, watery eyes fixed on him.

He steps out in the hallway, surprised by the sound of the front door shutting.

“Are you here?” he calls out.

He lowers the gun and walks toward the front of the house, his pulse picking up. He wasn’t expecting her, not yet.

“I told you not to do that,” God’s voice greets him, but he can’t see her, not yet. “You do only what I say.”

She materializes in the darkness, her black, flowing self in the dark, flowing toward him. She is beautiful and so powerful and he loves her and could never be without her.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she says to him.

“She still isn’t sorry. She won’t say it,” he tries to explain.

“It isn’t time. Did you think to bring the paint before you got so carried away in there?”

“It’s not here. It’s in the truck. Where I used it on the last one.”

“Bring it in. Prepare first. Always prepare. You lose control and then what. You know what to do. Don’t disappoint me.”

God flows closer to him. She has an IQ of a hundred and fifty.

“We’re almost out of time,” Hog says.

“You are nothing without me,” God says. “Don’t disappoint me.”

42

Dr. Self sits at her desk, staring at the pool and getting anxious about the time. Every Wednesday morning she is supposed to be at the studio by ten to get ready for her live radio show. “I absolutely can’t confirm that,” she says on the phone, and were she not in such a hurry, she would enjoy this conversation for all the wrong reasons.

“There’s no question you prescribed Ritalin hydrochloride to David Luck,” Dr. Kay Scarpetta replies.

Dr. Self can’t help but think of Marino and everything he has said about Scarpetta. Dr. Self isn’t intimidated. At the moment, she has the advantage over this woman she has met only once and hears about incessantly every single week.

“Ten milligrams three times daily,” Dr. Scarpetta’s voice comes over the line.

She sounds tired, maybe depressed. Dr. Self could help her. She told her so when they met last June at the Academy, at the dinner in honor of Dr. Self.

Highly motivated, successful professional women like us must be careful not to neglect our emotional landscapes, she said to Scarpetta when they happened to be in the ladies’ room at the same time.

Thank you for your lectures. I know the students are enjoying them, Scarpetta replied, and Dr. Self saw right through her.

The Scarpettas of the world are masters at evading personal scrutiny or anything that might expose their secret vulnerability.

I’m sure the students are quite inspired, Scarpetta said, washing her hands in the sink, washing them as if she were scrubbing for surgery. Everyone appreciates your finding time in your busy schedule to come here.

I can tell you really don’t mean that, Dr. Self replied quite candidly. The vast majority of my colleagues in the medical profession look down on anyone who takes their practice beyond closed doors, walks out in the wide open arena of radio and television. The truth, of course, is usually jealousy. I suspect half the people who criticize me would ransom their souls to be on the air.

You’re probably right, Scarpetta replied, drying her hands.

It was a comment that lent itself to several very different interpretations: Dr. Self is right, the vast majority of people in the medical profession do look down on her; or half the people who criticize her are jealous; or it is true that she suspects half the people who criticize her are jealous, meaning they may not be jealous at all. No matter how many times she has replayed their conversation in the ladies’ room and analyzed that particular remark, she can’t decide what it meant and whether she was subtly and cleverly insulted.

“You sound as if something is bothering you,” she says to Scarpetta over the phone.

“It is. I want to know what happened to your patient David.” She dodges the personal comment. “One hundred tablets were refilled a little over three weeks ago,” Scarpetta says.

“I can’t verify that.”

“I don’t need you to verify it. I collected the prescription bottle from his house. I know you prescribed the Ritalin hydrochloride, and I know exactly when it was filled and where. The pharmacy is in the same strip mall as Ev and Kristin’s church.”

Dr. Self doesn’t confirm this, but it’s true.

What she says is, “Certainly, of all people, you understand confidentiality.”

“I would hope you might understand that we’re greatly concerned about the welfare of David and his brother and the two women they live with.”

“Has anyone considered the possibility that the boys might have been homesick for South Africa? I’m not saying they were,” she adds. “I’m simply posing a hypothetical.”

“Their parents died last year in Capetown,” Scarpetta says. “I spoke to the medical examiner who…”

“Yes, yes,” she interrupts. “It’s terribly tragic.”

“Were both boys your patients?”

“Can you imagine how traumatizing that was? As I understand it from comments I heard outside of any sessions I might have had with either of them, their foster home was temporary. I believe it was always a given that at an appropriate time, they would return to Capetown and move in with relatives who had to move to a larger house or something like that before they could take the boys.”

She probably shouldn’t offer any further details but is enjoying the conversation too much to abort it.

“How were they referred to you?” Scarpetta asks.

“Ev Christian contacted me, was familiar with me, of course, because of my shows.”

“That must happen quite a lot. People listen to you and want to become your patient.”

“It certainly does.”

“Meaning you must turn down most.”

“I have no choice.”

“So what made you decide to take on David and perhaps his brother?”

Dr. Self notices two people out by her pool. Two men in white shirts, black baseball caps and dark glasses are looking at her fruit trees, at the red stripes around them.

“It looks like I have trespassers,” she says, annoyed.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Those damn inspectors. I’m doing a show on the very subject tomorrow, my new TV show. Well, now I really will be armed and dangerous on the air. Look at them just helping themselves to my property. I really do have to go.”

“This is extremely important, Dr. Self. I wouldn’t be calling you were there not reason for…”

“I’m in a terrible rush and now this. Now these idiots are back, probably to kill off all my beautiful trees. Well, we’ll see. I’ll be damned if they’re coming in here with a crew of dunces and stump grinders and wood chippers. We’ll see,” she says in a threatening way. “If you want any further information from me, you’ll have to get a court order or permission from the patient.”

“Rather difficult to get permission from someone who’s vanished.”

Dr. Self hangs up and walks out into the bright, hot morning, heading with purpose toward the men in white shirts that on closer inspection have a logo on the front, the same logo that is on their caps. In bold black print on the back of the shirts is Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. One inspector holds a PDA, and is doing something with it while the other inspector talks on his cell phone.

“Excuse me,” Dr. Self says aggressively. “May I help you?”

“Good morning. We’re Department of Agriculture citrus inspectors,” the man with the PDA says.

“I can see who you are,” Dr. Self says, unsmiling.

Each of them wears a green badge with his photograph, but Dr. Self doesn’t have her glasses on and can’t read their names.

“We rang the bell and didn’t think anyone was home.”

“So you just walk on my property and help yourselves?” Dr. Self says.

“We’re allowed to enter open yards, and, like I said, we didn’t think anyone was home. We rang the bell several times.”

“I can’t hear the bell from my office,” she says, as if it’s their fault.

“We apologize. But we need to inspect your trees and didn’t realize inspectors have already been here….”

“You’ve already been here. So you admit you’ve trespassed before.”

“Not us specifically. What I mean is we’ve not inspected your property before, but someone has. Even if there’s no record of it,” the inspector with the PDA says to Dr. Self.

“Ma’am, did you paint these stripes?”

Dr. Self looks blankly at the stripes on her trees.

“Why would I do that? I assumed you put them there.”

“No, ma’am. They were already here. You mean you haven’t noticed them before now?”

“Of course I’ve noticed them.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, when?”

“Several days ago. I’m not sure.”

“What it indicates is your trees are infected with citrus canker and will have to be removed. That they’ve been infected for years.”

“For years?”

“They should have been removed long before now,” the other inspector explains.

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“We stopped painting red stripes a couple years ago. Use orange tape now. So someone marked your trees for eradication and it looks like no one ever got around to it. I don’t understand that, but in fact, these trees do show signs of canker.”

“Not old canker, though.”

“Ma’am, you didn’t get a notice, a green notice that indicates we found symptoms and instructs you to call a one-eight-hundred number? No one showed you something like a specimen report?”

“I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about,” Dr. Self says, and she thinks of the anonymous phone call she got yesterday evening right after Marino left. “And it really does look like my trees are infected?”

She steps closer to a grapefruit tree. It is heavy with fruit and looks healthy to her. She leans close to a branch as an inspector’s gloved finger points out several leaves that have pale lesions on them, scarcely noticeable ones shaped like fans.

“See these areas?” he explains. “They indicate recent infection. Maybe just a few weeks. But they’re peculiar.”

“I don’t get it,” the other inspector says. “If the red stripes are to be believed, you should be seeing dieback and fruit drop, should be able to count the rings to see how long ago. You know, there’s four or five flushes a year, so you count rings….”

“I really don’t give a damn about counting rings and fruit drop! What are you saying?” she exclaims.

“I was just thinking that. If the stripes were painted a couple years ago…?”

“Man, I’m stumped.”

“You trying to be funny?” Dr. Self yells at him. “Be-cause I don’t think any of this is funny.” She looks at the pale, fan-shaped lesions and keeps thinking of yesterday’s anonymous phone call. “Why did you come here today?”

“Well, that’s what’s kind of strange about this,” the inspector with the PDA replies. “We’ve got no record of your trees already being inspected and quarantined and scheduled for eradication. I don’t understand. Everything’s supposed to be registered in the computer. The lesions on your leaves are peculiar. See?”

He holds one out, shows her, and she looks at the odd fan-shaped lesion again.

“They don’t normally look like that. We need to get a pathologist out here.”

“Why my damn yard today?” she demands to know.

“We received a phone tip that your trees might be infected, but…”

“A phone tip? From whom?”

“Someone doing yard work in the area.”

“This is crazy. I have a yard man. He’s never said anything to me about something being wrong with my trees. None of this is making any sense. No wonder the public is infuriated. You people don’t know what the hell you’re doing, just barge into people’s private property and can’t even keep it straight which damn trees to cut down.”

“Ma’am, I know how you feel. But the canker’s not a joke. If we don’t deal with it, there won’t be any citrus trees left….”

“I want to know who called.”

“We don’t know that, ma’am. We’ll get it straightened out, and we certainly apologize for the inconvenience. We’d like to explain your options. When’s a good time to come back? Will you be around later in the day? We’ll get a pathologist to look.”

“You can tell your damn pathologists and supervisors and whoever that they’ve not heard the last from me about this. Do you know who I am?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Turn on your damn radio today at noon. Talk It Out with Dr. Self.”

“You’re kidding. That’s you?” one of the inspectors, the one with the PDA, asks, impressed, as he ought to be. “I listen to you all the time.”

“I also have a new TV show. ABC, tomorrow at one-thirty. Every Thursday,” she says, suddenly pleased and feeling a bit more charitable toward them.

The scraping sound beyond the broken window sounds like someone digging. Ev breathes shallowly, rapidly, her arms raised above her head. She breathes shallow, rapid breaths and listens.

It seems she heard the same noise days ago. She doesn’t remember when. Maybe it was at night. She listens to a shovel, someone plunging a shovel into the dirt behind the house. She shifts her position on the mattress, and her ankles and wrists throb as if someone is beating them and her shoulders burn. She is hot and thirsty. She can barely think and probably has a fever. The infections are bad and every tender place burns unbearably, and she can’t lower her arms, not unless she stands.

She will die. If he doesn’t kill her first, she will die anyway. The house is silent, and she knows the rest of them are gone.

Whatever he did to them, they aren’t here anymore.

She knows it now.

“Water,” she tries to call out.

Words well up inside her and disintegrate in the air like bubbles. She talks in bubbles. They float up and vanish without a sound in the hot, foul air.

“Please, oh please,” and her words go nowhere and she begins to cry.

She sobs and tears fall on the ruined green robe in her lap. She sobs as if something has happened, something final, like a destiny she never could have imagined, and she stares at the dark spots her tears make on her ruined green robe, the splendid robe she wore when she preached. Beneath it is the small pink shoe, a left shoe, Keds. She feels the little girl’s pink shoe against her thigh, but her arms are raised and she can’t hold it or hide it better, and her sorrow deepens.

She listens to the digging beyond her window and begins to smell the stench.

The longer the digging goes on, the worse the stench gets inside her room, but it is a different stench, a dreadful stench, the acrid, putrid stench of something dead.

Take me home, she prays to God. Please take me home. Show me.

She manages to get on her knees, to kneel, and the sound of the digging stops, then starts again, then stops. She sways, almost falls, willing herself to stand, struggles and falls and tries again, sobbing, and then she is on her feet and the pain is so awful, she sees black. She takes a deep breath and the blackness passes.

Show me, she prays.

The ropes are thin white nylon. One is tied to the coat hanger bent and twisted around her inflamed, swollen wrists. When she stands, the rope is slack. When she sits, her arms are raised over her head. She can’t lie down anymore. His latest cruelty, shortening the rope, forcing her to stand as much as she can, leaning against the wooden wall until she can’t stay on her feet any longer and she sits and her arms go straight up. His latest cruelty, making her cut off her hair, then shortening the rope.

She looks up at the rafter, at the ropes over it, one tied to the coat hanger that binds her wrists, the other to the coat hanger bent around her ankles.

Show me. Please God.

The digging stops and the stench blots the light out of the room and stings her eyes, and she knows what the stench is.

They’re gone. She is the only one left.

She looks up at the rope tied to the coat hanger around her wrists. If she stands, the rope is slack enough to loop once around her neck and she smells the stench and knows what it is and she prays again and loops the rope once around her neck and her legs go out from under her.

43

The air is thick and wavy like water and slaps hard, but the V-Rod doesn’t wobble or seem stressed as Lucy grips the leather seat with her thighs and pushes the speed up to one hundred and twenty miles an hour. She keeps her head low, her elbows tucked in like a jockey as she tests her latest acquisition around the track.

The morning is bright and unseasonably hot, any vestige of yesterday’s storms gone. She eases back the throttle at thirteen thousand nine hundred rpms, satisfied that the Harley with its larger cams, pistons and rear sprocket, and souped-up Engine Control Module can scorch the pavement when needed, but she doesn’t want to push her luck for long. At even a hundred and ten, she is going faster than she can see, and that isn’t a good habit. Outside her pristinely maintained track are public roads, and at such high speeds, the slightest surface damage or debris can prove deadly.

“What’s it doing?” Marino’s voice sounds inside her full face helmet.

“What it should,” she replies, dropping back to eighty, lightly pushing the handlebars, swerving around small, bright-orange cones.

“Damn it’s quiet. Can hardly hear it up here,” Marino says from the control tower.

It’s supposed to be quiet, she thinks. The V-Rod is a Harley that’s quiet, a race bike that looks like a road bike and doesn’t draw attention to itself. Leaning back in the seat, she eases her speed to sixty and with her thumb tightens the friction screw to hold the throttle in a loose version of cruise control. She leans into a curve and pulls a forty-caliber Glock pistol out of a holster built into the right thigh of her black ballistic pants.

“Nobody down range,” she transmits.

“You’re clear.”

“Okay. Pop ’em.”

From the control tower, Marino watches Lucy sweep around the tight curve at the north end of the mile-long track.

He scans the high earthworks, scans the blue sky, the grassy firing ranges, the road that cuts through the middle of the grounds, then the hangar and runway about half a mile away. He makes sure no personnel, vehicles or aircraft are in the area. When the track is hot, nothing is allowed within a mile of it. Even the airspace is restricted.

He experiences a mixture of emotions when he watches Lucy. Her fearlessness and abundant skills impress him. He loves her and resents her, and a part of him would prefer not to care about her at all. In one important way, she’s like her aunt, makes him feel unacceptable to the sort of women he secretly likes but doesn’t have the courage to pursue. He watches Lucy speed around the track, maneuvering her new hot-rod bike as if it is part of her and he thinks about Scarpetta on her way to the airport, on her way to see Benton.

“Going hot in five,” he says into the mic.

Beyond the glass, Lucy’s black figure on the sleek, black bike speeds smoothly, almost silently. Marino detects her right arm move as she holds the pistol close in, her elbow tucked in to her waist so the wind doesn’t rip the weapon out of her hand. He watches seconds tick off on the digital clock built into the console and at the count of five presses the button for Zone Two. On the east side of the track, small, round, metal targets pop up and quickly fall back in loud, flat clanks as forty-caliber rounds bite into them. Lucy doesn’t miss. She makes it look easy.

“Long range on base,” her voice fills his headset.

“Downwind?”

“Roger.”

His footsteps are loud and excited as he walks quickly down the hallways. He can hear what he feels in the way his booted feet move over the scarred old wood, and he carries the shotgun. He carries the shoebox that holds the airbrush, the red paint and the stencil.

He is prepared.

“Now you’ll say you’re sorry,” he says to the open doorway at the end of the hall. “Now you get what you deserve,” he says as he walks quickly and loudly.

He walks into the stench. It is like a wall when he walks through the doorway, worse than out by the pit. Inside the room, the air doesn’t stir and the dead stench has nowhere to go and he stares, shocked.

This can’t have happened.

How could God let this happen!

He hears God in the hallway and she flows into the doorway, shaking her head at him.

“I prepared!” he yells.

God looks at her, the one hanged who went unpunished and shakes her head. It is Hog’s fault, he is stupid, he didn’t foresee it, should have made sure it couldn’t happen.

She didn’t say she was sorry, they all do in the end when the barrel is in their mouth, talk around it, try to, I’m sorry. Please. I’m sorry.

God disappears from the doorway, leaves him with his error and the girl’s pink sneaker on the stained mattress and he begins to shake inside, shake with a rage so powerful he doesn’t know what to do with it.

He screams as he strides across the floor, the filthy floor, sticky and foul with her piss and shit, and he kicks her lifeless, disgusting, naked body as hard as he can. She jerks with each kick. She sways from the rope around her neck, angled up to her left ear, and her tongue protrudes as if she is mocking him, her face bluish deep red as if she is yelling at him. Her weight rests on her knees on the mattress, and her head is bent, as if she is praying to her God, her bound arms straight up, her hands together, as if she is celebrating victory.

Yes! Yes! She sways from her rope, victorious, the little pink shoe next to her.

“Shut up!” he screams.

He kicks and kicks with his big boots until his legs are too tired to kick anymore.

He slams and slams her with the stock of the shotgun until his arms are too tired to slam anymore.

44

Marino waits to activate a series of human-shaped targets that will flip up from behind bushes, a fence and a tree on the base curve, or Dead Man’s Curve, as Lucy calls it.

He checks the blaze-orange wind sock center field, verifying that the wind is still out of the east and gusting at maybe five knots. He watches Lucy’s right arm holster the Glock and reach back to an oversized leather saddlebag as she glides at a steady speed of sixty miles an hour around the crosswind curve, entering the downwind straightaway.

She smoothly pulls out a nine-millimeter Beretta Cx4 Storm carbine.

“Going hot on five,” he says.

Sculpted of a nonreflective black polymer, with the same telescoping bolt used in an Uzi submachine gun, the Storm is a passion of Lucy’s. It weighs less than six pounds, has a pistol-grip stock that makes it easy to handle, and ejection can be altered from left to right. So it is nimble and no-nonsense, and when Marino goes active on Zone Three, Lucy rolls in and brass cartridge cases flash in the sun, flying behind her. She kills everything on Dead Man’s Curve, kills everything more than once. Marino counts fifteen rounds fired. All targets are down, and she has one round left.

He thinks about the woman named Stevie. He thinks about Lucy meeting her tonight at Deuce. The 617 phone number Stevie gave Lucy belongs to a guy in Concord, Massachusetts, a guy named Doug. He says several days ago he was in a bar in Ptown and lost his cell phone. He says he hasn’t cancelled the number yet because some lady apparently found his phone, called one of the numbers in it, ended up talking to one of Doug’s friends, who then gave her Doug’s home number. She called, said she’d found his cell phone, promised to mail it to him.

So far she hasn’t.

It’s a slick trick, Marino thinks. If you find or steal a cell phone and promise to send it to the owner, maybe he doesn’t get his electronic security identification number deactivated right away and you can use his phone for a while, until the person gets wise. What Marino doesn’t quite understand is why Stevie, whoever she is, would go to all the trouble. If her reasoning was to avoid having an account with a cellular company such as Verizon or Sprint, why not just get a pay-as-you-go phone?

Whoever Stevie is, she’s trouble. Lucy is living far too close to the edge these days, has been for the better part of a year. She’s changed. She’s gotten inattentive and indifferent, and at times Marino wonders if she’s trying to hurt herself, hurt herself badly.

“Another car has just sped up from behind,” he radios her. “You’re history.”

“I’m reloaded.”

“No way.” He can’t believe it.

Somehow, she has managed to drop out the empty magazine and slide in a new one without him noticing.

She slows the bike to a stop below the control tower. He sets his headphones on the console, and by the time he gets down the wooden stairs, she has her helmet and gloves off and is unzipping her jacket.

“How’d you do that?” he asks.

“I cheated.”

“I knew it.”

He squints in the sun and wonders where he left his sunglasses, new ones, Ray-Bans. He seems to be misplacing things a lot these days.

“I had an extra magazine here.” She pats a pocket.

“Huh. You probably wouldn’t in real life. So yeah, you cheated.”

“He who survives writes the rules.”

“What’s your thinking about the Z-Rod, about turning all of them into Z-Rods?” he asks, and he knows what she thinks about it, but he asks anyway, hoping she’s changed her mind.

It doesn’t make sense to increase the engine some thirteen percent, from an already enhanced 1150cc’s to 1318cc’s, and an already beefed-up breaking horsepower of 120 to 170, so the bike can rocket from 0 to 140 miles per hour in 9.4 seconds. The more weight the bike loses, the better it will perform, but it would mean replacing the leather seat and rear fender with molded fiberglass and losing the saddlebags, and they can’t lose those. He hopes Lucy isn’t interested in butchering their new fleet of Special Op bikes. He hopes that for once, what she has is enough.

“Impractical and unnecessary,” she surprises him by saying. “A Z-Rod engine only lasts ten thousand miles, so imagine the maintenance headaches, and we strip these things down, it’s going to call attention to them. Not to mention how much louder they’ll be because of the increased air intake.”

“Now what,” he says with a huff as his cell phone rings. “Yeah,” he answers it gruffly.

He listens for a moment, then ends the call and says “shit” before he tells Lucy, “They’re going to start processing the station wagon. Can you get started without me at the Simister house?”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll have Lex meet me.”

Lucy unclips a two-way radio from her waistband and gets on the air. “Zero-zero-one to the stable.”

“What can I do for you, zero-zero-one?”

“Gas up my horse. I’m taking her on the street.”

“She need a bigger burr under her saddle?”

“She’ll do just fine the way she is.”

“Good to hear. Be right there.”

“We’ll head out to South Beach around nine,” Lucy says to Marino. “I’ll meet you there.”

“Maybe it’s better we go together,” he says, looking at her, trying to figure out what’s in her mind.

He never can, not that mind. If she were any more complicated, he’d need an interpreter.

“We can’t run the risk she might see us in the same car,” Lucy says, pulling off her ballistic jacket, complaining that the sleeves are like Chinese handcuffs.

“Maybe it’s some kind of cult thing,” Marino says. “Some cult like a bunch of witches that paint red hands all over themselves. Salem’s up there in the same part of the world. All kinds of witches up there.”

“Witches are by the coven, not the bunch.” Lucy pokes him in the shoulder.

“Maybe she’s one of them,” he says. “Maybe your new friend is a witch who steals cell phones.”

“Maybe I’ll just come right out and ask her,” Lucy says.

“You should be careful about people. That’s the only thing with you, your judgment about who you hook up with. I wish you’d be more careful.”

“I guess we share the same dysfunction. Your judgment in that department seems to be almost as good as mine. Aunt Kay says Reba’s really nice and you were a dick to her at the Simister scene, by the way.”

“The Doc better not have said that. She better not have said nothing.”

“She didn’t say just that. She also said Reba’s smart, new on the job, but smart. Not as dumb as a bag of hammers and all those other clichés you like so much.”

“Bullshit.”

“She must be the one you were dating for a while,” Lucy says.

“Who told you?” Marino blurts out.

“You just did.”

45

Lucy has a macroadenoma. Her pituitary gland, which hangs by a threadlike stalk from the hypothalamus at the base of the brain, has a tumor.

The normal pituitary is about the size of a pea. It is referred to as the Master Gland because it transmits signals to the thyroid, the adrenals and ovaries or testes, controlling their production of hormones that dramatically affect metabolism, blood pressure, reproduction and other vital functions. Lucy’s tumor measures approximately twelve millimeters, or approximately half an inch, in diameter. It’s benign but won’t go away on its own. Her symptoms are headaches and an overproduction of prolactin, resulting in unpleasant symptoms that mimic pregnancy. For now, she controls her condition with drug therapy that is supposed to lower prolactin levels and shrink the tumor in size. Her response hasn’t been ideal. She hates taking her medication and isn’t consistent with it. Eventually, she might have to have surgery.

Scarpetta parks at Signature, the FBO at the Fort Lauderdale airport where Lucy hangars her jet. She gets out and meets the pilots inside as she thinks about Benton, not sure she’ll ever forgive him, so sick with hurt and anger that her heart is racing and her hands are shaking.

“There are still a few snow showers up there,” Bruce, the pilot in command, says. “We should be in the air about two hours twenty. We have a decent headwind.”

“I know you didn’t want catering, but we’ve got a cheese tray,” his copilot says. “Do you have baggage?”

“No,” she says.

Lucy’s pilots don’t wear uniforms. They are specially trained agents of her own design, don’t drink or smoke or do any kind of drugs, are very fit and trained in personal protection. They escort Scarpetta out to the tarmac where the Citation X waits like a big, white bird with a belly. It reminds her of Lucy’s belly, of what’s happened to her.

Inside the jet, she settles into the large leather seat, and when the pilots are busy in the cockpit, she calls Benton.

“I’ll be there by one, one fifteen,” she says to him.

“Please try to understand, Kay. I know what you must feel.”

“We’ll talk about it when I get there.”

“We never leave things like this,” he says.

It’s the rule, the old adage. Never let the sun go down on your wrath, never get into a car or a plane or walk out of the house when you’re angry. If anybody knows how quickly and randomly tragedy can strike, he and Scarpetta do.

“Fly safe,” Benton says to her. “I love you.”

Lex and Reba are walking around the outside of the house as if looking for something. They stop looking when Lucy makes her conspicuous entrance into Daggie Simister’s driveway.

She kills the engine of the V-Rod, takes off her black, full-face helmet and unzips her black ballistic jacket.

“You look like Darth Vader,” Lex says cheerfully.

Lucy’s never known anybody so chronically happy. Lex is a find, and the Academy wasn’t about to let her go after she graduated. She’s bright, careful and knows when to get out of the way.

“What are we looking for out here?” Lucy asks, scanning the small yard.

“The fruit trees over there,” Lex replies. “Not that I’m a detective. But when we were at the other house where those people disappeared”—she indicates the pale orange house on the other side of the waterway—“Dr. Scarpetta said something about a citrus inspector over here. She said he was examining trees in the area, maybe in the yard next door. And you can’t see it from here, but some of the trees over there have these same red stripes.” She again points to the pale orange house on the other side of the water.

“Of course, the canker spreads like crazy. If trees are infected here, I suppose a lot of trees in the area might be, too. I’m Reba Wagner, by the way,” she says to Lucy. “You’ve probably heard about me from Pete Marino.”

Lucy looks her in the eye. “What might I have heard if he’s talked about you?”

“How mentally challenged I am.”

“Mentally challenged might stretch his vocabulary to the point of injury. He probably said retarded.”

“There you have it.”

“Let’s go in,” Lucy says, heading to the front porch. “Let’s see what you missed the first time,” she says to Reba, “since you’re so mentally challenged.”

“She’s kidding,” Lex says to Reba, picking up the black crime-scene case she parked by the front door. “Before we do anything else”—she directs this to Reba—“I want to verify the house has been sealed since you guys cleared the scene.”

“Absolutely. I saw to it personally. All the windows and doors.”

“An alarm system?”

“You’d be amazed how many people down here don’t have them.”

Lucy notices stickers on windows that say H&W Alarm Company and comments, “She was worried, anyway. Probably couldn’t afford the real thing but still wanted to scare away bad people.”

“Problem is, the bad guys know that trick,” Reba replies. “Stickers and signs in the flower beds. Your typical burglar would take one look at this house and figure it probably doesn’t have an alarm system. That the person inside probably can’t afford it or is too old to bother.”

“A lot of elderly people don’t bother, it’s true,” Lucy says. “For one thing, they forget their codes. I’m serious.”

Reba opens the door and musty air greets them as if the life inside fled long ago. She reaches in and flips on lights.

“What’s anybody done about it so far?” Lex says, looking at the terrazzo floor.

“Nothing except in the bedroom.”

“Okay, let’s just stand out here a minute and think about this,” Lucy says. “We know two things. Her killer somehow got inside the house without breaking down a door. And after he shot her, he somehow left. Also through a door?” she asks Reba.

“I’d say so. She’s got all these jalousie windows. No way to climb through them unless you’re Gumby.”

“Then what we should do is start spraying at this door and work our way back to the bedroom where she was killed,” Lucy says. “Then we’ll do the same thing at all the other doors. Triangulating.”

“That would be this door, the kitchen door and the sliders leading from the dining room to the sunporch and on the sunporch itself,” Reba tells them. “Both sets of the sliders were unlocked when Pete got here, so he says.”

They put on their disposable clothing. Reba steps inside the foyer, and Lucy and Lex follow. They shut the door.

“We ever find out any other details about the citrus inspector you and Dr. Scarpetta happened to notice around the time this lady was shot?” Lucy asks, and on the job, she never refers to Scarpetta as her aunt.

“I found out a couple things. First, they work in pairs. The person we saw was alone.”

“How do you know his partner wasn’t out of sight? Maybe in the front yard?” Lucy asks.

“We don’t. But all we saw was this one person. And there’s no record any inspectors were even supposed to be in this neighborhood. Another thing, he was using one of those pickers, you know, the long pole with a claw or whatever so you can pull down fruit from high up in the tree? From what I’ve been told, inspectors don’t use anything like that.”

“What would be the point?” Lucy asks.

“He took it apart, put it in a big black bag.”

“I wonder what else was in the bag,” Lex says.

“Like a shotgun,” Reba says.

“We’ll keep an open mind,” Lucy says.

“I’d say it’s a big fuck-you,” Reba adds. “I’m in plain view on the other side of the water. A cop. I’m with Dr. Scarpetta and obviously we’re looking around, investigating, and he’s right there looking at us, pretending to examine trees.”

“Possibly, but we can’t be sure,” Lucy replies. “Let’s keep an open mind,” she reminds them again.

Lex crouches on the cool terrazzo floor and opens the crime-scene case. They close all the blinds in the house, then Lucy sets up the tripod, attaches the camera and the cable release, while Lex mixes up the luminol and transfers it to a black pump spray bottle. They photograph the area just inside the front door, then lights out, and they get lucky on their first try.

“Holy smoke,” Reba’s voice sounds in the dark.

The distinct shape of footprints glow bluish-green as Lex mists the floor and Lucy captures it on film.

“He must have had a hell of a lot of blood on his shoes to leave this much after walking all the way across the house,” Reba says.

“Except for one thing,” Lucy replies in the dark. “They’re heading in the wrong direction. They’re coming in instead of leaving.”

46

He looks grim but fantastic in a long, black suede coat, his silver hair peeking out of a Red Sox baseball cap. Whenever Scarpetta hasn’t seen Benton for a while, she is struck by his refined handsomeness, by his long, lean elegance. She doesn’t want to be angry with him. She can’t stand it. She feels sick.

“As always, we enjoyed flying with you. Just call when you know exactly when you’re leaving,” Bruce the pilot says to her, warmly shaking her hand. “Get in touch if you need anything. You’ve got all my numbers, right?”

“Thanks, Bruce,” Scarpetta says.

“Sorry you had to wait,” he says to Benton. “A headwind that got more wicked.”

Benton isn’t the least bit friendly. He doesn’t answer him. He watches him walk off.

“Let me guess,” Benton says to Scarpetta. “Another triathlete who decided to play cops and robbers. The one thing I hate about flying on her jet. Her musclehead pilots.”

“I feel very safe with them.”

“Well, I don’t.”

She buttons her wool coat as they walk out of the FBO.

“I hope he didn’t try to chat with you too much, bother you. He strikes me as the type,” he says.

“It’s nice to see you, too, Benton,” she says, walking one step ahead of him.

“I happen to know you don’t think it’s nice at all.”

He picks up his pace, holds the glass front door for her, and the wind rushing in is cold and carries small flakes of snow. The day is dark gray, so dusky that lights in the parking lot have come on.

“She gets these guys, all of them good-looking and addicted to the gym, and they think they’re action heroes,” he says.

“You made your point. Are you trying to pick a fight before I have a chance?”

“It’s important you notice certain things, don’t assume someone’s just being friendly. I worry you don’t pick up important signals.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she replies, anger sounding in her voice. “If anything, I pick up too many signals. Although I obviously missed some pretty important ones this past year. You want a fight, now you’ve got it.”

They are walking through the snowy parking lot, and the lamps along the tarmac are blurred by the snow and sound is muted. Usually, they hold hands. She wonders how he could have done what he did. Her eyes water. Maybe it is the wind.

“I’m worried who’s out there,” he says oddly, unlocking his Porsche, this one a four-wheel-drive SUV.

Benton likes his cars. He and Lucy are into power. The difference is, Benton knows he’s powerful. Lucy doesn’t feel she is.

“Worried in general?” Scarpetta asks, assuming he’s still talking about all the signals she supposedly misses.

“I’m talking about whoever just murdered this lady up here. NIBIN got a hit on a shotgun shell that appears to have been fired by the same shotgun used in a homicide in Hollywood two years ago. A convenience-store robbery. The guy was wearing a mask, killed a kid in the store and then the manager killed him. Sound familiar?”

He looks over at her as they talk, as they drive away from the airport.

“I’ve heard about it,” she replies. “Seventeen years old, armed with nothing but a mop. Anybody have a clue as to why that shotgun’s back in circulation?” she asks as her resentment grows.

“Not yet.”

“A lot of shotgun deaths recently,” she says, coolly professional.

If he wants to be this way, she can, too.

“I wonder what that’s about,” she adds in a detached sort of way. “The one used in the Johnny Swift case disappears—now one is used in the Daggie Simister case.”

She has to explain to him the Daggie Simister case. He doesn’t know about it yet.

“A shotgun that is supposed to be in custody or destroyed is just used again up here,” she goes on. “Then we have the Bible in the house of these missing people.”

“What Bible and what missing people?”

She has to explain that to him, tell him about the anonymous call from someone who referred to himself as Hog. She has to tell him about the centuries-old Bible inside the house of the women and boys who have vanished, that it was open to the Wisdom of Solomon, that the verse is the same one this man called Hog recited to Marino over the phone.

Therefore unto them, as to children without the use of reason, thou dids’t send a judgment to mock them.

“Marked with X’s in pencil,” she says. “The Bible printed in 1756.”

“Unusual they would have one that old.”

“There were no other old books like that in the house. According to Detective Wagner. You don’t know her. People who worked with them at the church say they’ve never seen the Bible before.”

“Checked it for prints, for DNA?”

“No prints. No DNA.”

“Any theories about what might have happened to them?” he asks, as if the sole reason for her racing here on a private jet was to discuss their work.

“Nothing good,” and her resentment grows.

He knows almost nothing about what her life has been like of late.

“Evidence of foul play?”

“We’ve got a lot to do at the labs. They’re in overdrive,” she says. “I found earprints outside a slider in the master bedroom. Someone had his ear pressed up against the glass.”

“Maybe one of the boys.”

“It’s not,” she says, getting angrier. “We got their DNA, or presumably it’s their DNA, from clothing, their toothbrushes, a prescription bottle.”

“I don’t exactly consider earprints good forensic science. There have been a number of wrongful convictions because of earprints.”

“Like a polygraph, it’s a tool,” she almost snaps.

“I’m not arguing with you, Kay.”

“DNA from an earprint the same way we get DNA from fingerprints,” she says. “We’ve already run that and it’s unknown, doesn’t appear to be anybody who lived in the house. Nothing in CODIS. I’ve asked our friends at DNAPrint Genomics in Sarasota to test for gender and ancestral inference or racial affiliation. Unfortunately, that will take days. I don’t really give a damn about matching someone’s ear to an earprint.”

Benton doesn’t say a word.

“Do you have anything to eat in the house? And I need a drink. I don’t care if it’s the middle of the day. And I need us to talk about something besides work. I didn’t fly up here in a snowstorm to talk about work.”

“It’s not a snowstorm yet,” Benton says somberly. “But it will be.”

She stares out her window as he drives toward Cambridge.

“I have plenty of food in the house. And whatever you want to drink,” he says quietly.

He says something else. She’s not sure she heard it correctly. What she thinks she heard can’t be right.

“I’m sorry. What did you just say?” she asks, startled.

“If you want out, I’d rather you tell me now.”

“If I want out?” She looks at him, incredulous. “Is that all it takes, Benton? We have a major disagreement and should discuss ending our relationship?”

“I’m just giving you the option.”

“I don’t need you to give me anything.”

“I didn’t mean you need my permission. I just don’t see how it can work if you don’t trust me anymore.”

“Maybe you’re right.” She fights back tears, turns her face away from him, looks out at the snow.

“So you’re saying you don’t trust me anymore.”

“What if I had done it to you?”

“I would be very upset,” he replies. “But I’d try to understand why. Lucy has a right to her privacy, a legal right. The only reason I know about the tumor is because she told me she was having a problem and wondered if I could arrange for her to be scanned at McLean, if I could make sure nobody knew, could keep it absolutely quiet. She didn’t want to make an appointment at some hospital somewhere. You know how she is. Especially these days.”

“I used to know how she is.”

“Kay.” He glances over at her. “She didn’t want a record. Nothing’s private anymore, not since the Patriot Act.”

“Well, I can’t argue with that.”

“You have to assume your medical records, prescription drugs, bank accounts, shopping habits, everything private about your life might be looked at by the Feds, all in the name of stopping terrorists. Her controversial past career with the FBI and ATF is a realistic concern. She doesn’t trust that they won’t find out anything they can about her, and she ends up audited by the IRS, on a no-fly list, accused of insider trading, scandalized in the news, God knows what.”

“What about you and your not-so-pleasant past with the FBI?”

He shrugs, driving fast. A light snow swirls and seems to barely touch the glass.

“There’s not much else they can do to me,” he says. “Truth is, I’d probably be a waste of their time. I’m much more worried about who’s running around with a shotgun that’s supposed to be in the custody of the Hollywood police or destroyed.”

“What is Lucy doing about her prescription drugs? If she’s so anxious about leaving any sort of paper or electronic trail.”

“She should be anxious. She’s not delusional. They can get hold of pretty much anything they want—and are. Even if it requires a court order, what do you suppose happens in reality if the FBI wants a court order from a judge who just so happens to have been appointed by the current administration? A judge who worries about the consequences if he doesn’t cooperate? Do I need to paint about fifty possible scenarios for you?”

“America used to be a nice place to live.”

“We’ve handled everything we can in-house for Lucy,” he says.

He goes on and on about McLean, assures her that Lucy couldn’t have come to a better place, that if nothing else, McLean has access to the finest doctors and scientists in the country, in the world. Nothing he says makes her feel better.

They are in Cambridge now, passing the splendid antique mansions of Brattle Street.

“She hasn’t had to go through the normal channels for anything, including her meds. There’s no record unless somebody makes a mistake or is indiscreet,” Benton is saying.

“Nothing’s infallible. Lucy can’t spend the rest of her life paranoid that people are going to find out she has a brain tumor and is on some type of dopamine agonist to keep it under control. Or that she’s had surgery, if it comes to that.”

It is hard for her to say it. No matter the statistical fact that surgical extraction of pituitary tumors is almost always successful, there is a chance something can go wrong.

“It’s not cancer,” Benton says. “If it were, I probably would have told you no matter what she said.”

“She’s my niece. I raised her like a daughter. It’s not your right to decide what constitutes a serious threat to her health.”

“You know better than anyone that pituitary tumors aren’t uncommon. Studies show that approximately twenty percent of the population has incidental pituitary tumors.”

“Depending on who’s surveying. Ten percent. Twenty percent. I don’t give a damn about statistics.”

“I’m sure you’ve seen them in autopsies. People never even knew they had them—a pituitary tumor isn’t why they ended up in your morgue.”

“Lucy knows she has it. And the percentages are based on people who had micro—not macro—adenomas and were asymptomatic. Lucy’s tumor on her last scan was twelve millimeters, and she’s not asymptomatic. She has to take medication to lower her abnormally high levels of prolactin, and she may have to be on the medication the rest of her life unless she has the tumor removed. I know you’re well aware of the risks, the very least of which is the surgery won’t be successful and the tumor will still be there.”

Benton turns into his driveway, points a remote and opens the door of the detached garage, a carriage house in an earlier century. Neither of them talks as he pulls the SUV in next to his other powerful Porsche and shuts the door. They walk to the side entrance of his antique house, a dark-red brick Victorian just off Harvard Square.

“Who is Lucy’s doctor?” she asks, stepping inside the kitchen.

“Nobody at the moment.”

She stares at him as he takes off his coat and neatly drapes it over a chair.

“She doesn’t have a doctor? You can’t be serious. What the hell have you people been doing with her up here?” she says, fighting her way out of her coat and angrily throwing it on a chair.

He opens an oak cabinet and lifts out a bottle of single-malt Scotch and two tumblers. He fills them with ice.

“The explanation’s not going to make you feel any better,” he says. “Her doctor’s dead.”

The Academy’s forensic evidence bay is a hangar with three garage doors that open onto an access road that leads to a second hangar where Lucy keeps helicopters, motorcycles, armored Humvees, speedboats and a hot-air balloon.

Reba knows Lucy has helicopters and motorcycles. Everybody knows that. But Reba isn’t so sure she believes what Marino said about the rest of what’s supposed to be in that hangar. She’s suspicious he was setting her up as a joke, a joke that wouldn’t have been funny because it would have made her look stupid if she believed him and went around repeating what he said. He has lied to her plenty. He said he liked her. He said sex with her was the best ever. He said no matter what, they would always be friends. None of it was true.

She met him several months back when she was still in the motorcycle unit and he showed up one day on the Softail he rode before he got his tricked-out Deuce. She had just parked her Road King by the back entrance of the police department when she heard his loud pipes, and there he was.

Trade ya, he said, swinging his leg over the seat like a cowboy getting off his horse.

He hitched up his jeans and walked over to inspect her bike as she was locking it and getting a few items out of the saddlebags.

I bet you would, she replied.

How many times you dropped that thing?

None.

Huh. Well there’s only two types of riders. Those who’ve dropped their bikes and those who will.

There’s a third kind, she said, feeling rather good about herself in her uniform and tall, black leather boots. The one who’s dropped it and lies about it.

Well, that ain’t me.

That’s not what I hear, she said, and she was teasing him, flirting a little. The story I hear is you forgot to put down the kickstand at the gas pumps.

Bullshit.

I also hear you were doing a poker run and forgot to unlock your front fork before you headed off to the next bar.

That’s the biggest crock I ever heard.

How about the time you hit the kill switch instead of your right turn signal?

He started laughing and asked her to ride to Miami and have lunch at Monty Trainer’s on the water. They rode quite a few times after that, once to Key West, flying like birds along U.S.1 and crossing the water as if they could walk on it, the old Flagler railway bridges to the west, a storm-battered monument to a romantic past when South Florida was a tropical paradise of Art Deco hotels, Jackie Gleason and Hemingway—not all at the same time, of course.

All was fine until not even a month ago, right after she got promoted to the detective division. He started avoiding sex. He got weird about it. She worried it had to do with her promotion, worried maybe he didn’t find her attractive anymore. Men had gotten tired of her in the past, why wouldn’t it happen again? Their relationship fractured for good when they were having dinner at Hooters—not her favorite restaurant, by the way—and somehow got on the topic of Kay Scarpetta.

Half the guys in the police department got the hots for her, Reba said.

Huh, he said, his face changing.

Just like that, he became somebody else.

I wouldn’t know anything about it, he said, and he didn’t sound like the Marino she had come to like so much.

You know Bobby? she asked, and she now wishes she had kept her mouth shut.

Marino stirred sugar in his coffee. It was the first time she’d seen him do that. He told her he didn’t touch sugar anymore.

The first homicide we worked together, she kept talking, Dr. Scarpetta was there, and when she was getting ready to transport the body to the morgue, Bobby whispered to me, I might just die if I could have her hands all over me. And I said, Good, you die I’ll make sure she saws open your skull to see if you really got a brain in there.

Marino drank his sweetened coffee, looking at some waitress with big tits bending over to take away his salad bowl.

Bobby was talking about Scarpetta, Reba added, not sure he got it, wishing he would laugh or something, anything other than the hard, distant look on his face, watching tits and asses go by. It was the first time I met her, Reba talked on nervously, and I remember thinking maybe you and her were an item. I sure was glad later on to find out it wasn’t true.

You should work all your cases with Bobby. Marino then made a comment that had nothing to do with what she just said. Until you know what the hell you’re doing, you shouldn’t handle any case solo. In fact, you probably should transfer out of the detective division. I don’t think you realize what you’ve gotten yourself into. It’s not like what you see on TV.

Reba looks around the bay and feels self-conscious and useless. It is late afternoon. Forensic scientists have been at work for hours, the gray station wagon up on a hydraulic lift, the windows cloudy from superglue fumes, the carpets already processed and vacuumed. Something lit up on the mat beneath the driver’s seat. Maybe blood.

The forensic scientists are collecting trace evidence from the tires, using paintbrushes to sweep dust and dirt from the tread, brushing it off onto sections of white paper they fold and seal with bright-yellow evidence tape. A minute ago, one of the scientists, a pretty young woman, told Reba they don’t use metal evidence cans because when they run the trace through the SEM…

The what? Reba asked.

A scanning electron microscope with an energy dispersive x-ray system.

Oh, Reba said, and the pretty scientist went on to explain that if you put trace evidence in metal cans and the scan is positive for iron or aluminum, how do you know it’s not microscopic particles from the can?

That was a good point, one that would never have occurred to Reba. Most of what they are doing wouldn’t occur to her. She feels inexperienced and stupid. She stands off to one side, thinking about Marino telling her she shouldn’t work anything solo, about the way his face looked and the way he sounded when he said it. She looks around at the tow truck, at other hydraulic lifts and tables of photography equipment, Mini-Crime scopes, luminescent powders and brushes, trace-evidence vacuums, Tyvek protective clothing, superglue and crime-scene kits that look like big, black tackle boxes. On the far side of the hangar, there is even a sled and crash dummies, and she hears Marino’s voice. She hears it as plain as day in her head.

It’s not like what you see on TV.

He had no right to say that.

You should probably transfer out of the detective division.

Then she hears his voice and it’s real, and she is startled and turns around.

Marino is walking over to the station wagon, walks right past her, a coffee in hand.

“Anything new?” Marino says to the pretty scientist taping up a folded sheet of paper.

He stares at the wagon on the lift, acting as if Reba is a shadow on the wall, a mirage on the highway, something that’s nothing.

“Maybe blood inside,” the pretty scientist is saying. “Something that reacted to luminol.”

“I go to get coffee and look what I miss. What about prints?”

“We haven’t opened her up yet. I was getting ready to, don’t want to overcook her.”

The pretty scientist has long hair, shiny and a deep brown that reminds Reba of a chestnut horse. She has beautiful skin, perfect skin. What Reba wouldn’t give to have skin like that, to undo all her years in the Florida sun. There’s no point caring anymore, and wrinkled skin looks even worse when it’s pale, so she bakes herself. She still does. She looks at the pretty scientist’s smooth skin and youthful body and feels like crying.

The living room has fir floors and paneled mahogany doors, and a marble fireplace ready for a fire. Benton crouches before the hearth and lights a match, and wisps of smoke curl up from fatwood kindling.

“Johnny Swift graduated from Harvard Medical School, did a residency at Mass General, a fellowship in the department of neurology at McLean,” he says, getting up and returning to the couch. “A couple years ago, he started a practice at Stanford, but he also opened an office in Miami. We referred Lucy to Johnny because he was well known at McLean, was excellent and was accessible to her. He was her neurologist and I think they became pretty good friends.”

“She should have told me.” Scarpetta still can’t grasp it. “We’re investigating his case and she keeps something like that to herself?” She keeps repeating herself. “He may have been murdered and she says nothing?”

“He was a candidate for suicide, Kay. I’m not saying he wasn’t murdered, but when he was at Harvard, he started having mood disturbances, became an outpatient at McLean, was diagnosed as bipolar, which was controlled with lithium. As I say, he was well known at McLean.”

“You don’t have to keep justifying that he was qualified and compassionate and not just a random referral.”

“He was more than qualified and certainly wasn’t a random referral.”

“We’re investigating his case, a very suspicious case,” she says again. “And Lucy can’t be honest enough to tell me the truth. How the hell can she be objective?”

Benton drinks Scotch and stares into the fire, and the shadows from the flames play on his face.

“I’m not sure it’s relevant. His death has nothing to do with her, Kay.”

“And I’m not sure we know that,” she says.

47

Reba watches Marino watching the pretty scientist set her paintbrush on a sheet of clean, white paper and open the wagon’s driver’s door, his eyes wandering all over her.

He stands very close to the pretty scientist as she removes foil packets of superglue from inside the wagon and drops them into an orange biohazard trash can. They are shoulder to shoulder, bent over, looking inside the front, then the back, one side of the wagon, then the other, saying things to each other that Reba can’t hear. The pretty scientist laughs at something he says and Reba feels awful.

“I don’t see anything on the glass,” he says loudly, straightening up.

“Me either.”

He squats and looks again at the inside of the door, the one behind the driver’s seat. He takes his time as if noticing something.

“Come here,” he says to the pretty scientist as if Reba isn’t here.

They are standing so close they couldn’t fit a piece of that white paper between them.

“Bingo,” Marino says. “The metal part here that inserts into the buckle.”

“A partial.” The pretty scientist looks. “I see some ridge detail.”

They don’t find any other prints, partial or otherwise, not even smudges, and Marino wonders out loud if the interior of the car has been wiped down.

He doesn’t move out of Reba’s way as she tries to get close. It’s her case. She has a right to see what they’re talking about. It’s her case, not his. No matter what he thinks of her or says, she’s the detective and it’s her damn case.

“Excuse me.” She says it with authority she doesn’t feel. “How about giving me some room.” Then, to the pretty scientist, “What did you find on the carpets?”

“Relatively clean, just a little bit of dirt, kind of the way they look when you shake them out or use a vacuum cleaner that doesn’t have good suction. Maybe blood, but we’ll have to see.”

“Then maybe this station wagon was used and returned to the house.” Reba talks boldly, and Marino gets that hard look on his face again, that same hard, distant look he had in Hooters. “And it didn’t go through any tollbooths after the people disappeared.”

“What are you talking about?” Marino finally looks at her.

“We checked out the SunPass but that doesn’t necessarily mean much.” She has information, too. “There’s a lot of roads without tollbooths. Maybe it was driven where there aren’t tolls.”

“That’s a big maybe,” he says, not looking at her again.

“Nothing wrong with maybes,” she replies.

“See how that goes over in court,” he says, and he’s not going to look at her. “Using maybes. You say maybe and the defense attorney eats you for lunch.”

“Nothing wrong with what-ifs, either,” she says. “You know, like what if someone or even more than one person abducted these people in this wagon and then later returned it to the driveway, unlocked and partially on the grass? That would be pretty smart, now wouldn’t it? If anyone saw the wagon drive away from the house, they weren’t going to think it was abnormal. Wouldn’t think it abnormal if they saw it drive back, either. And I bet no one saw anything because it was dark.”

“I want the trace analyzed right away and the finger-print run through AFIS.” Marino tries to reassert his dominance by sounding like an even bigger bully.

“Sure thing,” the pretty scientist says sarcastically. “I’ll be right back with my magic box.”

“I’m curious,” Reba says to her. “Is it true Lucy’s got bulletproof Humvees, speedboats and a hot-air balloon in that other hangar over there?”

The pretty scientist laughs, snatches off her gloves, drops them into the trash. “Where the hell did you hear that?”

“Just some jerk,” she says.

At seven thirty that night, all the lights are turned off inside Daggie Simister’s house and the porch light is off.

Lucy holds the cable release, ready.

“Go,” she says, and Lex begins to mist the front porch with luminol.

They couldn’t do it earlier. They had to wait until after dark. Footprints glow and fade again, this time more strongly. Lucy takes pictures, then quits.

“What’s wrong?” Lex asks.

“I have a funny feeling,” Lucy says. “Let me have the spray bottle.”

Lex hands it to her.

“What’s the most common false positive we get with luminol?” Lucy asks.

“Bleach.”

“Try again.”

“Copper.”

Lucy starts spraying in wide sweeps over the yard, walking and spraying and the grass glows bluish-green, glowing and fading like an eerie luminescent ocean everywhere the luminol touches. She’s never seen anything like it.

“Fungicide is the only thing that makes sense,” she says. “Copper sprays. What they use on citrus trees to prevent canker. Course, it doesn’t work all that well. Witness her blighted trees with their pretty red stripes painted around them,” Lucy says.

“Someone walks across her yard and tracks it into the house,” Lex replies. “Someone like a citrus inspector.”

“We’ve got to find out who that was,” Lucy says.

48

Marino hates the trendy restaurants of South Beach and never parks his Harley anywhere near the lesser bikes, mostly Japanese crotch rockets, that always line the boardwalk at this hour. He cruises slowly and loudly along Ocean Drive, glad his pipes annoy all the cool customers drinking their flavored martinis and wine at their little candlelit outdoor tables.

He stops inches away from the back bumper of a red Lamborghini, pulls in the clutch and rolls the throttle, giving the engine enough gas to remind everybody he’s here. The Lamborghini inches forward and Marino inches forward, almost touching the back bumper, and rolls the throttle again, and the Lamborghini inches ahead and Marino does the same. His Harley roars like a mechanical lion, and a bare arm flies out the Lamborghini’s open window and a middle finger with a long, red nail flips up.

He smiles as he gooses the throttle again and threads between cars, stopping beside the Lamborghini, peers in at the olive-skinned woman behind the steel-alloy wheel. She looks maybe twenty, is dressed in a denim vest and shorts and not much else. The woman next to her is homely but makes up for it by wearing what looks like a stretchy black Ace bandage around her breasts, and shorts that barely cover what matters.

“How do you type or do housework with those nails?” Marino asks the driver over the roaring and throbbing of big, powerful engines, and he splays his huge hands like cat claws to make his point about her long, red nails, acrylic extenders or whatever they’re called.

Her pretty, snooty face stares up at the light, probably desperate for it to turn green so she can blast away from the redneck in black, and she says, “Get away from my car, motherfucker.”

She says it in a heavy Hispanic accent.

“Now that ain’t no way for a lady to talk,” Marino replies. “You just hurt my feelings.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“How about I buy you two babes a drink? After that, we’ll go dancing.”

“Leave us the fuck alone,” the driver says.

“I call police!” the one in the black Ace bandage threatens.

He tips his helmet, the one with the bullet hole decals, and rockets ahead of them as the light turns green. He is around the corner on 14th Street before the Lamborghini is even out of first gear, and parks by a meter in front of Tattoo’s By Lou and Scooter City, cuts the engine and dismounts his warrior seat. He locks the bike and crosses the street to the oldest bar in South Beach, the only bar he frequents in these parts, Mac’s Club Deuce, or what the local clientele simply call Deuce, not to be confused with his Harley Deuce. A two-Deuce night is what he says when he rides his Deuce to Deuce, a dark hole with a black-and-white checkered floor, a pool table and a neon nude over the bar.

Rosie starts pouring him a Budweiser draft. He doesn’t have to ask.

“You expecting company?” She slides the tall, foaming glass across the old oak bar.

“You don’t know her. You don’t know nobody tonight.” He gives her the script.

“Ohhhhh-kay.” She measures vodka in a water glass for some old guy sitting by himself on a nearby stool. “I don’t know anyone in here, least not the two of you. That’s fine. Maybe I don’t want to know you.”

“Don’t break my heart,” Marino says. “How ’bout putting some lime in it.” He pushes the beer back to her.

“Well, aren’t we fancy tonight.” She drops in a few slices. “That how you like it?”

“It’s really good.”

“Didn’t ask if it was good. Asked if that’s how you like it.”

As usual, the usual locals ignore them. The usuals are slouched on stools on the other side of the bar, glazed as they stare at a baseball game they’re not following on the big TV. He doesn’t know their names, but they don’t need names. There’s the fat guy with the goatee, the really fat woman who’s always complaining and her boyfriend, who is a third her size and looks like a ferret with yellow teeth. Marino wonders how the hell they fuck and imagines a jockey-sized cowboy flopping like a fish on a bucking bull. All of them smoke. On a two-Deuce night, Marino usually lights up a few, doesn’t think about Dr. Self. Whatever goes on in here stays in here.

He carries his beer with lime to the pool table and picks out a stick from the mismatched collection propped in a corner. He racks the balls and stalks around the table, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, chalking his stick. He squints at ferret, watching him get up from his stool and carry his beer to the men’s room. He always does that, afraid someone will swipe his drink. Marino’s eyes take in everything and everyone.

A scrawny, homeless-looking man with a scraggly beard, a ponytail, dark, ill-fitting Goodwill clothes, a filthy Miami Dolphins cap and weird pink-tinted glasses walks unsteadily into the bar and pulls up a chair near the door, stuffs a washcloth into the back pocket of his dark, baggy pants. A kid outside on the sidewalk is shaking a broken parking meter that just ate his money.

Marino smacks two solids into side pockets, squinting through cigarette smoke.

“That’s right. You keep knocking your balls in the hole,” Rosie calls out to him, pouring another beer. “Where you been anyway?”

She is sexy in a hard-ridden way, a little thing nobody in his right mind dares to mess with, no matter how drunk he is. Marino once saw her break a three-hundredpounder’s wrist with a beer bottle when he wouldn’t stop grabbing at her ass.

“Quit waiting on everybody and get over here,” Marino says, smacking the eight ball.

It warbles to the center of the green felt and stops.

“Screw it,” he mutters, propping his stick against the table, wandering over to the jukebox while Rosie pops open two bottles of Miller Lite and sets them in front of the fat woman and the ferret.

Rosie’s always frenetic, like a windshield wiper on high. She dries her hands on the back of her jeans as Marino picks out a few favorites from a mix of the seventies.

“What are you staring at?” he asks the homeless-looking man sitting by the door.

“How about a game?”

“I’m busy,” Marino says, not turning around as he makes selections on the jukebox.

“You’re not playing anything unless you buy a drink,” Rosie tells the homeless-looking man slumped by the door. “And I don’t want you hanging around here just for the hell of it. How many times I got to tell you?”

“I thought he might like a game with me.” He pulls out his washcloth and nervously starts wringing it.

“I’m going to tell you the same thing I did last time you came in here buying nothing and using the john, get out,” Rosie says in his face, her hands on her hips. “You want to stay, you pay.”

He slowly gets up from his chair, wringing the washcloth, and stares at Marino, his eyes defeated and tired, but there’s something in them.

“I thought you might like to play a game,” he says to Marino.

“Out!” Rosie yells at him.

“I’ll take care of it,” Marino says, walking over to the man. “Come on, I’m seeing you out, pal, before it’s too late. You know how she gets.”

The man doesn’t resist. He doesn’t stink half as bad as Marino expected, and he follows him out the door onto the sidewalk, where the idiot kid is still shaking the parking meter.

“It ain’t a goddamn apple tree,” Marino tells the kid.

“Fuck off.”

Marino strides over to him, towers over him, and the kid’s eyes get wide.

“What’d you say?” Marino asks, cupping his ear, leaning into him. “Did I hear what I think I did?”

“I put in three quarters.”

“Well now, ain’t that a pity. I suggest you get in your piece-of-shit car and get your ass out of here before I arrest you for damaging city property,” Marino says, even though he really can’t arrest anybody anymore.

The homeless-looking man from the bar is walking slowly along the sidewalk, glancing back as if expecting Marino to follow. He says something as the kid starts his Mustang and guns it out of there.

“You talking to me?” Marino asks the homeless-looking man, walking his way.

“He’s always doing that,” the homeless-looking man says quietly, softly. “Same kid. He never puts a damn nickel in the meters around here and then shakes the hell out of them until they break.”

“What do you want.”

“Johnny came in here the night before it happened,” he says in his ill-fitting clothes, the heels of his shoes cut out.

“Who you talking about.”

“You know who. He didn’t kill himself, neither. I know who did.”

Marino gets a feeling, the same feeling he got when he walked inside Mrs. Simister’s house. He spots Lucy a block away, taking her time on the sidewalk, not dressed in her usual baggy black clothes.

“Him and me played pool the night before it happened. He had on splints. They didn’t seem to bother him. He played pool just fine.”

Marino watches Lucy without making it obvious. Tonight, she fits in. She could be any gay woman who hangs out around here, boyish but good-looking and sexy in expensive jeans, faded and full of holes, and beneath her soft, black leather jacket is a white undershirt that clings to her breasts, and he’s always liked her breasts, even if he isn’t supposed to notice them.

“I saw him just the one time when he brought this girl in here,” the homeless man is saying, looking around as if something makes him edgy, turning his back to the bar. “Think she’s somebody you ought to find. That’s all I have to say.”

“What girl and why should I give a shit?” Marino says, watching Lucy get closer, scanning the area, making sure nobody gets any ideas about her.

“Pretty,” the man says. “The kind both men and women look at around here, dressed all sexy. Nobody wanted her around.”

“Seems to me nobody wants you around, either. You just got your ass kicked out.”

Lucy walks into Deuce without looking, as if Marino and the homeless man are invisible.

“Only reason I didn’t get kicked out that night is because Johnny bought me a drink. We played pool while the girl sat by the jukebox, looking around as if she’d never been taken to such a slop hole in her life. Went in the ladies’ room a couple times and after that it smelled like weed.”

“You make a habit of going into the ladies’ room?”

“I heard a woman at the bar talking. This girl, she looked like trouble.”

“You got any idea what her name is?”

“Sure don’t.”

Marino lights a cigarette. “What makes you think she has anything to do with what happened to Johnny?”

“I didn’t like her. Nobody did. That’s all I know.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t be telling nobody else about this, you got it?”

“No point in it.”

“Point or not, keep your mouth shut. And now you’re going to tell me how the hell you knew I was going to be in here tonight, and why the hell you thought you could talk to me.”

“That’s quite a bike you got.” The homeless man looks across the street. “Kind of hard to miss. A lot of people around here know you used to be a homicide detective and now do private-investigation stuff at some police camp or something north of here.”

“What? Am I the mayor?”

“You’re a regular. I’ve seen you with some of the Harley guys, been watching for you for weeks, hoping for a chance to talk to you. I hang out in the area, do the best I can. Not exactly the high point of my life, but I keep hoping it will get better.”

Marino pulls out his wallet and slips him a fifty-dollar bill.

“You find out more about this girl you saw in here, I’ll make it worth your while,” he says. “Where can I reach you?”

“Different place, different night. Like I said, I do the best I can.”

Marino gives him his cell phone number.

Want another one?” Rosie asks as Marino returns to the bar.

“Better give me an unleaded. You remember right before Thanksgiving, some good-looking blond doctor coming in here with a girl? He and that guy you just chased out play pool that night?”

She looks thoughtful, wiping down the bar, shakes her head. “A lot of people come in here. That was a long time ago. How long before Thanksgiving?”

Marino watches the door. It is a few minutes before ten. “Maybe the night before.”

“No, not me. I know this is hard to believe,” she says, “but I got a life, don’t work here every damn night. I was out of here at Thanksgiving. In Atlanta with my son.”

“Supposedly there was a girl in here who was trouble, was in here with the doctor I’ve told you about. Was with him the night before he died.”

“Got no idea.”

“Maybe she came in that night with the doctor when you was out of town?”

Rosie keeps wiping down the bar. “I don’t want a problem in here.”

Lucy sits by the window, near the jukebox, Marino at another table on the other side of the bar, his earpiece in and plugged into a receiver that looks like a cell phone. He drinks a nonalcoholic beer and smokes.

The locals on the other side aren’t paying any attention. They never do. Every time Lucy has been in here with Marino, the same losers are sitting on the same stools, smoking menthol cigarettes and drinking lite beer. The only person they talk to outside their deadbeat little club is Rosie, who once told Lucy that the hugely fat woman and her scrawny boyfriend used to live in a nice Miami neighborhood with a guard gate and everything until he got sent to jail for selling crystal meth to an undercover cop. Now the fat lady has to support him on what she makes as a bank teller. The fat man with the goatee is a cook in a diner Lucy will never visit. He comes here every night, gets drunk and somehow manages to drive himself home.

Lucy and Marino ignore each other. No matter how many times they’ve been through this routine during various operations, it always feels awkward and invasive. She doesn’t like being spied on, even if it’s her idea, and no matter the logic in him being here tonight, she resents his presence.

She checks the wireless mic attached to the inside of her leather jacket. She bends over as if tying her shoes so no one in the bar can see her talking. “Nothing so far,” she transmits to Marino.

It is three minutes past ten.

She waits. She sips a nonalcoholic beer, her back to Marino, and she waits.

She glances at her watch. It is eight minutes past ten.

The door opens and two men walk in.

Two more minutes pass and she transmits to Marino, “Something’s wrong. I’m going out to look. Stay here.”

Lucy walks through the Art Deco district along Ocean Drive, looking for Stevie in the crowd.

The later it gets, the louder and drunker the patrons of South Beach become, and the street is so crowded with people cruising and looking for parking, traffic barely moves. It’s irrational to look for Stevie. She didn’t show up. She’s probably a million miles from here. But Lucy looks.

She thinks of Stevie claiming to have followed her footprints in the snow, follow them to the Hummer parked behind the Anchor Inn. She wonders how she could have accepted what Stevie said, not really questioned it. While Lucy’s footprints would have been obvious just outside the cottage, they would have gotten mixed in with other footprints along the sidewalk. It’s not as if Lucy was the only person in Ptown that morning. She thinks of the cell phone that belongs to a man named Doug, of the red handprints, of Johnny, and is sickened by how careless she has been, how myopic and self-destructive.

Stevie probably never intended to meet Lucy at Deuce, just teased her, toyed with her the same way she did at Lorraine’s that night. Nothing is Stevie’s first time. She’s an expert in her games, her bizarre, sick games.

“You see her anywhere?” Marino’s voice sounds in her ear.

“I’m turning around,” she says. “Stay where you are.”

She cuts over on 11th Street, then heads north on Washington Avenue past the courthouse as a white Chevy Blazer with dark, tinted windows drives past. She walks quickly, uneasily, suddenly not so brave, mindful of the pistol in her ankle holster and breathing hard.

49

Another winter storm covers Cambridge, and Benton can barely make out the houses across the street. Snow falls steeply and thickly, and he watches the whitening of the world around him.

“I can put on more coffee, if you’d like,” Scarpetta says as she walks into the living room.

“I’ve had enough,” he says, his back to her.

“So have I,” she says.

He hears her sit on the hearth, set a coffee mug on it. He feels her eyes on him and turns around, looking at her, not sure what to say. Her hair is wet and she has thrown on a black silk robe and is naked beneath it, and the satiny fabric caresses her body and reveals the deep hollow between her breasts because of the way she sits sideways on the hearth, bending into herself, her strong arms around her knees, her skin unblemished and smooth for her age. Firelight touches her short, blond hair and extremely handsome face, and fire and sunlight love her hair and her face the same way he does. He loves her, all of her, but right now he doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know how to fix it.

Last night she said she was leaving him. She would have packed her suitcase if she’d had one, but she never brings a suitcase. She has belongings here. This is her home, too, and all morning he has listened for the sound of drawers and closet doors, for the sound of her moving out and never coming back.

“You can’t drive,” he says. “I guess you’re stuck.”

Bare trees are delicate pencil strokes against luminous whiteness, and there isn’t a moving car in sight.

“I know how you feel and what you want,” he says, “but you aren’t going anywhere today. Nobody is. Some of the streets in Cambridge don’t always get plowed right away. This is one of them.”

“You have four-wheel drive,” she says, staring down at her hands in her lap.

“We’re expecting two feet of snow. Even if I could get you to the airport, your plane’s not going anywhere. Not today.”

“You should eat something.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“How about an omelet with Vermont cheddar? You need to eat. You’ll feel better.”

She watches him from the hearth, her chin resting on her hand. Her robe is tied tightly around her waist and she is sculpted in glossy black silk, and he desires her just as much as he always did. He desired her the first time they met some fifteen years ago. Both of them were chiefs. His fiefdom was the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, hers the Virginia medical examiner’s system. They were working an especially heinous case, and she walked into the conference room. He can still see the way she looked the first time he saw her, in a long, white lab coat with pens in the pockets over a pearl-gray pinstriped suit, a pile of case files in her arms. He was intrigued by her hands, strong and capable but elegant.

He realizes she is staring at him.

“Who were you on the phone with a little earlier?” he asks. “I heard you talking to someone.”

She’s called her lawyer, he thinks. She’s called Lucy. She’s called someone to say she’s leaving him and means it this time.

“I called Dr. Self,” she says. “Tried her, left her a message.”

He is perplexed and shows it.

“I’m sure you remember her,” she says. “Or maybe you listen to her on the radio,” she adds wryly.

“Please.”

“Millions of people do.”

“Why would you call her?” he asks.

She tells him about David Luck and his prescription. She tells him that Dr. Self wasn’t the least bit helpful the first time she called.

“No surprise. She’s a crackpot, an egomaniac. She lives up to her name. Self.”

“Actually, she was well within her right. I don’t have jurisdiction. Nobody’s dead, as far as we know. Dr. Self doesn’t have to respond to any medical examiner at this point, and I’m not so sure I’d call her a crackpot.”

“How about a psychiatric whore? Have you listened to her lately?”

“Then you do listen to her.”

“Next time, invite a real psychiatrist to speak at the Academy, not some radio jackass.”

“It wasn’t my idea, and I made it clear I was against it. But the buck stops with Lucy.”

“That’s ridiculous. Lucy can’t stand people like her.”

“I believe it was Joe’s suggestion to invite Dr. Self as a guest lecturer, his first big coup when he started his fellowship. Getting a celebrity lined up for the summer session. That and getting on her show, a repeat guest. In fact, they’ve talked about the Academy on the air, which I’m not happy about.”

“Idiot. They deserve each other.”

“Lucy wasn’t paying attention. Never, of course, attended the lectures. She didn’t care what Joe did. There’s a lot she doesn’t seem to care about anymore. What are we going to do.”

She isn’t talking about Lucy now.

“I don’t know.”

“You’re a psychologist. You should know. You deal with dysfunctions and misery every day.”

“I’m miserable this morning,” he says. “You’re right about that. I suppose if I were your psychologist, I might suggest that you’re venting your pain and anger on me because you can’t vent it on Lucy. You can’t get angry with someone who has a brain tumor.”

Scarpetta opens the screen and places another split log on the fire, and sparks fly and wood pops.

“She’s made me angry most of her life,” she confesses. “There’s never been anyone who tries my patience the way she does.”

“Lucy’s an only child raised by a borderline personality disorder,” Benton says. “A hypersexual narcissist. Your sister. Add to the equation, Lucy is unusually gifted. She doesn’t think like other people. She’s gay. And all that equals someone who learned a long time ago to be self-contained.”

“Someone supremely selfish, you mean.”

“Insults to our psyche can make us selfish. She was afraid if you knew about the tumor you’d treat her differently, and that would play right into her secret fear. If you know, then somehow it becomes real.”

She stares out the window behind him as if transfixed by the snow. Already it is at least eight inches deep, and cars parked along the street are beginning to look like snowdrifts, and even the neighborhood children are staying in.

“Thank goodness I went to the store,” Benton comments.

“On that subject, let me see what I can throw together for lunch. We should have a nice lunch. We should try to have a good day.”

“You ever had a body that was painted?” he asks.

“Mine or somebody else?”

He smiles a little. “Decidedly not yours. There is nothing dead about your body. This case up here. The red handprints on her body. I’m wondering if it was done while she was alive or after she was killed. Wish there was a way to tell.”

She looks at him for a long moment, the fire moving behind her and sounding like the wind.

“If he did it while she was alive, we’re dealing with a very different sort of predator. How terrifying and humiliating would that be?” he says. “To be restrained…”

“Do we know she was restrained?”

“There are some marks around her wrists and ankles. Reddish areas that the medical examiner lists as possible contusions.”

“Possible?”

“As opposed to postmortem artifact,” Benton says. “Especially since the body was exposed to the cold. That’s what she says.”

“She?”

“The chief here.”

“Left over from the Boston ME office’s not-so-glorious past,” Scarpetta says. “Too bad. She single-handedly has pretty much ruined the place.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d look over the report. I have it on a disk. I want to know what you think of the bodypainting, of everything. It’s really important for me to know if he did it when she was alive or dead. Too bad we couldn’t scan her brain and replay what happened.”

She treats it like a serious comment. “That’s a nightmare I’m not sure you want. Not even you would want to see that. Assuming it was possible.”

“Basil would like me to see it.”

“Yes, dear Basil,” she says, not at all happy about Basil Jenrette’s intrusion into Benton’s life.

“Theoretically,” he says, “would you want to see it? Would you want to see the replay if it were possible?”

“Even if there were a way to replay a person’s final moments,” she replies from the hearth, “I’m not sure how reliable it would be. I suspect the brain has the remarkable capacity to process events in a way that ensures the least amount of trauma and pain.”

“Some people disassociate, I suspect,” he says as her cell phone rings.

It’s Marino.

“Call extension two forty-three,” he says. “Now.”

50

Extension 243 is the fingerprints lab. It is also a favorite forum for Academy staff, a place to gather and talk about evidence that requires more than one type of forensic analysis.

Fingerprints are no longer just fingerprints. They can be a source of DNA, not just the DNA of whoever left them but the DNA of the victim the perpetrator touched. They can be a source of drug residues or a material that was on the person’s hands, perhaps ink or paint, that requires analysis by such lofty instruments as the gas chromatograph or the infrared spectrophotometer or the Fourier transform infrared microscope. In the old days, a piece of evidence usually walked onstage alone. Now, with the sophistication and sensitivity of scientific instruments and processes, a solo becomes a string quartet or a symphony. The problem remains what to collect first. Testing for one thing can eradicate another. So scientists get together, usually in Matthew’s lab. They debate and decide what should be done and who goes first.

When Matthew received the latex gloves from Daggie Simister’s scene, he was faced with a plethora of possibilities, none of them foolproof. He could put on cotton examination gloves, and on top of those wear the inside-out latex gloves. By using his own hands to fill out otherwise-limp latex, he makes it easier to lift and photograph latent prints. But in doing so, he runs the risk of ruining any possibility of fuming prints with superglue or looking for them with an alternate light source and luminescent powders or processing them with chemicals such as ninhydrin or diazafluoren. One process can interfere with another, and once the damage is done, there is no going back.

It is half past eight, and the inside of his small lab right now looks like a mini staff conference, with Matthew, Marino, Joe Amos and three scientists gathered around a large transparent plastic box, the glue tank. Inside it are two inside-out latex gloves, one bloody, hanging from clips. Small holes have been cut into the bloody glove. Other areas of the latex, inside and out, were swabbed for DNA in such a way as not to disturb any possible prints. Then Matthew had to decide door number one, door number two, door number three, as he likes to describe a deliberation that involves just as much instinct, experience and luck as good science. He chose to place the gloves, a foil pack of superglue and a dish of warm water inside the tank.

What that produced was one visible print, a left thumbprint preserved in hard, whitish glue. He lifted it with black gel lifter, then photographed it.

“The gang’s all here,” he is saying to Scarpetta over speakerphone. “Who wants to start?” he asks the people assembled around the examination table. “Randy?”

DNA scientist Randy is an odd little man with a big nose and a lazy eye. Matthew has never liked him much, and is reminded why the instant Randy starts to talk.

“Well what I was given were three potential sources of DNA,” Randy says in his typically pedantic way. “Two gloves and two earprints.”

“That’s four.” Scarpetta’s voice enters the room.

“Yes sir, I meant four. The hope, of course, was to get DNA from the outside of the one glove, and primarily that meant from the dried blood, and perhaps DNA from the inside of both gloves. I already got DNA from the earprints,” he reminds everybody, “which I managed to swab nondestructively by avoiding what might be considered individual variations or potentially characteristic features such as the inferior extension of the anthelix. As you know, we ran that profile in CODIS and came back empty-handed, but what we just found out is the DNA from the earprint matches the DNA inside one of the gloves.”

“Just one?” Scarpetta’s voice asks.

“The bloody one. I didn’t get anything off the other glove. I’m not sure it was ever worn.”

“That’s peculiar,” Scarpetta’s puzzled voice says.

“Of course, Matthew assisted because I’m not really up on ear anatomy, and prints of any type are his department more than mine,” Randy adds, as if it matters. “As I’ve just pointed out, we got the DNA from the earprints, specifically from the areas of the helix and the lobe. And it’s obviously from the same person who was wearing one of the gloves, so I suppose you could conjecture that whoever pressed their ear against the glass at the house where those people disappeared was the same individual who murdered Daggie Simister. Or at least was wearing at least one latex glove at her crime scene.”

“How many times did you sharpen your damn pencil while you did all that?” Marino whispers.

“What’s that?”

“Wouldn’t want you to leave out even one fascinating little detail,” Marino says quietly, so Scarpetta can’t hear. “I bet you count the cracks in the sidewalk and set your timer when you have sex.”

“Randy, please continue,” Scarpetta says. “And nothing in CODIS. That’s a shame.”

He goes on in his long-winded, convoluted way to confirm yet again that a search of the Combined DNA Index system database known as CODIS was unsuccessful. Whoever left the DNA isn’t in the database, possibly suggesting that the person has never been arrested.

“It also came up empty-handed with DNA from blood found in that beach shop in Las Olas. But some of those samples aren’t blood,” Randy says to the black telephone on the counter. “I don’t know what it is. Something that caused a false positive. Lucy mentioned the possibility it might be copper. She thinks what might be reacting to luminol is the fungicide that’s used down here to prevent the canker. You know, copper sprays.”

“Based on?” Joe asks, and he’s another staff member Matthew can’t stand.

“There was a lot of copper at the Simister scene, inside and out.”

“Which samples, specifically, were human blood at Beach Bums?” Scarpetta’s voice asks.

“The bathroom. Samples from the storage-area floor aren’t blood. May be copper. Also the trace from the station wagon. The carpet in the front seat driver’s side that reacted to luminol. Also not blood. Another false positive. Again, could be copper.”

“Phil? You around?”

“Right here,” Phil, the trace evidence examiner, says.

“I’m really sorry about this,” Scarpetta’s voice then says and she sounds like she means it. “I want the labs in overdrive.”

“I thought we already were. About to over-torque, in fact.” Joe couldn’t keep his mouth shut if he were drowning.

“All biological samples that haven’t already been analyzed, I want them analyzed ASAP,” Scarpetta’s voice says and it’s sounding more adamant. “Including any potential sources of DNA taken from the house in Hollywood, the one where the two boys and two women disappeared. Everything in CODIS. We’re going to treat everybody as if they’re dead.”

The scientists, Joe and Marino look at each other. They’ve never heard Scarpetta say anything quite like that.

“Now that’s optimism for you,” Joe remarks.

“Phil, how about running the carpet sweepings, the trace from the Simister case and trace from the station wagon—trace from everything—through SEM-EDS,” Scarpetta’s voice says. “Let’s see if in fact it’s copper.”

“It must be everywhere down here.”

“No, it’s not,” Scarpetta’s voice says. “Not everybody uses it. Not everybody has citrus trees. But so far in the cases we’re dealing with, that is a common denominator.”

“What about the beach shop? I wouldn’t think there are citrus trees around there.”

“You’re right. Good point.”

“Then let’s just say some of that trace is positive for copper….”

“That will be significant,” Scarpetta’s voice says. “We have to ask why. Who tracked it into the storeroom. Who tracked it into the station wagon and now we’re going to have to go back to the house where the people disappeared, look for copper in there, too. Anything interesting about the red paint-like substance we found on the floor, the chunks of concrete we brought in?”

“Henna pigment, definitely not what you see in top-coats, wall paints,” Phil replies.

“What about temporary tattoo or bodypaints?”

“Certainly could be, but if it’s alcohol-based, we wouldn’t detect that. The ethanol or isopropanol would have evaporated by now.”

“Interesting it would be back there, and appears to have been there for a while. Someone keep Lucy up on what we’re talking about. Where is she?”

“Don’t know,” Marino says.

“We need the DNA of Florrie Quincy and her daughter, Helen,” Scarpetta’s voice then says. “See if it’s their blood in the beach shop. Beach Bums.”

“Single-donor blood in the bathroom,” Randy says. “Definitely not the blood of two people, and if there were, we could certainly tell if the two people were related. For instance, mother and daughter.”

“I’ll get on it,” Phil says. “I mean the SEM part.”

“Just how many cases are there?” Joe says. “And are you assuming they’re all connected? Is that why we’re supposed to treat everybody as if they’re dead?”

“I’m not assuming everything’s connected,” Scarpetta’s voice answers. “But I’m worried it might be.”

“Like I was saying about the Simister case, no dice with CODIS,” Randy resumes, “but the DNA from the inside of the bloody latex glove is different from the DNA of the blood on the outside of it. Which isn’t surprising. The inside would have skin cells that were shed by the wearer. The blood on the outside would be from someone else, at least that’s what you might suppose,” he explains, and Matthew wonders how the man can be married.

Who could live with him? Who could stand it?

“Is the blood Daggie Simister’s?” Scarpetta bluntly asks.

Like everybody else, she logically would suspect that the bloody glove found at the scene of Daggie Simister’s homicide would, no doubt, be covered with her blood.

“Well, actually, the blood from the carpet is.”

“He means the carpet by the window where we think she might have been hit on the head,” Joe says.

“I’m talking about the blood on the glove. Is it Daggie Simister’s?” Scarpetta’s voice asks, and it is beginning to sound strained.

“No sir.”

Randy says “no sir” to everyone, regardless of the person’s gender.

“That’s definitely not her blood on that glove, which is curious,” Randy tediously explains. “Now, you would expect it to be her blood.”

Oh God. Here he goes again, Matthew thinks.

“Here are these latex gloves at the crime scene, and the blood’s on the outside of one but not on the inside.”

“Why would blood be on the inside?” Marino scowls at him.

“It’s not.”

“I know it’s not, but why would it be?”

“Well, for instance, if the perpetrator injured himself somehow, bled inside the glove, perhaps cut himself while he was wearing gloves. I’ve seen it before in stabbings. The perpetrator has on gloves, nicks himself and gets his blood inside a glove, which clearly didn’t happen in this case. Which brings me to the important question. If the blood is the killer’s in the Simister case, why would it be all over the outside of a glove? And why is that DNA different from the DNA I got from inside that same glove?”

“I think we’re clear on the question,” Matthew says, because he can stand Randy’s supercilious sidewinding monologue maybe one minute longer.

After a minute, Matthew will have to walk out of the lab, pretend he has to visit the men’s room, run an errand, eat poison.

“The outside of the glove is where you’d expect blood to be if the perpetrator touched something bloody or someone bloody,” Randy says.

They all know the answer, but Scarpetta doesn’t. Randy’s building up to the crescendo, playing it out, and no one can steal his thunder. DNA is his department.

“Randy?” Scarpetta’s voice sounds.

It’s the voice she uses when Randy is confusing and annoying everyone, including her.

“Do we know whose blood it is on that glove?” she asks him.

“Yes sir we do. Well, almost. It’s either Johnny Swift’s or his brother, Laurel. They’re identical twins,” he finally says it. “So their DNA’s the same.”

“You still there?” Matthew asks Scarpetta after a long silence.

Then Marino comments, “I just don’t see how it could be Laurel’s blood. He’s not the one whose blood was all over the living room when his brother’s head was blown off.”

“Well, I for one am totally baffled,” Mary, the toxicologist, joins in. “Johnny Swift got shot way back in November, so how does his blood suddenly show up some ten weeks later in a case that doesn’t appear to be related?”

“How does his blood show up at the Daggie Simister murder scene at all?” Scarpetta’s voice fills the room.

“It’s certainly within the realm of possibility that the gloves were planted,” Joe says.

“Maybe you should state the damn obvious,” Marino snipes at him. “And what’s obvious is whoever blew that poor old lady’s head off is telling us he had something to do with Johnny Swift’s death. Someone’s fucking with us.”

“He’d had recent surgery….”

“Bullshit,” Marino snaps. “No way the damn gloves came from some carpal tunnel surgery. Jesus Christ. You’re looking for unicorns when there’s horses everywhere.”

“What?”

“I think the damn message is pretty damn clear,” Marino says again, pacing the lab, talking loudly, his face bright red. “Whoever killed her is saying he also killed Johnny Swift. And the gloves are to fuck with us.”

“We can’t assume it’s not Laurel’s blood,” Scarpetta’s voice says.

“If it is, that certainly might explain things,” Randy says.

“It don’t explain shit. If Laurel killed Mrs. Simister, why the hell would he leave his DNA in the sink?” Marino retorts.

“Maybe it’s Johnny Swift’s blood, then.”

“Shut up, Randy. You’re curling my hair.”

“You don’t have any hair, Pete,” Randy says seriously.

“You want to tell me how the hell we’re going to figure out whether it’s Laurel or Johnny, since their DNA’s supposedly the same?” Marino exclaims. “This is so fucked up it isn’t even funny.”

He looks accusingly at Randy, then at Matthew, then back at Randy. “You sure you didn’t get something mixed up when you did your tests?”

He never cares who hears him when he impeaches a person’s credibility or is just plain nasty.

“Like maybe one or the other of you got swabs mixed up or something,” Marino says.

“No sir. Absolutely not,” Randy replies. “Matthew received the samples and I did the extractions and analyses and ran them in CODIS. There was no break in the chain of evidence, and Johnny Swift’s DNA is in the database, because everybody who’s autopsied these days goes in there, meaning Johnny Swift’s DNA was entered into CODIS last November. I believe I’m right about that? You still there?” he asks Scarpetta.

“I’m still here…” she starts to say.

“The policy as of last year is to enter all cases, whether it’s suicide, accident, homicide or even a natural death,” Joe pontificates, interrupting her as usual. “Just because someone’s a victim or his death is unrelated to crime doesn’t mean he might not have been involved in criminal activity at some point in his life. I’m assuming we’re sure the Swift brothers are identical twins.”

“Look alike, talk alike, dress alike, fuck alike,” Marino whispers to him.

“Marino?” Scarpetta’s voice resumes its presence. “Did the police submit a sample of Laurel Swift’s DNA at the time of his brother’s death?”

“Nope. No reason to.”

“Not even for exclusionary purposes?” Joe asks.

“Excluded from what? DNA wasn’t relevant,” Marino says to him. “Laurel’s DNA would be all over that house. He lives there.”

“It would be good if we could test Laurel’s DNA,” Scarpetta’s voice says. “Matthew? Did you use any chemicals on the bloody glove, the one from Daggie Simister’s scene? Anything that might cause a problem if we want to do further testing?”

“Superglue,” Matthew says. “And by the way, I ran the one print I got. Nothing. Nothing in AFIS. Couldn’t match it up with the partial from the seat belt in the station wagon. Wasn’t enough minutiae.”

“Mary? I want you to get samples of the blood on that glove.”

“Superglue shouldn’t have made a difference since it reacts to the amino acids in skin oils, sweat, and not blood,” Joe feels compelled to explain. “We should be all right.”

“I’ll be glad to get her a sample,” Matthew says to the black telephone. “There’s plenty of bloody latex left.”

“Marino?” Scarpetta’s voice says. “I want you to go to the ME’s office and get Johnny Swift’s case file.”

“I can do it,” Joe quickly says.

“Marino?” she reiterates. “Inside the file should be his DNA cards. We always make more than one.”

“You touch that case file, your teeth will end up in the back of your head,” Marino whispers to Joe.

“You can place one of the cards inside an evidence envelope and receipt it to Mary,” Scarpetta’s voice is saying. “And Mary? Take a sample of the blood from that card and a sample from the glove.”

“I’m not sure I’m following you,” Mary says, and Matthew doesn’t blame her.

He can’t imagine what a toxicologist might be able to do with a drop of dried blood from a DNA card and an equally small amount of dried blood from a glove.

“Maybe you mean Randy,” Mary suggests. “Are you talking about more DNA testing?”

“No,” she says. “I want you to check for lithium.”

Scarpetta rinses a whole young chicken in the sink. Her Treo is in her pocket, the earpiece in her ear.

“Because his blood wouldn’t have been screened for it at the time,” she is saying to Marino over the phone. “If he was still taking lithium, apparently his brother never bothered telling the police.”

“They should have found a prescription bottle at the scene,” Marino replies. “What’s that noise?”

“I’m opening cans of chicken broth. Too bad you’re not here. I don’t know why they didn’t find any lithium,” she says, emptying the cans into a copper pot. “But it’s possible his brother collected any prescription bottles so the police wouldn’t find them.”

“Why? It’s not like it’s cocaine or something.”

“Johnny Swift was a prominent neurologist. He might not have wanted people to know he had a psychiatric disorder.”

“I sure as hell wouldn’t want someone with mood swings screwing with my brain, now that you mention it.”

She chops onions. “In reality, his bipolar disorder probably had no effect at all on his skills as a physician, but there are plenty of ignorant people in the world. Again, it’s possible Laurel didn’t want the police or anybody else to know about his brother’s problem.”

“That doesn’t make sense. If what he said is true, he ran from the house right after he found the body. Doesn’t sound to me like he wandered around collecting pill bottles.”

“I guess you’re going to have to ask him.”

“As soon as we get the lithium results. Rather go in when I know what’s what. And right now we’ve got a bigger problem,” he says.

“I’m not sure how our problems could get much bigger,” she says, cutting up the chicken.

“It’s about the shotgun shell,” Marino says. “The one NIBIN got a hit on up there in the Walden Pond case.”

I didn’t want to say anything about it in front of everybody else,” Marino explains over the phone. “Someone on the inside, has to be. No other explanation.”

He sits at his office desk, the door shut and locked.

“Here’s what happened,” he goes on. “I didn’t want to say anything in front of everybody else,” he repeats himself, “but earlier this morning I had a little chat with a buddy of mine at Hollywood PD who’s in charge of the evidence room. So he checked the computer. It took all of five minutes for him to access the info on the shotgun used in that convenience-store robbery-homicide from two years back. And guess where the shotgun’s supposed to be, Doc. Are you sitting down?”

“Sitting down has never helped,” she says. “Tell me.”

“In our own fucking reference collection.”

“At the Academy? Our reference firearms collection at the Academy?”

“Hollywood PD donated it to us about a year ago when they gave us a bunch of other guns they no longer needed. Remember?”

“Have you actually walked into the firearms lab to make sure it isn’t there?”

“It’s not going to be. We know it was just used to kill some lady up there where you are.”

“Go check right now,” she says. “Call me back.”

51

Hog waits in line.

He stands behind a fat lady wearing a loud, pink suit. He holds his boots in one hand, and a tote bag, driver’s license and boarding pass in the other. He moves ahead and places his boots and coat in a plastic tub.

He places the tub and his bag on the black belt, and they move away from him. He stands in the two white footprints, both stocking feet exactly on the white footprints on the carpet, and an airport security officer nods for him to pass through the x-ray scanner, and he does and nothing beeps, and he shows the officer his boarding pass, grabs his boots and jacket out of the tray, grabs his bag. He begins walking to gate twenty-one. Nobody pays any attention to him.

He still smells the rotting bodies. He can’t seem to get the stench out of his nose. Maybe it’s an olfactory hallucination. He’s had them before. Sometimes he smells the cologne, the Old Spice cologne that he smelled when he did the bad thing on the mattress and was sent away where there were old brick houses, where it was snowing and cold, where he’s going now. It is snowing, not much, but some. He checked the weather before he took a taxi to the airport. He didn’t want to leave his Blazer in long-term parking. That costs real money, and it wouldn’t be good if someone looked inside the back of it. He hasn’t cleaned it up very well.

In his bag are a few things, not much. All he needs is a change of clothing, a few toiletries, different boots that fit better. He won’t need his old boots much longer. They are a biological hazard, and the thought amuses him. Now that he thinks about it as the boots walk toward the gate, maybe he should save the boots in perpetuity. They have quite a history, have walked in places as if he owned them, taken people away as if he owned them, have returned to places and climbed up on things to spy, walked right in, brazenly, the boots carrying him from room to room from place to place, doing what God says. Punishing. Confusing people. The shotgun. The glove. To show them.

God has an IQ of a hundred and fifty.

His boots carried him right into the house, and he had the hood on before they even knew what was happening. Stupid religious freaks. Stupid little orphans. Stupid little orphan walking into the pharmacy, Mom Number One holding his hand so he could get his prescription filled. Lunatic. Hog hates lunatics, fucking religious freaks, hates little boys, little girls, hates Old Spice. Marino wears Old Spice, the big, dumb cop. Hog hates Dr. Self, should have put her on the mattress, had fun with the ropes, gotten her good after what she did.

Hog ran out of time. God isn’t happy.

There wasn’t time to punish the worst offender of all.

You’ll have to go back, God said. This time with Basil.

Hog’s boots walk toward the gate, carry him to Basil. They’ll have their good times again, just like those times in the old days after Hog did the bad thing, was sent away, then sent back, then met Basil in a bar.

He was never afraid of Basil, not the least bit put off by him from the first moment they found themselves sitting next to each other, drinking tequila. They had several together, and there was something about him. Hog could tell.

He said, You’re different.

I’m a cop, Basil said.

This was in South Beach, where Hog often cruised and hung out, looking for sex, looking for drugs.

You’re not just a cop, Hog said to him. I can tell.

Oh, really?

I can tell. I know about people.

How about I take you somewhere, and Hog had a sense that Basil had figured him out, too. I’ve got something you can do for me, Basil said to Hog.

Why should I do anything for you?

Because you’ll like it.

Later that night, Hog was in Basil’s car, not his police car but a white Ford LTD that looked just like an unmarked police car but wasn’t. It was his personal car. They weren’t in Miami, and he couldn’t possibly drive a marked car with Dade County on it. Someone might remember seeing it. Hog was a little disappointed. He loves police cars, loves sirens and lights. All those lights lit up and flashing remind him of The Christmas Shop.

No way they’ll ever think twice if you talk to them, Basil said that first night they met, after they’d been riding around awhile, smoking crack.

Why me? Hog asked, and he wasn’t the least bit afraid.

Common sense would dictate that he should have been. Basil kills whomever he pleases, always has. He could have killed Hog. Easily.

God told Hog what to do. That’s what kept Hog safe.

Basil spotted the girl. It turned out later she was only eighteen. She was getting cash at an ATM, her car nearby, the engine running. Stupid. Never get cash after dark, especially if you are a young girl, a pretty one, all alone in shorts and a tight T-shirt. If you’re a young girl, a pretty one, bad things happen.

Give me your knife and your gun, Hog told Basil.

Hog tucked the gun in his waistband and cut his thumb with the knife. He smeared blood on his face and climbed over the seat, lying down in back. Basil rolled up to the ATM and got out of the car. He opened the back door, checking on Hog, looking appropriately distressed.

It will be all right, he said to Hog. To the girl he said, Please help us. My friend’s been hurt. Where’s the nearest hospital?

Oh my God. We should call nine-one-one, and she frantically dug her cell phone out of her bag and Basil shoved her hard into the backseat, and then Hog had the gun in her face.

They drove off.

Shit, Basil said. You’re good, he said, and he was high, laughing. Guess we’d better figure out where we’re going.

Please don’t hurt me, the girl was crying, and Hog felt something as he sat back there, holding the gun on her while she cried and begged. He felt like having sex.

Shut up, Basil told her. It won’t do any good. Guess we’d better find somewhere. Maybe the park. No, they patrol it.

I know somewhere, Hog said. Nobody will ever find us. It’s perfect. We can take our time, all the time in the world, and he was aroused. He wanted sex, wanted it something awful.

He directed Basil to the house, the house that is falling apart with no electricity or running water, and a mattress and dirty magazines in the back room. It was Hog who figured out how to tie them up so they couldn’t sit without their arms straight up.

Stick ’em up!

Like in cartoons.

Stick ’em up!

Like in campy Westerns.

Basil said Hog was brilliant, the most brilliant person he’d ever met, and after a few times of taking women there and keeping them until they smelled too bad, got too infected or just got too used up, Hog told Basil about The Christmas Shop.

Have you ever seen it?

No.

Can’t miss it. Right on the beach on A1A. The lady’s rich.

Hog explained that on Saturdays, it’s always just her and her daughter in there. Hardly anybody goes in there. Who buys Christmas stuff at the beach in July?

No shit.

He wasn’t supposed to do it in there.

Then before Hog knew what was happening, Basil had her in the back, raping, cutting, blood everywhere, while Hog watched and calculated how they were going to get away with it.

The lumberjack by the door was five feet tall, hand-carved. He carried a real ax, an antique one, a curved wooden handle and shiny steel blade, half of it painted blood red. It was Hog who thought of it.

About an hour later, Hog carried out the trash bags, made sure no one was around. He put them in the trunk of Basil’s car. No one saw them.

We were lucky, Hog told Basil when they were back at their secret place, the old house, digging a pit. Don’t do that again.

A month later, he did something again, tried to get two women at once. Hog wasn’t with him. Basil forced them into the car, then the damn thing broke down. Basil never told anybody about Hog. He protected Hog. Now it’s Hog’s turn.

They’re doing a study up there, Hog wrote to him. The prison knows about it and has been asked for volunteers. It would be good for you. You could do something constructive.

It was a pleasant, innocuous letter. No prison official thought twice about it. Basil got word to the warden that he wanted to volunteer for a study they were doing in Massachusetts, that he wanted to do something to pay for his sins, that if the doctors could learn something about what’s wrong with people like him, maybe it would make a difference. Whether or not the warden fell for Basil’s manipulations is a matter of speculation. But this past December, Basil was transferred to Butler State Hospital.

All because of Hog. God’s Hand.

Since then, their communications have had to be more ingenious. God showed Hog how to tell Basil anything he wants. God has an IQ of a hundred and fifty.

Hog finds a seat at gate twenty-one. He sits as far away from everybody as he can, waiting for the nine a.m. flight. It’s on time. He’ll land at noon. He unzips his bag and pulls out a letter Basil wrote to him more than a month ago.

I got the fishing magazines. Many thanks. I always learn a lot from the articles. Basil Jenrette.

P.S. They are going to put me in that damn tube again—Thursday, February 17. But they promise it will be quick. “In at 5 and out at 5:15 p.m.” Promises, promises.

52

The snow has stopped and chicken broth simmers. Scarpetta measures two cups of Italian Arborio rice and opens a bottle of dry white wine.

“Can you come down?” She steps closer to the doorway, calling up to Benton.

“Can you come up here, please?” his voice returns from the office at the top of the back stairs.

She melts butter in a copper saucepan and begins to brown the chicken. She pours the rice into the chicken broth. Her cell phone rings. It’s Benton.

“This is ridiculous,” she says, looking at the stairs that lead up to his second-floor office. “Can’t you please come down? I’m cooking. Things are going to hell in Florida. I need to talk to you.”

She spoons a little broth on the browning chicken.

“And I really need you to take a look at this,” he answers.

How odd it is to hear his voice upstairs and over the phone at the same time.

“This is ridiculous,” she says again.

“Let me ask you something,” his voice says over the phone and from upstairs, as if there are two identical voices speaking. “Why would she have splinters between her shoulder blades? Why would anybody?”

“Wood splinters?”

“A scraped area of skin that has splinters embedded in it. On her back, between her shoulder blades. And I wonder if you can tell if it happened before or after death.”

“If she were dragged across a wooden floor or perhaps beaten with something wooden. There could be a number of reasons, I suppose.” She pushes the browning chicken around with a fork.

“If she were dragged and got splinters that way, wouldn’t she have them elsewhere on her body? Assuming she was nude when she was dragged across some old splintery floor.”

“Not necessarily.”

“I wish you’d come upstairs.”

“Any defense injuries?”

“Why don’t you come up?”

“As soon as lunch is under control. Sexual assault?”

“No evidence of it, but it’s certainly sexually motivated. I’m not hungry at the moment.”

She stirs the rice some more and sets the spoon on a folded paper towel.

“Any other possible source of DNA?” she asks.

“Such as?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she bit off his nose or a finger or something and it was recovered from her stomach.”

“Seriously.”

“Saliva, hair, his blood,” she says. “I hope they swabbed the hell out of her and checked like crazy.”

“Why don’t we talk about this up here.”

Scarpetta takes off her apron and walks toward the stairs as she talks on the phone, thinking how silly it is to be in the same house and communicate by phone.

“I’m hanging up,” she says at the top of the stairs, looking at him.

He is sitting in his black leather chair and their eyes meet.

“Glad you didn’t walk in a second ago,” he says. “I was just talking on the phone with this incredibly beautiful woman.”

“Good thing you weren’t in the kitchen to hear who I was talking to.”

She rolls a chair close to him and looks at a photograph on his computer screen, looks at the dead woman facedown on an autopsy table, looks at the red-painted handprints on her body.

“Maybe painted with a stencil, possibly airbrushed,” she says.

Benton enlarges the area of skin between the shoulder blades, and she studies the raw abrasion.

“To answer one of your questions,” she says, “yes, it’s possible to tell if an abrasion embedded with splinters might have occurred before or after death. It depends on whether there is tissue response. I don’t guess we have histology.”

“If there are slides, I wouldn’t know,” Benton replies.

“Does Thrush have access to a SEM-EDS, a scanning electron microscope with an energy dispersive x-ray system?”

“The state police labs have everything.”

“What I’d like to suggest is he get a sample of the alleged splinters, magnify them one hundred times up to five hundred times and see what they look like. And it would be a good idea to also check for copper.”

Benton looks at her, shrugs. “Why?”

“It’s possible we’re finding it all over the place. Even in the storage area of the former Christmas shop. Possibly from copper sprays.”

“The Quincy family was in the landscaping business. I would assume a lot of commercial citrus growers use copper sprays. Maybe the family tracked it into the back of The Christmas Shop.”

“And possibly bodypaint in there, too—in the storage area where we found blood.”

Benton falls silent, something else coming to him.

“A common denominator in Basil’s murders,” he says. “All of the victims, at least the ones whose bodies were recovered, had copper. The trace had copper in it, also citrus pollen, which didn’t mean much. There’s citrus pollen all over the place in Florida. Nobody thought about copper sprays. Maybe he took them someplace where copper sprays were used, someplace with citrus trees.”

He looks out the window at the gray sky as a snow-plow works loudly on his street.

“What time do you need to head out?” Scarpetta clicks on a photograph of the abraded area on the dead woman’s back.

“Not until late afternoon. Basil’s coming in at five.”

“Wonderful. See how inflamed it is just in that one discrete area?” She points it out. “An area where there’s been a removal of the epithelial layer of the skin by rubbing against some sort of rough surface. And if you zoom in”—she does—“you can see that before she was cleaned up, there’s serosanguineous fluid on the surface of the abrasion. See it?”

“Okay. What looks like a little bit of scabbing. But not the entire area.”

“If an abrasion is deep enough, you get leakage of fluid from the vessels. And you’re right, the entire area isn’t scabbing, which makes me suspect that the abraded area is actually several scrape abrasions of differing age, injuries caused by repeated contact with a rough surface.”

“That’s strange. I’m trying to imagine it.”

“I wish I had the histology. Polymorphonuclear white cells would indicate the injury is maybe four to six hours old. As for the brownish-reddish scabs, you generally start seeing those in a minimum of eight hours. She lived for at least a little while after she got this injury, these scrapes.”

She studies more photographs, studies them closely. She makes notes on a legal pad.

She says, “If you look at photographs thirteen through eighteen, you’ll see, just barely, areas of what looks like localized red swelling on the backs of her legs and buttocks. What they look like to me are insect bites that have begun to heal. And if you go back to the picture of the abrasion, there’s some localized swelling and barely visible petechial hemorrhaging, which can be associated with spider bites.

“If I’m right, microscopically you should see a congestion of blood vessels and an infiltration of white blood cells, mainly eosinophils, depending on her response. It’s not very accurate, but we could look for tryptase levels, too, in the event she had an anaphylactic response. But I would be surprised. Certainly she didn’t die of anaphylactic shock from an insect bite. I wish I had the damn histology. Could be more in there than splinters. Urticating hairs. Spiders—tarantulas, specifically—flick them, part of their defense system. Ev and Kristin’s church is next door to a pet store that sells tarantulas.”

“Itching?” Benton asks.

“If she got flicked, she would have itched like hell,” Scarpetta says. “She might have rubbed up against something, scratching herself raw.”

53

She suffered.

“Wherever he kept her, she suffered from bites that were painful and itchy and awful,” Scarpetta says.

“Mosquitoes?” Benton suggests.

“Just one? Just one bad bite between her shoulder blades? There are no other similar abrasions with inflammation anywhere else on her body, except on her elbows and knees,” she goes on. “Mild abrasions, scrapes, such as you might expect if someone were kneeling or propping herself up by her elbows on a rough surface. But those abraded areas don’t look anything like this.”

She again points out the inflamed area between the shoulder blades.

“It’s my theory she was kneeling when he shot her,” Benton says. “Based on the blood pattern on her slacks. Could you get abrasions on your knees if you had pants on when you were kneeling?”

“Sure.”

“Then he killed her first, then undressed her. That tells a different story, now doesn’t it. If he really wanted to sexually humiliate and terrorize, he would have made her undress, made her kneel nude, then put the shotgun barrel in her mouth and pulled the trigger.”

“What about the shotgun shell in her rectum.”

“Could be anger. Could be he wanted us to find it and link it to the case in Florida.”

“You’re suggesting her murder might have been impulsive, perhaps anger-driven. Yet you’re also suggesting a significant element of premeditation, of game playing, as if he wanted us to link her case to that robbery-homicide.” Scarpetta looks at him.

“It all means something, at least to him. Welcome to the world of violent sociopaths.”

“Well, one thing is clear,” she says. “For a while, at least, she was held hostage some place where there was insect activity. Possibly fire ants, maybe spiders, and your normal hotel room or house isn’t likely to have an infestation of fire ants or spiders, not around here. Not this time of year.”

“Except tarantulas. Usually they’re pets, unrelated to the climate,” Benton says.

“She was abducted from someplace else. Where exactly was the body found?” she then asks. “Right at Walden Pond?”

“About fifty feet off a path that isn’t used much this time of year but certainly is used some. A family hiking near the pond found her. Their black Lab ran off into the woods and started barking.”

“What a horrible thing to happen upon when you’re minding your own business at Walden Pond.”

She scans the autopsy report on the screen.

“She wasn’t out there long, her body dumped after dark,” she says. “If what I’m reading here is accurate. The after-dark part makes sense. And maybe he put her where he did, off the path and not in clear view, because he wasn’t taking any chance of being seen. If anybody happened to show up—although not likely after dark—he’s out of sight in the woods with her. And this business”—she points at the hooded face and what looks like a diaper—“you could do this in minutes if you’d premeditated it, already cut the eyeholes into the panties, if the body was already nude and so on. It all makes me suspect he’s familiar with the area.”

“It makes sense he is.”

“Are you hungry or do you intend to obsess up here all day?”

“What did you make? Then I’ll decide.”

“Risotto alla Sbirraglia. Also known as chicken risotto.”

“Sbirraglia?” He takes her hand. “That some exotic breed of Venetian chicken?”

“Supposedly from the word sbirri, which is pejorative for the police. A little humor on a day that hasn’t been funny.”

“I don’t understand what the police have to do with a chicken dish.”

“Supposedly when the Austrians occupied Venice, the police were quite fond of this particular dish, if my culinary sources are to be believed. And I was thinking of a bottle of Soave or a fuller-bodied Piave Pinot Bianco. You have both in your cellar, and as the Venetians say, ‘He who drinks well sleeps well, and he who sleeps well thinks no evil, does no evil and goes to heaven,’ or something like that.”

“I’m afraid there’s not a wine on earth that will stop me from thinking about evil,” Benton says. “And I don’t believe in heaven. Only hell.”

54

On the ground floor of the Academy’s spacious stucco headquarters, the red light is on outside the firearms lab, and from the hallway, Marino hears the dull thud of gunfire. He walks in, not one to care if a range is hot, as long as it’s Vince who’s doing the shooting.

Vince withdraws a small pistol from the port of the horizontal stainless-steel bullet-recovery tank, which weighs five tons when filled with water, explaining why his lab is located where it is.

“You been out flying already?” Marino asks, climbing up the aluminum checker steps to the shooting platform.

Vince is dressed in a black flight suit and ankle-high black leather boots. When he isn’t lost in his world of tool marks and guns, he’s one of Lucy’s helicopter pilots. As is true of a number of her staff, his appearance is inconsistent with what he does. Vince is sixty-five, flew Black Hawks in Vietnam, then went to work for ATF. He has short legs and a barrel chest, and a gray ponytail that he says he hasn’t cut in ten years.

“You say something?” Vince asks, removing his hearing-protector headset and shooting glasses.

“It’s a wonder you can hear a damn thing anymore.”

“Not as good as I used to. When I get home, I’m stone-deaf, according to my wife.”

Marino recognizes the pistol Vince is test-firing, the Black Widow with rosewood grips that was found beneath Daggie Simister’s bed.

“A sweet little .22,” Vince says. “Thought it couldn’t hurt to add it to the database.”

“Doesn’t look to me like it’s ever been fired.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. Can’t tell you how many people have guns for home protection and don’t remember they’ve got them or can’t remember where they put it or even know if it’s missing.”

“We’ve got a problem with something missing,” Marino says.

Vince opens a box of ammunition and begins pushing. 22 cartridges into the cylinder.

“Want to try it?” he says. “Kind of a strange thing for an old woman’s self-protection. Bet somebody gave it to her. I usually recommend something more user-friendly, like a Lady Smith .38 or a pit bull. I understand it was under the bed, out of reach.”

“Who told you that?” Marino says, getting the same feeling he’s been getting a lot lately.

“Dr. Amos.”

“He wasn’t at the scene. What the hell does he know?”

“Not half as much as he thinks. He’s in here all the time, drives me insane. I hope Dr. Scarpetta doesn’t intend to hire him after he finishes his fellowship. She does, I might just go to work at Wal-Mart. Here.”

He offers Marino the pistol.

“No thanks. The only thing I feel like shooting right now is him.”

“What do you mean, something’s missing.”

“We’ve got a shotgun missing from the reference collection, Vince.”

“Not possible,” he says, shaking his head.

They climb down from the platform, and Vince sets the pistol on top of an evidence table that is covered with other tagged firearms, boxes of ammunition, an array of targets with test powder patterns to determine distance and a shattered window of tempered automobile glass.

“Mossberg 835 Ulti-Mag pump,” Marino says. “Used in a robbery-homicide down here two years ago. The case was exceptionally cleared when the guy behind the counter blew the suspect away.”

“Weird you would mention that,” he says, perplexed. “Dr. Amos called me not five minutes ago and asked if he could come down and check something on the computer.”

Vince moves to a counter arranged with comparison microscopes, a digital trigger-pull gauge and a computer. He taps the keyboard with his index finger, brings up a menu and selects reference collection. He enters the shotgun in question.

“I said no, as a matter of fact he couldn’t. I was doing some test-fires and he couldn’t come in. I asked what he wanted to check and he said never mind.”

“I don’t know how he could be onto this,” Marino says. “How could he know about this? A buddy of mine at the Hollywood PD knows, he’d never say a word. Only other people I’ve told are the Doc and now you.”

“Camo stock, twenty-four-inch barrel, tritium ghost ring sights,” Vince reads. “You’re right. Used in a homicide. Suspect dead. A donation from Hollywood police, March of last year.” He glances up at Marino. “As I recall, it was one of ten or twelve firearms they were clearing out of their inventory, their usual generous selves. Providing we give them free training and consultation, beer and door prizes. Let’s see.” He scrolls down the screen. “According to this, it’s only been checked out twice since we got it. Once by me last April eighth—on the remote-firing platform to make sure there was nothing wrong with it.”

“Son of a bitch,” Marino says, reading over his shoulder.

“And Dr. Amos checked it out the second time this last June twenty-eighth at three fifteen in the afternoon.”

“What for?”

“Maybe test-firing it in ordnance gelatin. Last summer was when Dr. Scarpetta started giving him cooking lessons. He’s in and out of here so much, unfortunately, it’s hard for me to remember. Says here he used it June twenty-eighth and returned it to the collection that same day, at five fifteen. And if I look up that date on the computer, there’s the entry. What that means is I did get it out of the vault and put it back.”

“Then how come it’s out on the street and killing people?”

“Unless this record is somehow wrong,” Vince considers, frowning.

“Maybe that’s why he wanted to check the computer. Son of a bitch. Who maintains the log? You or the user? Anybody touch this computer besides you?”

“Electronically, I do. You make your request in writing in the book over there”—Vince indicates a spiral ledger book by the phone—“then you sign it out and sign it back in, all in your own handwriting and initialed. After the fact, I enter the information in the computer to verify that you used the gun and it was returned to the vault. Guess you’ve never played with guns up here.”

“I’m not a firearms examiner. I let you do that. Damn son of a bitch.”

“In the request, you write in what type of firearm you want and when you’d like to reserve the range or the water tank. I can show you.”

He retrieves the ledger and opens it to the last page filled in.

“Here’s Dr. Amos again,” he says. “Ordnance gelatin test-fires with a Taurus PT-145 two weeks ago. At least this time he bothered to log it. He was in here the other day and didn’t.”

“How did he get into the vault?”

“He brought his own pistol. He collects guns, is a real yahoo.”

“Can you tell when the entry for the Mossberg was entered into the computer?” Marino asks. “You know, like when you look at a file and can see the time and date when it was saved last? What I’m wondering is if there’s some way Joe might have altered the computer after the fact, entered the shotgun to make it look like you gave it to him and then returned it to the vault.”

“It’s just a word-processing file called Log. So I’m going to close it now without saving it, take a look at the last time stamp.” He looks hard at it, shocked. “Says here it was last saved twenty-three minutes ago. I can’t believe it!”

“This thing not password-protected?”

“Of course it is. I’m the only person who can get into it. Except, of course, Lucy. So I wonder why Dr. Amos called and said he wanted to come down and check the computer. If he somehow altered the computer log, why bother to call me?”

“That’s an easy one. If you opened the file for him and you saved it when you closed it, then that would explain the new date and time.”

“Then he’s pretty damn smart.”

“We’ll see how smart he is.”

“This is very upsetting. If he did that, he’s got my password.”

“Is it written down anywhere?”

“No. I’m very careful.”

“Who besides you has access to the vault combination? I’m going to get him this time. One way or other.”

“Lucy. She can get into anything. Come on. Let’s look.”

The vault is a fireproof room with a steel door that requires a code to unlock it. Inside are file drawers housing thousands of known bullet and cartridge case specimens, and in racks and hanging on pegboards are hundreds of rifles, shotguns and handguns, all tagged with accession numbers.

“Quite a candy store,” Marino says, looking around.

“You’ve never been in here?”

“I’m not a gun freak. I’ve had some bad experiences with them.”

“Like what?”

“Like having to use them.”

Vince scans racks of shoulder firearms, picks up each shotgun and checks the tag. He does it twice. He and Marino move from rack to rack, checking for the Mossberg. It isn’t inside the vault.

Scarpetta points out the livor mortis pattern, a reddish-purple discoloration caused by noncirculating blood settling due to gravity. Pale areas or blanching of the dead woman’s right cheek, breasts, belly, thighs and the inside of her forearms were caused by those areas of her body pressing against some firm surface, perhaps a floor.

“She was facedown for some time,” Scarpetta is saying. “Hours at least, her head turned to the left, which is why there’s blanching of the right cheek—it would have been against the floor or whatever flat surface she was on.”

She pulls up another photograph on the computer screen, this one showing the dead woman facedown on the autopsy table after she was washed, her body and hair wet, the red handprints bright and intact, obviously waterproof. She goes back to a photograph she just looked at, back and forth through a number of them, trying to piece together the artifacts of this woman’s death.

“So, after he killed her,” Benton says, “maybe he turned her facedown to paint the handprints on her back, worked on her for hours. Her blood settled and lividity began to form, and that’s why we have this pattern.”

“I have another scenario in mind,” Scarpetta says. “He painted her face-up first, then turned her over and worked on her back, and this was the position he left her in. Certainly he didn’t do all this outside in the cold dark. Someplace where there was no risk anyone would hear the shotgun blast or see him trying to get the body into a vehicle. In fact, maybe he did all this in the vehicle he transported her in, a van, an SUV, a truck. Shot her, painted her, transported her.”

“One-stop shopping.”

“Well, that would have reduced the risk, wouldn’t it. Abduct her, drive her to a remote area, and kill her inside the vehicle—as long as it’s a vehicle with sufficient room in back—then dump the body,” she says, clicking through more photographs, stopping on one she’s already looked at.

She sees it differently this time, the photograph of the woman’s brain, what’s left of it, on a cutting board. The tough, fibrous membrane that lines the inside of the cranium, the dura mater, is supposed to be creamy white. In this photograph, it is stained a yellowish-orange, and she envisions the two sisters, Ev and Kristin, with their hiking sticks, squinting in the sun, the photograph on the dresser in their bedroom. She recalls the somewhat jaundiced complexion of one of them and clicks back to the autopsy report, checks on what it says about the dead woman’s sclera, the whites of her eyes. They’re normal.

She recalls the raw vegetables, the nineteen bags of carrots in the refrigerator at Ev and Kristin’s house, and thinks of the white linen pants the dead woman was wearing like a diaper, clothing consistent with a warm climate.

Benton is looking curiously at her.

“Xanthochromia of the skin,” Scarpetta says. “A yellow discoloration that doesn’t affect the sclera. Possibly caused by carotenemia. We may know who she is.”

55

Dr. Bronson is in his office, moving a slide around on the stage of his compound microscope. Marino knocks on the open door.

Dr. Bronson is smart and competent, always neat in a starchy white lab coat. He’s been a decent chief. But he can’t dislodge himself from the past. The way things were done is how he still does them, and that would include how he evaluates other people. Marino doubts Dr. Bronson bothers with background checks or any other sort of intense scrutiny that should be standard practice in today’s world.

He knocks again, this time louder, and Dr. Bronson looks up from the microscope.

“Do come in,” he says, smiling. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

He is a man of the old world, polite and charming, with a perfectly bald head and vague, gray eyes. A briar-wood pipe is cold in the ashtray on his neatly arranged desk, and the faint aroma of aromatic tobacco always lingers.

“Least down here in the sunny south they still let you smoke indoors,” Marino says, pulling a chair close.

“Well, I shouldn’t,” Dr. Bronson says. “My wife keeps telling me I’m going to get cancer of the throat or tongue. I tell her if I do, at least I won’t complain much on my way out.”

Marino remembers he didn’t shut the door. He gets up, shuts it and sits back down.

“If they cut my tongue or vocal cords out, then I guess I won’t be griping much,” Dr. Bronson says as if Marino didn’t get the joke.

“I need a couple of things,” Marino says. “First, we’d like to run a sample of Johnny Swift’s DNA. Dr. Scarpetta says there should be several DNA cards in his case file.”

“She ought to take my place, you know. I wouldn’t mind if she was the one who took my place,” he says, and the way he says it makes Marino realize that Dr. Bronson probably knows all too well what people think.

Everyone wants him to retire. They wanted him to retire years ago.

“I built this place, you know,” he goes on. “Can’t just let any Tom, Dick or Harry come in and muck up everything. Not fair to the public. Certainly not fair to my staff.” He picks up the phone and presses a button. “Polly? How about pulling the Johnny Swift case for me and bringing it in. We’ll need all the appropriate paperwork.” He listens, then, “Because we need to receipt a DNA card to Pete. They’re going to do something with it over at the labs.”

He hangs up, takes off his glasses and cleans them with a handkerchief.

“So, am I to assume there’s some new development?” he asks.

“It’s beginning to look that way,” Marino replies. “When it’s a certainty, you’ll be the first to know. But put it like this, some things have come up that make it pretty damn likely Johnny Swift was murdered.”

“Happy to change the manner if you can show that. Never was all that comfortable about the case. But I have to go with the evidence and there just hasn’t been anything significant in the investigation to make me sure about anything. Mostly, I’ve suspected suicide.”

“Except for the shotgun missing from the scene,” Marino can’t help but remind him.

“You know, a lot of strange things happen, Pete. Can’t tell you how many times I show up and find the family’s completely mucked up the scene to protect the dignity of their loved one. Especially in autoerotic asphyxiations. I get there and there’s not a pornographic magazine or bondage accouterment in sight. Same with suicides. Families don’t want anyone to know or want to collect the insurance money, so they hide the gun or knife. They do all kinds of things.”

“We need to talk about Joe Amos,” Marino says.

“A disappointment,” he says, his normally pleasant expression fading. “Truth is, I’m sorry I recommended him for your fine institution. I’m especially sorry because Kay deserves a heck of a lot better than the likes of that arrogant little bastard.”

“That’s what I’m getting at. Based on what? You recommended him because of what?”

“His impressive education and references. He has quite a pedigree.”

“Where’s his file? You still have it? The original?”

“I sure do. I kept the original. A copy went to Kay.”

“When you went over this fancy education and references, did you check them out to make sure they were authentic?” Marino hates to ask him. “People can fake a lot of things these days. Especially because of computer graphics, the Internet, you name it. That’s one reason identity theft’s becoming such a problem.”

Dr. Bronson rolls his chair to a filing cabinet and opens a drawer. He walks his fingers through neatly labeled files and pulls out one with Joe Amos’s name on it. He hands it to Marino.

“Help yourself,” he says.

“Mind if I sit here for a minute?”

“I don’t know what’s taking Polly so long,” Dr. Bronson says, rolling his chair back to the microscope. “You take all the time you want, Pete. I’ll just get back to my slides. A sad one. Poor woman found in the swimming pool.” He adjusts the focus, his head bent over the eyepiece. “Her ten-year-old little girl found her. Question’s whether she drowned or had some other fatal event like a myocardial infarct. She was bulimic.”

Marino looks through letters that medical-school department heads and other pathologists wrote on Joe Amos’s behalf. He skims through a résumé that is five pages long.

“Dr. Bronson? Did you ever call any of these people?” Marino asks.

“About what.” He doesn’t look up. “No old scarring of her heart. Course, if she had an infarct and survived for hours, I’m not going to see anything. I asked if she might have purged earlier. That can really muck up your electrolytes.”

“About Joe,” Marino says. “To make sure these big-shot doctors really know him.”

“Of course they know him. They wrote me all those letters.”

Marino holds a letter up to the light. He notices a watermark that looks like a crown with a sword through it. He holds up each of the other letters. They all have the same watermark. The letterheads are convincing, but since they aren’t engraved or embossed, they could have been scanned or reproduced with some sort of graphic software package. He picks a letter supposedly generated by the chief of pathology at Johns Hopkins and tries the number. A receptionist answers.

“He’s out of town,” she tells him.

“I’m calling about Dr. Joe Amos,” Marino says.

“Who?”

He explains. He asks her if she could check her files.

“He wrote a letter on Joe Amos’s behalf a little over a year ago, on December seventh,” Marino tells her. “Says here on the bottom of the letter the person who typed it has the initials LFC.”

“There’s nobody here with those initials. And I would have been the one who typed anything like that, and those certainly aren’t my initials. What is this about?”

“Just a simple case of fraud,” Marino says.

56

Lucy rides one of her souped-up V-Rods north on A1A, hitting every red light on her way to Fred Quincy’s house.

He runs his Web design business out of his Hollywood home. He isn’t expecting her, but she knows he’s in, or at least he was when she called half an hour ago to sell him a subscription to The Miami Herald. He was polite, far more polite than Lucy would be if some solicitor dared to get her on the phone. His address is two blocks west of the beach, and he must have money. His home is two stories of pale-green stucco and black wrought iron, and the driveway is gated. Lucy stops her bike at an intercom and presses the button.

“May I help you?” a male voice answers.

“Police,” Lucy says.

“I didn’t call the police.”

“I’m here to talk to you about your mother and sister.”

“What police department?” The voice sounds suspicious.

“Broward sheriff’s.”

She slips out her wallet and holds up her bogus credentials, holds the wallet and its badge in front of the closed-circuit video camera. A tone sounds, and the wrought-iron gate begins to slide open. She kicks her bike in gear and bumps over granite pavers, parking in front of a big black door that opens the instant she turns off the engine.

“That’s quite a bike,” the man she assumes is Fred says.

He is of average height with narrow shoulders and a slender build. His hair is dark blond, his eyes bluish-gray. He is quite handsome in a delicate sort of way.

“Don’t think I’ve ever seen a Harley quite like this,” he says, walking around her bike.

“You ride?” she asks.

“Nope. I leave the dangerous stuff to other people.”

“You must be Fred.” Lucy shakes his hand. “Mind if I come in?”

She follows him across the marble tile foyer into a living room that overlooks a narrow, murky canal.

“What about my mother and Helen? Have you found out something?”

He says it as if he means it the way he should. He isn’t just curious or paranoid. Pain fills his eyes, and there is an eagerness, a faint ring of hope.

“Fred,” she says. “I’m not with the Broward County Sheriff’s Department. I have private investigators and laboratories and we’ve been asked to help.”

“So you misrepresented yourself at my gate,” he says, his eyes turning unfriendly. “That wasn’t a very nice thing to do. Bet you’re the one who called, too, saying you’re the Herald. To see if I was home.”

“Right on both counts.”

“And I’m supposed to talk to you?”

“I’m sorry,” Lucy says. “It was a lot to explain over an intercom.”

“What’s happened to make this of interest again? Why now?”

“I’m afraid I need to be the one asking the questions,” she says.

Uncle Sam is pointing his finger at YOU and saying I WANT YOUR CITRUS.”

Dr. Self pauses dramatically. She looks comfortable and confident in a leather chair on the set of Talk It Out. In this segment she has no guests. She doesn’t need them. She has a telephone centered on the table next to her chair, and cameras catch her from different angles as she punches buttons and says, “This is Dr. Self. You’re on the air.”

“So how about that?” she goes on. “Is the USDA stomping on our Fourth Amendment rights?”

It is an easy set-up, and she can’t wait to jump right down the throat of the fool who just called in. She glances at the monitor, satisfied the lighting and angles are catching her favorably.

“They sure are,” the fool says over speakerphone.

“What’s your name again? Sandy?”

“Yeah, I…”

“Stop before you chop, Sandy?”

“Ah, what…?”

“Uncle Sam with an ax? Isn’t that the image the public has?”

“We’re being screwed. It’s a conspiracy.”

“So that’s how you think of it? Good Old Uncle Sam cutting down all your trees. Chop, chop.”

She catches the cameramen, her producer smiling.

“The bastards came into my yard without permission, and next thing I know, all my trees are going to be cut down….”

“And you live where, Sandy?”

“Cooper City. I don’t blame people for wanting to shoot them or siccing their dogs on…”

“Here’s the thing about it, Sandy.” She leans into the point she’s about to make, the cameras zooming in. “You people don’t pay attention to the facts. Have you attended meetings? Have you written your legislators? Have you bothered to ask questions point-blank and consider that maybe, just maybe, the explanations offered by the Department of Agriculture might make sense?”

It is her style to take whatever side the other person isn’t on. She’s known for it.

“Well, the stuff about hurricanes is [bleep],” the fool snaps, and Dr. Self suspected it wouldn’t be long before the profanity started.

“It’s not bleep,” she mimics him. “There’s nothing bleep about it. The fact is”—she faces the camera—“we had four major hurricanes last fall, and it is a fact that citrus canker is a bacterial disease carried by the wind. When we come back, we’re going to explore the reality of this dreaded blight and talk it out with a very special guest. Stay with me.”

“We’re off,” a cameraman says.

Dr. Self reaches for her bottle of water. She takes a sip through a straw so she doesn’t smear her lipstick and waits for the makeup person to touch up her forehead and nose, impatient when the makeup person is slow getting to her, impatient when the makeup person is slow to hurry up and finish.

“All right. Okay. That’s enough.” Dr. Self holds up a hand, shooing off the makeup person. “This is going well,” she says to her producer.

“I think in the next segment, we need to really focus on the psychology. That’s why people tune in to you, Marilyn. It’s not the politics, it’s their problems with their girlfriends, bosses, mothers, fathers.”

“I don’t need coaching.”

“I didn’t mean…”

“Listen, what makes my shows unique is the blend of current affairs and our emotional responses.”

“Absolutely.”

“Three, two, one.”

“And we’re back.” Dr. Self smiles into the camera.

57

Marino stands beneath a palm tree outside the Academy, watching Reba walk off to her unmarked Crown Victoria. He notes the defiance in her step, tries to determine if it’s genuine or if she’s putting on an act. He wonders if she sees him standing under the palm tree, smoking.

She called him a jerk. He’s been called that a lot, but he never thought she would say it.

She unlocks her car, then seems to change her mind about getting in. She doesn’t look in his direction, but he has a feeling she knows he’s standing there in the shadow of the palm tree, his Treo in hand, the earpiece in his ear, a cigarette going. She shouldn’t have said what she did. She has no right to talk about Scarpetta. The Effexor ruined things. If he wasn’t depressed before, he was after that, then that comment about Scarpetta, about all these cops having the hots for her.

The Effexor was a blight. Dr. Self has no right to put him on a drug that ruined his sex life. She has no right to talk about Scarpetta all the time, as if Scarpetta is the most important person in Marino’s life. Reba had to remind him. She said what she did to remind him he couldn’t have sex, remind him of men who can and want it with Scarpetta. Marino hasn’t taken the Effexor for several weeks, and his problem is getting better except he is depressed.

Reba pops the trunk, walks around to the back of the car and opens it.

Marino wonders what she’s doing. He decides he may as well find out and be decent enough to let her know he can’t arrest anyone and could probably use her help. He can threaten people all he wants, but he can’t legally arrest anybody. It’s the only thing he misses about policing. Reba grabs what looks like a bag of laundry out of the trunk and throws it into the backseat as if she’s pissed off.

“Got a body in there?” Marino asks, casually walking up to her, flicking his cigarette butt into the grass.

“Ever heard of using a trash can?”

She slams shut the door, barely looking at him.

“What’s in the bag?”

“I’ve got to go to the cleaners. Haven’t had time in a week, not that it’s any of your business,” she says, hiding behind a pair of dark glasses. “Don’t treat me like shit anymore, at least not in front of other people. You want to be a jerk, at least be discreet about it.”

He looks back at his palm tree as if it’s his favorite spot, looks at the stucco building against the bright blue sky, trying to think how to put it.

“Well, you were disrespectful,” he says.

She looks at him in shock. “Me? What are you talking about? Are you crazy? Last I remember, we had a nice ride and you dragged me to Hooters, never asked if that’s where I wanted to go, by the way. Why you’d take a woman to an ass-and-tits place like that beats the hell out of me. Talk about disrespectful? Are you kidding? Making me sit there while you ogle all the tartlets jiggling past.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Were too.”

“I sure wasn’t,” he says, sliding out the pack of cigarettes.

“You’re smoking too much.”

“I wasn’t staring at nothing. I was minding my own business drinking my coffee, then out of the blue you started in on all this crap about the Doc and I’ll be damned if I have to listen to such disrespectful bullshit.”

She’s jealous, he thinks, pleased. She said what she did because she thought he was staring at the waitresses in Hooters, and maybe he was. To make a point.

“I’ve worked with her a million years and don’t let anybody talk about her like that and I’m not going to start now,” he goes on, lighting up, squinting in the sun, noticing a group of students dressed in field clothes walking past on the road, heading to the SUVs in the parking lot, probably heading off to the Hollywood Police Training Facility for a demonstration by the Bomb Disposal Team.

Seems like they were scheduled for that today, to play with Eddie the RemoteTec robot, watch it move on its tractor belts, sounding like a crab crawling down the trailer’s aluminum ramp, connected to a fiber-optic cable, showing off, and Bunky the bomb dog showing off, and firefighters in their big trucks showing off, and guys in their bomb-and-search suits showing off with dynamite and det cord and disrupters, maybe blowing up a car.

Marino misses it. He’s tired of being left out.

“I’m sorry,” Reba says, “I didn’t mean to say anything disrespectful about her. All I was saying was some of the guys I work with—”

“I need you to arrest somebody,” he cuts her off, looking at his watch, not interested in hearing her repeat what she told him at Hooters, not interested in perhaps having to face that some of it was him.

Most of it was him.

The Effexor. Reba would have found out sooner rather than later. The damn stuff ruined him.

“In maybe half an hour. If you can put off going to the Laundromat,” he is saying.

“The dry cleaner’s, jerk,” she says with hostility that’s not at all convincing.

She still likes him.

“I’ve got my own washer and dryer,” she says. “I don’t live in a trailer.”

Marino tries Lucy on the cell phone as he says to Reba, “I’ve got an idea. Not sure it will work, but maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Lucy answers and tells him she can’t talk.

“It’s important,” Marino says, looking at Reba, remembering their weekend in Key West when he wasn’t on Effexor. “Just give me two minutes.”

He can hear Lucy talking to someone, saying she’s got to take the call and will be right back. A man’s voice says no problem. Marino can hear Lucy walking. He looks at Reba and remembers getting drunk on Captain Morgan rum in the Paradise Lounge at the Holiday Inn and watching the sunsets and sitting up late at night in the hot tub when he wasn’t on Effexor.

“You there?” Lucy is asking him.

“Is it possible for me to have a three-way conference call with two cell phones, one landline and only two people?” he asks.

“This some kind of Mensa test question?”

“What I want is to make it look like I’m on my phone in my office talking to you, but what I’m really doing is talking to you on my cell phone. Hello? Are you there?”

“Are you suggesting someone may be monitoring your phone calls from a multiline phone that’s connected to the PBX system?”

“From the damn phone on my desk,” he says, looking at Reba looking at him, trying to see if she’s impressed.

“That’s what I meant. Who?” Lucy says.

“I intend to find out but I’m pretty sure I know.”

“No one could do that without the system admin’s password. And that would be me.”

“I think someone’s got it. It would explain a lot of things. Is it possible to do what I said?” he asks her again. “Can I call you on my office phone, then conference in on my cell phone, then leave my office phone line open so it seems I’m in there talking but I’m not?”

“Yes, we can,” she says. “But not right this minute.”

Dr. Self presses a flashing button on the phone.

“Our next caller—well, he’s been on hold for several minutes now, and he has an unusual nickname. Hog? I apologize. You still with us?”

“Yes, ma’am,” a soft-spoken voice enters the studio.

“You’re on the air,” she says. “Now, Hog? Why don’t you tell us about your nickname first. I’m sure everybody’s curious.”

“It’s what I’m called.”

Silence, and Dr. Self fills it instantly. There can be no dead time on the air.

“Well, Hog it is. Now, you called in with a startling story. You’re in the lawn-care business. And you were in a certain neighborhood and noticed citrus canker in someone’s yard…?”

“No. It’s not quite like that.”

Dr. Self feels a pinch of irritation. Hog’s not following the script. When he called late Tuesday afternoon and she pretended to be someone other than herself, he distinctly said he had discovered canker in an old woman’s yard in Hollywood, just one orange tree, and now every citrus tree in her yard and all her neighbors’ yards has to be cut down, and when he mentioned the problem to the owner of that particular infected tree, the old woman, she threatened to kill herself if Hog reported the canker to the Department of Agriculture. She threatened to shoot herself with her dead husband’s shotgun.

The old woman’s husband had planted the trees when they first got married. He’s dead and the trees are all she has left, the only living thing left. To cut down her trees is to destroy a precious part of her life that nobody has any business touching.

“Eradicating those trees is to cause her to at last accept her loss.” Dr. Self is explaining all this to her audience. “And in doing so, she doesn’t see anything left worth living for. She wants to die. That’s quite a dilemma to find yourself in, isn’t it, Hog? Playing God,” she says to the speakerphone.

“I don’t play God. I do what God says. It’s not an act.”

Dr. Self is confused but carries on. “What a choice for you to make. Did you follow the government’s rules or follow your heart?”

“I painted red stripes on them,” he says. “Now she’s dead. You were next. But there isn’t time.”

58

They sit in the kitchen at a table before a window that overlooks the narrow, murky canal.

“When the police got involved,” Fred Quincy is saying, “they did ask for a few things that might have their DNA. Hairbrush, toothbrush, I forget what else. I never heard anything about what they did with the stuff.”

“They probably never analyzed it,” Lucy says, thinking about what she and Marino just talked about. “Possibly it’s still in their evidence room. We can ask them about it, but I’d rather not wait.”

The suggestion that someone may have gained access to her system’s administrative password is incredible. It’s sickening. Marino must be mistaken. She can’t stop thinking about it.

“Obviously, the case isn’t a priority for them. They’ve always believed they just ran off. There was no sign of violence,” Fred says. “They said there should have been a sign of a struggle, or someone should have seen something. It was the middle of the morning, and there were people around. And Mom’s SUV was missing.”

“I was told her car was there. An Audi.”

“It definitely wasn’t. And she didn’t have an Audi. I did. Someone must have seen my car when I got there later, looking for them. Mom had a Chevy Blazer. She used it to haul things around. You know, people get things so twisted. I went to the shop after trying to call all day. My mom’s purse and Blazer were gone, and there was no sign of her or my sister.”

“Any sign they had ever been inside the shop?”

“Nothing was on. The closed sign was out.”

“Anything missing?”

“Not that I could tell. Certainly nothing obvious. Nothing in the cash drawer, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. If she left money in it overnight, it wasn’t much. Something must have come up if you suddenly need their DNA.”

“I’ll let you know,” Lucy says. “We may have a lead.”

“You can’t tell me?”

“I promise I’ll let you know. What was your first thought when you went looking for them, drove to the shop?”

“Truth? I thought maybe they’d never gone there at all, had just driven off somewhere over the rainbow.”

“Why do you put it like that?”

“There had been a lot of problems. Financial ups and downs. Personal problems. Dad had this extremely successful landscaping business.”

“In Palm Beach.”

“That’s where it was headquartered. But he had greenhouses and tree farms in other locations, including around here. Then, in the mid-eighties, he got wiped out by citrus canker. Every damn one of his citrus trees had to be destroyed, and he had to let go of almost all of his employees and came very close to declaring bankruptcy. That was hard on Mom. He got back on his feet and was more successful then, and that was hard on Mom, too. You know, I’m not sure I should be telling you all this.”

“Fred, I’m trying to help. I can’t do it if you don’t talk to me.”

“Let me start with when Helen was twelve,” he says. “I was beginning my freshman year in college. I’m older, obviously. Helen went to live with my dad’s brother and his wife for about six months.”

“Why?”

“It was sad, such a pretty, talented girl. Got into Harvard when she was only sixteen, lasted not even a semester, had a meltdown and came home.”

“When?”

“That would have been the fall before she and Mom disappeared. She only lasted until November—at Harvard.”

“Eight months before she and your mother disappeared?”

“Yes. Helen was dealt a really lousy genetic hand.”

He pauses as if trying to decide whether he should go on, then, “All right. My mom wasn’t the most stable person. You might have already figured that out, her Christmas obsession. Craziness, more craziness, on and off for as long as I can remember. But it got really bad when Helen was twelve. Mom was doing some pretty irrational things.”

“Was she seeing a local psychiatrist?”

“Whatever money could buy. That celebrity one. She lived in Palm Beach back then. Dr. Self. She recommended hospitalization. That’s the real reason she sent Helen off to live with my aunt and uncle. Mom was in the hospital, and Dad was really busy and not inclined to take care of a twelve-year-old kid all by himself. Mom came home. Then Helen did and neither of them were, well, normal.”

“Did Helen go to a psychiatrist?”

“Not at that time,” Fred says. “She was just strange. Not unstable like Mom but strange. She did well in school, really well, then went off to Harvard and crashed and burned, was found in the lobby of some funeral home up there, didn’t know who she was. As if things weren’t bad enough, Dad died. Mom went into a real downhill spiral, would go places on the weekends, not tell me where she was, freaking me out. It was awful.”

“So the police figured she was unstable and into disappearing acts, and maybe ran off with Helen?”

“I wondered it myself. I still wonder if my mom and sister are out there somewhere.”

“How did your dad die?”

“Fell off a ladder in the rare-book library. The house in Palm Beach was three stories, everything marble and stone tiles.”

“He home alone when it happened?”

“Helen found him on the first-floor landing.”

“She was the only one in the house at the time?”

“A boyfriend, maybe. Don’t know who.”

“When was this?”

“A couple months before she and Mom disappeared. Helen was seventeen then, precocious. Well, truthfully, after she came home from Harvard, she was completely out of control. I’ve always wondered if it was a reaction to my dad, my uncle, the people on my dad’s side of the family. Extremely religious and serious, Jesus this, Jesus that, big in their churches. Deacons, Sunday-school teachers, always trying to witness to people.”

“You ever meet any of Helen’s boyfriends?”

“No. She ran around, would disappear for days. Just trouble. I didn’t come home if I didn’t have to. Mom’s Christmas obsession is such a joke. It was never Christmas in our house. It was always pretty damn awful.”

He gets up from the table. “Mind if I have a beer?”

“Help yourself.”

He picks out a Michelob, twists off the cap. He shuts the refrigerator door and sits back down.

“Was your sister ever hospitalized?” Lucy asks.

“Same place Mom was. For a month right after she dropped out of Harvard. Club McLean, I called it. The good ole family genes.”

“McLean in Massachusetts?”

“Yup. You ever take notes? I don’t know how you can remember all this.”

Lucy fingers the pen she’s holding, the small recorder turned on and invisible in her pocket.

“We need your mom’s and sister’s DNA,” she says.

“I don’t have any idea how we’re going to get it now. Unless the police still have that stuff.”

“Yours will work. Think of it as family-tree DNA,” Lucy says.

59

Scarpetta looks out the window at the cold, white street. It is almost three, and she has been on the phone most of the day.

“What kind of screening do you have? You must have some system in place for controlling who makes it on the air,” she says.

“Of course. One of the producers talks to the person, makes sure he isn’t crazy.”

It seems an odd choice of words for a psychiatrist.

“In this case, I’d already had a conversation with the man, the lawn-service man. It’s a long story.” Dr. Self is talking fast.

“He said his name was Hog when you talked to him the first time?”

“I didn’t think anything about it. A lot of people have wacky nicknames. I just need to know. Did some elderly lady suddenly turn up dead, a suicide? You would know, wouldn’t you? He threatened to kill me.”

“I’m afraid a lot of elderly ladies turn up dead on a regular basis,” Scarpetta replies evasively. “Can you give me a few more details? What exactly did he say?”

Dr. Self recounts the story of the blighted citrus trees in the old woman’s yard, of her grief over the loss of her husband, of her threat to kill herself with her dead husband’s shotgun if the lawn-service man—Hog—had her trees destroyed. Benton walks into the living room with two coffees, and Scarpetta puts Dr. Self on speakerphone.

“Then he threatened to kill me,” Dr. Self says again. “Or said he was going to but changed his mind.”

“I’ve got someone with me who needs to hear this,” Scarpetta says, and she introduces Benton. “Tell him what you just told me.”

Benton sits on the couch as Dr. Self replies that she doesn’t understand why a forensic psychologist in Massachusetts would have any interest in a suicide that may or may not have happened in Florida. But he might have a valid opinion about a threat on her life, and she would love to have him on her show sometime. What sort of person would threaten her like that? Is she in danger?

“Does your studio keep track of the call-ins through caller ID?” Benton asks. “Are the numbers stored, even temporarily?”

“I would think so.”

“I’d like you to find that out right away,” he says. “Let’s see if we can determine where he was calling from.”

“I do know we don’t accept unidentified calls. You have to disable the caller ID block, because once I had this insane woman threaten to kill me on the air. It’s not the first time it’s happened. Her call came in as unidentified. No more.”

“Then you’re obviously capturing the numbers of whoever is calling in,” Benton says. “What I’d like is a printout of the numbers of everybody who called in during the show earlier this afternoon. What about when you talked to this lawn man the first time? You mentioned you had a phone conversation with him. When was that, and was the call local? Did you capture the number in a log?”

“Late Tuesday afternoon. I don’t have caller ID. I have an unlisted, unpublished number and don’t need it.”

“Did he identify himself?”

“As Hog.”

“He called your house?”

“My private office. I see patients in the office behind my house. It’s really a guesthouse-slash-pool house.”

“How might he have gotten the number?”

“I have no idea, now that you mention it. Of course, my colleagues, anybody I do business with, my patients have it.”

“Any possibility this man might be one of your patients?”

“I didn’t recognize his voice. I can’t think of anybody I see who might have been him. There’s something more going on here.” She gets pushy. “I think I have a right to know if there’s something more about this than meets the eye. In the first place, you haven’t confirmed whether there’s an old woman who committed suicide with a shotgun because of her blighted citrus trees.”

“Nothing quite like that.” It is Scarpetta who speaks. “But there is a very recent case that sounds similar to what you just described, an elderly woman whose trees were marked for eradication. A shotgun death.”

“My God. Did it happen after six p.m. this past Tuesday?”

“Probably before that,” Scarpetta says, fairly certain she knows why Dr. Self is asking.

“That’s a relief. Then she was already dead by the time the lawn man, Hog, called me. He called maybe five, ten minutes after six and asked to be on my show, told the story about the old woman threatening to kill herself. So she must have already done it. I wouldn’t want to think her death had something to do with him wanting to be on my show.”

Benton gives Scarpetta a look that says, What a narcissistic, insensitive bitch, and says to the speakerphone, “Right now we’re trying to figure out a lot of other things, Dr. Self. And it would be helpful if you could give us a little more information about David Luck. You prescribed Ritalin to him.”

“Are you now saying something horrible’s happened to him, too? I know he’s missing. Is there something new?”

“There’s reason to be greatly concerned.” Scarpetta repeats what she’s said in the past. “We have reason to be very concerned about him, his brother and the two sisters they lived with. How long have you been seeing David as a patient?”

“Since last summer. I think he first came to see me last July. It might have been late June. Both parents had been killed in an accident and he was acting out a lot, doing poorly in school. He and his brother were homeschooled.”

“You saw him how often?” Benton asks.

“Usually once a week.”

“Who brought him to his appointments?”

“Sometimes Kristin. Sometimes Ev. Now and then they both brought him, and on occasion I would meet with the three of them.”

“How was David referred to you?” It is Scarpetta who asks. “How did he end up in your care?”

“Well, it’s rather poignant. Kristin was a call-in. Apparently, she listens to my show a lot and decided maybe she could get hold of me that way. She called in to my radio show and said she was taking care of a South African boy who had just lost both his parents and he needed help, et cetera, et cetera. It was quite a heartbreaking story, and I agreed on the air to see him. You would be amazed at the mail I got from my listeners after that. I still get mail, people wanting to know how the little South African orphan is doing.”

“Do you have a tape of the show you’re talking about?” Benton asks. “An audio clip?”

“We have tapes of everything.”

“How quickly could you get me that audio clip, and one from your television show earlier today? I’m afraid we’re snowed in up here—at the moment, anyway. We’re doing what we can remotely but are somewhat limited.”

“Yes, I hear you’ve had quite the storm up there. Hope you don’t lose power,” she says, as if they’ve just spent the past half-hour having a pleasant conversation. “I can call my producer right now, and he can get it to you by e-mail. I’m sure he’ll want to talk with you about being on my show sometime.”

“And the phone numbers of the callers,” Benton reminds her.

“Dr. Self?” Scarpetta says, looking out the window with dismay.

It is starting to snow again.

“What about Tony? David’s brother?”

“They fought a lot.”

“Did you see Tony, too?”

“I never met him,” she says.

“You said you know both Ev and Kristin. Did one of them have an eating disorder?”

“I wasn’t treating either one of them. They weren’t my patients.”

“I should think you could tell by looking at them. One of them was on a steady diet of carrots.”

“Based on her appearance, Kristin,” she replies.

Scarpetta looks at Benton. She had the Academy’s DNA lab contact Detective Thrush the instant she discovered the yellowish dura mater. DNA from the dead woman up here has been matched to DNA from yellowish stains on a blouse Scarpetta removed from Kristin’s and Ev’s house. The body in the Boston morgue most likely is Kristin, and Scarpetta has no intention of relaying this information to Dr. Self, who might very well talk about it on the air.

Benton gets up from the couch to put another log on the fire as Scarpetta gets off the phone. She watches the snow. It falls fast in the light of the lamps at Benton’s front gate.

“No more coffee,” Benton says. “My nerves have had it.”

“Does it do anything besides snow up here?”

“The main streets are probably already clear. They’re amazingly fast up here. I don’t think the boys have anything to do with this.”

“They have something to do with it,” she says, moving in front of the fire, sitting on the hearth. “They’re gone. It appears Kristin’s dead. Probably all of them are.”

60

Marino calls Joe while Reba sits quietly nearby, engrossed in hell scenes.

“I’ve got a few things to go over with you,” Marino tells Joe. “There’s a problem.”

“What kind of problem?” he says cautiously.

“You need to hear about it from me. I’ve got to return a few calls in my office, take care of a few things. Where you going to be during the next hour?”

“Room one twelve.”

“You there now?”

“Walking that way.”

“Let me guess,” Marino says. “Working on another hell scene you stole from me?”

“If that’s what you want to talk to me about…”

“It’s not,” Marino says. “It’s a whole lot worse than that.”

“You’re really something,” Reba says to Marino, placing the file of hell scenes back on his desk. “They’re really good. They’re brilliant, Pete.”

“We’re going to do this in five, give him time to get into his office,” and now he has Lucy on the phone. “Lay it on me, what do I do?”

“You’re going to hang up, so am I, then hit the conference button on your desk phone and dial my cell phone. When I answer, hit conference again and dial your cell phone. Then you can either put your desk phone on hold to keep the line open or just leave it off the hook. If someone’s monitoring our call, he’s going to assume you’re in your office.”

Marino waits a few minutes, then does what she said. He and Reba walk out of the building while he and Lucy talk to each other on their cell phones. They have a real conversation while he hopes like hell that Joe is listening in. He and Lucy are lucky so far. The reception is good. She sounds as if she’s in the next room.

They chat about the new motorcycles. They chat about all sorts of things as Marino and Reba walk.

The Last Stand motel is a modified double-wide trailer that has been divided into three rooms that are used for mock crime scenes. Each section has a separate door with a number on it. Room 112 is in the middle. Marino notes that the curtain is drawn over the front window, and he can hear the air conditioner running. He tries the door and it’s locked, and he kicks it hard with his big, Harley-booted foot and the cheap door flies open and slams against the wall. Joe is sitting at the desk, the receiver to his ear, a tape recorder hooked up to the phone, his face shocked, then terrified. Marino and Reba look at him.

“Know why they call this the Last Stand motel?” Marino asks, walking over to Joe, grabbing him out of the chair as if he weighs nothing. “Because you’re as dead as Colonel Custer.”

“Let me go!” Joe yells.

His feet are off the floor. Marino is holding him up by his armpits, their faces inches apart. Marino shoves him against a wall.

“Let me go! You’re hurting me!”

Marino drops him. He sits down hard on the floor.

“You know why she’s here?” He indicates Reba. “To arrest your sorry ass.”

“I didn’t do anything!”

“Falsifying records, grand larceny, maybe homicide since you obviously stole a gun that was used out of state to blow a lady’s head off. Oh, and add fraud,” Marino adds to the list, not caring if any of it’s valid.

“I didn’t! I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“Quit yelling. I’m not deaf. See, Detective Wagner here’s a witness, right?”

She nods, her face hard. Marino’s never seen her look so scary.

“You see me lay a finger on him?” he asks her.

“Absolutely not,” she says.

Joe is so scared, he might wet himself.

“You want to tell us why you stole that shotgun and who you gave it to or sold it to?” Marino pulls up the desk chair, turns it around, sits on it backward, his huge arms resting on the back. “Or maybe you blew the lady’s head off. Maybe you’re living out hell scenes, only I didn’t write that one. You must have stole it from someone else.”

“What lady? I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t steal a shotgun. What shotgun?”

“The one you checked out last June twenty-eighth at three-fifteen in the afternoon. That one that belongs to the computer record you just updated, falsifying that record, too.”

Joe’s mouth is open, his eyes wide.

Marino reaches into his back pocket, pulls out a piece of paper, unfolds it and hands it to him. It’s a photocopy of the ledger page showing when Joe signed out the Mossberg shotgun and supposedly returned it.

Joe stares at the photocopy, his hands shaking.

He says, “I swear to God I didn’t take it. I remember what happened. I was doing more research with ordnance gelatin and maybe test-fired it once. Then I left to do something in the lab kitchen. I think it was to check on some more blocks I’d just made, the ones we were using to simulate passengers in an airplane crash. Remember when Lucy used that big helicopter to drop an airplane fuselage out of the sky so the students could…?”

“Get to the point!”

“When I came back, the shotgun was gone. I assumed Vince locked it back up in the vault. It was late in the day. He probably locked it up because he was about to go home. I remember feeling pissed about it because I wanted to fire it a couple more times.”

“No wonder you have to steal my hell scenes,” Marino says. “You’ve got no imagination. Try again.”

“I’m telling the truth.”

“You want her to haul you off in handcuffs?” Marino says, jerking his thumb toward Reba.

“You can’t prove I did anything.”

“I can prove you’ve committed fraud,” Marino says. “You want to talk about all those letters of reference you faked so the Doc would hire you as a fellow?”

For an instant, he’s speechless. Then he begins to regain his composure. He gets that smart-ass look on his face again.

“Prove it,” he says.

“Every one of those letters is on the same water-marked paper.”

“Doesn’t prove a thing.”

Joe gets to his feet and rubs his lower back.

“I’m going to sue you,” he says.

“Good. Then I may as well hurt you worse,” Marino replies, rubbing his fist. “Maybe I’ll break your neck. You haven’t seen me touch him, have you, Detective Wagner.”

“Absolutely not,” she says. Then, “If you didn’t take the shotgun, who did? Was anybody else with you in the firearms lab that afternoon?”

He thinks for a minute and something shows in his eyes.

“No,” he says.

61

Twenty-four hours a day, guards inside the control room monitor inmates who are considered suicide risks.

They watch Basil Jenrette. They watch him sleep, shower, eat. They watch him use the steel toilet. They watch him turn his back to the closed-circuit camera and relieve his sexual tension beneath the sheets of his narrow steel bed.

He imagines them laughing at him. He imagines what they say inside the control room as they watch him on the monitors. They make fun of him to the other guards. He can tell by the smirks on their faces when they bring him his meals or let him out so he can exercise or make a phone call. Sometimes they make comments. Sometimes they show up outside his cell just as he is relieving his sexual tension, and they imitate the noise and laugh and bang on the door.

Basil sits on his bed, looking up at the camera mounted high on the opposite wall. He flips through this month’s copy of Field&Stream as he thinks back to the first time he met with Benton Wesley and made the mistake of answering one of his questions honestly.

Do you ever think about hurting yourself or others?

I’ve already hurt others so I guess that means I think about it, Basil said.

What thoughts do you have, Basil? Can you describe what you envision when you think about hurting other people and yourself?

I think of doing what I used to. Seeing a woman and getting the urge. Getting her into my police car and pulling out my gun and maybe my badge and telling her I’m arresting her, and if she resists arrest, so much as touches the door, I’ll have no choice but to shoot her. They all cooperated.

None of them resisted you.

Just the last two. Because of car trouble. It’s so stupid.

The others, before the last two, did they believe you were the police and you were arresting them?

They believed I was a cop. But they knew what was happening. I wanted them to know. I’d get hard. I’d show them I was hard, make them put their hand on it. They were going to die. It’s so stupid.

What’s stupid, Basil?

So stupid. I’ve said it a thousand times. You’ve heard me say it, right? Wouldn’t you rather I shoot you right then in my car or get you off somewhere so I can take my time with you? Why would you let me get you to some secret place and tie you up?

Tell me how you would tie them up, Basil. Always the same way?

Yeah. I have a really cool method. It’s absolutely unique. I invented it when I started making my arrests.

By arrests you mean abducting and assaulting women.

When I first started, yeah.

Basil smiles as he sits on his bed, remembering the thrill of twisting wire coat hangers around their ankles and wrists and threading rope through them so he could string them up.

They were my puppets, he explained to Dr. Wesley during that first interview, wondering what it would take to get a reaction out of him.

No matter what Basil said, Dr. Wesley kept his steady gaze, listening, not letting anything he felt register on his face. Maybe he didn’t feel anything. Maybe he’s like Basil.

See, in this place I had, there were exposed rafters where the ceiling had come down, especially in this one room in the back. I would throw the ropes over the rafters, and I could tighten or loosen them however I wanted, give them a long leash or a short one.

And they never resisted, even when they realized what was in store for them when you got them into this building? What was it? A house?

I don’t remember.

Did they resist, Basil? Seems as if it might have been difficult to restrain them in such an elaborate fashion while you’re still holding them at gunpoint.

I’ve always had this fantasy of having someone watch. Basil didn’t answer the question. Then having sex after it was over. Having sex for hours with the body right there on the same mattress.

Sex with the dead body or sex with another person?

I was never into that. That’s not for me. I like to hear them. I mean, it had to hurt like hell. Sometimes their shoulders got dislocated. Then I’d give them enough slack to use the bathroom. That was the part I didn’t like. Emptying the bucket.

What about their eyes, Basil?

Well, let’s see. No pun intended.

Dr. Wesley didn’t laugh, and that annoyed Basil a little.

I’d let them dance around at the end of their rope, no pun intended. Don’t you ever smile? I mean, come on, some of this is funny.

I’m listening to you, Basil. I’m listening to every word you say.

That was good, at least. And he was. Dr. Wesley was listening and thought every word was important and fascinating, thought Basil was the most interesting, original person he had ever interviewed.

As soon as I was going to have sex with them, he continued, that’s when I’d do their eyes. You know, if I’d been born with a decent-sized dick, none of this would have been necessary.

They were conscious when you blinded them.

If I could have given them some gas and knocked them out while I was performing the surgery, I would have. I didn’t particularly like them screaming and jerking all over the place. But I couldn’t have sex with them until they were blind. I explained it to them. I’d say, I’m really sorry I got to do this to you, okay? I’ll be as quick as I can. It’s going to hurt a little.

Isn’t that funny? It’s going to hurt a little. Every time somebody says that to me, I know it’s going to hurt like a bitch. Then I’d tell them I was going to untie them so we could have sex. I said if they tried to get away or do anything stupid, I was going to do even worse things to them than I already did. That’s it. We had sex.

How long would this go on?

You mean the sex?

How long did you keep them alive and have sex with them?

Depended. If I liked having sex with them, sometimes I’d keep them around for days. I think the longest time was ten days. But that didn’t turn out to be a good thing because she got infected real bad and it was disgusting.

Did you do anything else to them? Anything besides blinding them and having sex?

I experimented. Some.

Did you ever engage in torture?

I’d say stabbing somebody’s eyes out…well, Basil replied, and now he wishes he hadn’t said it.

It opened a whole new line of questioning. Dr. Wesley started in on knowing right from wrong and comprehending the suffering Basil was causing another human being, that if he knew something was torture, then he was cognizant of what he was doing at the time he was doing it and also upon reflection. That’s not exactly the way he said it, but that’s what he was getting at. Just the same old song and dance he heard in Gainesville when the shrinks were trying to figure out if he was competent to stand trial. He never should have let them know he was. That was stupid, too. A forensic psychiatric hospital is a five-star hotel compared to prison, especially if you’re on death row, sitting around in your tiny, claustrophobic cell feeling like Bozo the clown in your blue-and-white-striped pants and orange T-shirt.

Basil gets up from his steel bed and stretches. He pretends he’s not interested in the camera high up on the wall. He never should have admitted that sometimes he fantasized about killing himself, that his preferred way would be to cut his wrists and watch himself bleed, drip, drip, drip, watch the puddle form on the floor, because it would remind him of his former pleasant preoccupations with how many women? He’s lost count. It might have been eight. He told Dr. Wesley eight. Or was it ten?

He stretches some more. He uses the steel toilet and returns to the bed. He opens the most recent Field & Stream, looks at page 52, at what’s supposed to be a column about a hunter’s first .22 rifle and happy memories of rabbit and possum hunting, of fishing in Missouri.

This page 52 isn’t the real one. The real page 52 was torn out and scanned into a computer. Then, in an identical font and identical format, a letter was embedded into the magazine’s text. The scanned page 52 was carefully reinserted into the magazine, a little glue used, and what looks like a chatty column on hunting and fishing is a clandestine communication intended for Basil.

The guards don’t care about inmates getting fishing magazines. They aren’t likely to even flip through them, not boring magazines that are completely devoid of sex and violence.

Basil gets under the covers, turning on his left side diagonally on the bed, his back to the camera, just like he always does when he needs to relieve his sexual tension. He reaches under the thin mattress and pulls out strips of white cotton from two pairs of white boxer shorts that he has been ripping up all week.

Under the sheets, he begins a tear with his teeth, then rips. Each strip gets tightly tied to what has become a six-foot-long knotted rope. He has enough fabric left for two more strips. He tears with his teeth and rips. He breathes heavily and rocks himself a little as if relieving his sexual tension, and he rips and he ties a strip to the rope, and then he ties on the last one.

62

Inside the Academy’s computer center, Lucy sits before three large video screens, reading e-mails as she restores them to the server.

What she and Marino have discovered so far is that before he began his fellowship, Joe Amos was communicating with a television producer who claimed to be interested in developing yet another forensic show for one of the cable networks. For his input, Joe was promised five thousand dollars per episode, assuming the shows ever make it on the air. Apparently, Joe started getting brilliant ideas in late January, about the time Lucy got sick while testing new avionics in one of her helicopters, fled to the ladies’ room and forgot her Treo. At first he was subtle about it, plagiarizing hell scenes. Then he became blatant, outright stealing them as he went into databases to his heart’s content.

Lucy restores another e-mail, this one dated February 10, a year ago. It is from last summer’s intern, Jan Hamilton, who got the needle stick and threatened to sue the Academy.

Dear Dr. Amos,

I heard you on Dr. Self’s radio show the other night and was fascinated by what you had to say about the National Forensic Academy. Sounds like an amazing place, and by the way, congratulations on being awarded a fellowship. That’s incredibly impressive. I wonder if you could help me get an internship there for the summer. I am studying nuclear biology and genetics at Harvard and want to be a forensic scientist, specializing in DNA. I’m attaching a file that has my photograph and other personal information.

Jan Hamilton.

P.S. The best way to reach me is at this address. My Harvard account is firewall-protected, and I can’t use it unless I’m on campus.

“Shit,” Marino says. “Holy shit,” he says.

Lucy restores more e-mails, opens dozens of them, e-mails that become increasingly personal, then romantic, then lewd exchanges between Joe and Jan that continued during her internship at the Academy, leading up to an e-mail he sent her early this past July when he suggested she try a little creativity with a hell scene that was scheduled to take place at the Body Farm. He arranged for her to stop by his office for hypodermic needles and whatever else you might feel like getting stuck with.

Lucy has never seen the film of the hell scene that went so wrong. She has never seen films of any hell scenes. Until now, she wasn’t interested.

“What’s it called?” she says, getting frantic.

“Body Farm,” Marino says.

She finds the video file and opens it.

They watch students walking around the dead body of one of the most obese men Lucy has ever seen. He is on the ground, fully clothed in a cheap, gray suit, probably what he had on when he dropped from sudden cardiac arrest. He is beginning to decompose. Maggots teem over his face.

The camera angle shifts to a pretty young woman digging in the dead man’s coat pocket, turning toward the camera, withdrawing her hand, yelling—yelling that she’s been stuck through her glove.

Stevie.

Lucy tries to reach Benton. He doesn’t answer. She tries her aunt and can’t get hold of her. She tries the neuroimaging lab, and Dr. Susan Lane answers the phone. She tells Lucy that both Benton and Scarpetta should be here any minute, are scheduled to be with a patient, with Basil Jenrette.

“I’m e-mailing a video clip to you,” Lucy says. “About three years ago, you scanned a young female patient named Helen Quincy. I’m wondering if it might be the same person in the video clip.”

“Lucy, I’m not supposed to.”

“I know, I know. Please. It’s really important.”

WONK…WONK…WONK…WONK…

Dr. Lane has Kenny Jumper in the magnet. She is in the middle of his structural MRI, and the lab is full of the usual racket.

“Can you go into the database?” Dr. Lane asks her research assistant. “See if we might have scanned a patient named Helen Quincy. Possibly three years ago? Josh, keep going,” she says to the MRI tech. “Can you stand it without me for a minute?”

“I’ll try.” He smiles.

Beth, the research assistant, is typing on the keyboard of a computer on the back counter. It doesn’t take her long to find Helen Quincy. Dr. Lane has Lucy on the phone.

“Do you have a photograph of her?” Lucy asks.

WOP WOP WOP WOP. The sound of the gradients acquiring images reminds Dr. Lane of the sonar in a submarine.

“Only of her brain. We don’t photograph patients.”

“Have you looked at the video clip I just e-mailed to you? Maybe it will mean something.”

Lucy sounds frustrated, disappointed.

TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP…

“Hold on. But I don’t know what you think I can do with it,” Dr. Lane says.

“Maybe you remember her when she was there? You were working there three years ago. You or someone scanned her. Johnny Swift was doing a fellowship there at the same time. May have seen her, too. Reviewed her scans.”

Dr. Lane isn’t sure she understands.

“Maybe you scanned her,” Lucy persists. “Maybe you saw her three years ago, might remember her if you saw a picture….”

Dr. Lane wouldn’t remember. She’s seen so many patients, and three years is a long time.

“Hold on,” she says again.

BAWN…BAWN…BAWN…BAWN…

She moves to a computer terminal and goes into her e-mail without sitting down. She opens the file of the video clip and plays it several times, watches a pretty young woman with dark blond hair and dark eyes looking up from the dead body of an enormously fat man whose face is covered with maggots.

“Good Lord,” Dr. Lane says.

The pretty young woman in the video clip looks around, right into the camera, her eyes looking right at Dr. Lane, and the pretty young woman digs her gloved hand in the pocket of the fat, dead man’s gray jacket. There the clip stops, and Dr. Lane plays it again, realizing something.

She looks through the Plexiglas at Kenny Jumper and can barely see his head at the other end of the magnet. He is small and slender in baggy, dark clothes, ill-fitting boots, sort of homeless-looking but delicately handsome with dark-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. His eyes are dark, and Dr. Lane’s realization gets stronger. He looks so much like the girl in the photograph, they could be brother and sister, maybe twins.

“Josh?” Dr. Lane says. “Can you do your favorite little trick with SSD?”

“On him?”

“Yes. Right now,” she says tensely. “Beth, give him the CD of the Helen Quincy case. Right now,” she says.

63

Benton finds it a little curious that a taxicab is parked outside the neuroimaging lab. It is a blue SUV taxi, and no one is inside it. Maybe it is the taxi that was supposed to pick up Kenny Jumper at the Alpha & Omega Funeral Home, but why is the taxi parked here, and where is the driver? Near the taxi is the white prison van that transported Basil here for his five o’clock interview. He’s not doing well. He says he’s feeling very suicidal and wants to quit the study.

“We have so much invested in him,” Benton says to Scarpetta as they walk inside the lab. “You have no idea how bad it is when these people drop out. Especially him. Dammit. Maybe you can be a good influence on him.”

“I’m not even going to comment,” she says.

Two prison guards stand outside the small room where Benton will talk to Basil, try to talk him out of quitting PREDATOR, talk him out of killing himself. The room is part of the MRI suite, the same room Ben ton has used before when he talks to Basil. Scarpetta is reminded that the guards aren’t armed.

She and Benton walk into the interview room. Basil is sitting at the small table. He isn’t restrained, not even with plastic flex-cuffs. She likes PREDATOR even less and she didn’t think that was possible.

“This is Dr. Scarpetta,” Benton says to Basil. “She’s part of the research study team. Do you mind if she sits in?”

“That would be nice,” Basil says.

His eyes seem to spin. They are eerie. They seem to spin as they look at her.

“So tell me what’s going on with you,” Benton says as he and Scarpetta sit down at the table.

“You two are close,” Basil says, looking at her. “I don’t blame you,” he says to Benton. “I tried to drown myself in the toilet and you know what’s funny about that? They didn’t even notice. Isn’t that something. They have this camera spying on me all the time and when I try to kill myself no one sees it.”

He is wearing jeans, tennis shoes and a white shirt. He doesn’t have a belt. He has no jewelry. He isn’t at all what Scarpetta imagined. She thought he would be bigger. He is small and insignificant-looking, slightly built, thinning blond hair, not ugly, just insignificant. She supposes that when he approached his victims, they probably felt the way she does, at least at first. He was nothing, just some nobody with a bland smile. The only thing about him that stands out are his eyes. Right now, they are strange and unsettling.

“Might I ask you a question?” Basil says to her.

“Go ahead.” She isn’t particularly nice to him.

“If I met you on the street and told you to get into my car or I would shoot you, what would you do?”

“Let you shoot me,” she says. “I wouldn’t get into your car.”

Basil looks at Benton and shoots his finger at him as if it’s a gun. “Bingo,” he says. “She’s a keeper. What time is it?”

There is no clock in the room.

“Eleven minutes after five,” Benton says. “We need to talk about why you feel like killing yourself, Basil.”

Two minutes later, Dr. Lane has the Surface Shading Display of Helen Quincy on the computer screen. Next to it is the Surface Shading Display of the so-called normal who is in the magnet.

Kenny Jumper.

Not a minute ago, he asked over the intercom what time it was. Then, not a minute later, he started getting restless, complaining.

BWONK-BWONK-BWONK…in the MRI suite as Josh rotates Kenny Jumper’s pale, hairless, eyeless head. It ends raggedly just below the jaw, as if he has been decapitated, because of the signal ending, because of the coil. Josh rotates the image some more on one screen, tries to duplicate the exact position of Helen Quincy’s hairless, eyeless, decapitated-looking image on another screen.

“Oh boy,” he says.

“I think I need to get out,” Kenny’s voice sounds over the intercom. “What time is it now?”

“Oh boy,” Josh says to Dr. Lane as he rotates the image some more, looking from one screen to the other.

“I have to get out.”

“A little more that way,” Dr. Lane is saying, looking from one screen to the other, back and forth between the pale, eyeless, hairless heads.

“I need to get out!”

“That’s it,” Dr. Lane says. “Oh, my.”

“Whoa!” Josh says.

Basil is getting increasingly restless, glancing at the closed door. Again, he asks what time it is.

“Five seventeen,” Benton says. “You supposed to be somewhere?” he adds ironically.

Where would Basil be? In his cell, no place good. He’s lucky to be here. He doesn’t deserve it.

Basil pulls something out of his sleeve. At first Scarpetta can’t tell what it is and doesn’t understand what is happening, but then he is out of his chair and around to her side of the table and the thing is around her neck. Long and white and thin and around her neck.

“You try one fucking thing and I tighten it like this!” Basil says.

She is aware of Benton standing up and yelling at him. She feels her pulse pounding. Then the door opens. Then Basil is pulling her outside the room and her pulse is pounding and she has her hands around her neck and he has the long, white thing tight around her neck and is pulling her and Benton is shouting and the guards are shouting.

64

Three years ago at McLean, Helen Quincy was diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder.

She may not have fifteen or twenty separate and autonomous alter personalities, maybe just three or four or eight. Benton continues explaining a disorder that is caused by a person splitting with his or her primary personality.

“An adaptive response to overwhelming trauma,” Benton says as he and Scarpetta drive west toward the Everglades. “Ninety-seven percent of people diagnosed with it were sexually or physically abused or both, and women are nine times more likely to suffer DID than men,” he says as the sun turns the windshield white and Scarpetta squints in the glare, despite her sunglasses.

Far ahead, Lucy’s helicopter hovers over an abandoned citrus orchard, a parcel of real estate still owned by the Quincy family—Helen’s uncle, specifically. Adger Quincy. Canker struck the orchard some twenty years ago, and all the grapefruit trees were cut down and burned. Since then, the orchard has sat, overgrown, with its falling-down house, an investment, an eventual housing development. Adger Quincy is still alive, a slight man, rather unimpressive in appearance, extremely religious—a Bible-banger, as Marino puts it.

Adger denies that anything unusual happened when Helen was twelve and went to live with him and his wife while Florrie was hospitalized at McLean. Adger says, as a matter of fact, he was quite attentive to the misguided, uncontrollable young girl who needed to be saved when she lived with them.

I did what I could, did the best I could, he said when Marino taped yesterday’s interview with him.

How did she know about your old orchard, your old house? was one of the questions Marino asked him.

Adger wasn’t inclined to talk about it much, but he did say that now and then he drove twelve-year-old Helen to the old, abandoned orchard so he could check on things.

What things?

To make sure it wasn’t being vandalized or anything.

What was there to vandalize? Ten acres of burned-down trees and weeds and a falling-down house?

There’s not a thing wrong with checking on things. And I would pray with her. Talk to her about the Lord.

“The fact that he said it that way,” Benton comments as he drives and Lucy’s helicopter seems to float down like a feather, about to land, far off over the abandoned orchard that Adger still owns, “indicates he knows he did something wrong.”

“The monster,” Scarpetta says.

“We’ll probably never know exactly what he and perhaps others did to her,” Benton says, subdued as he drives, his jaw set in a hard way.

He’s angry. He’s upset by what he suspects.

“But this much is obvious,” he goes on. “Her various entities, her alters, were her adaptive response to unbearable trauma when there was no one to turn to, the same sort of thing you find in some survivors of concentration camps.”

“The monster.”

“A very sick man. Now a very sick young woman.”

“He shouldn’t get away with it.”

“I’m afraid he already has.”

“I hope he goes to hell,” Scarpetta says.

“He’s probably already in it.”

“Why must you defend him?” She looks over at him and absently rubs her neck.

It is bruised. It is still tender, and every time she touches it, she remembers Basil grabbing her with a homemade white-cloth ligature, briefly occluding the vessels that supply blood, and therefore oxygen, to the brain. She passed out. She is fine. She wouldn’t be if the guards hadn’t gotten Basil off her as quickly as they did.

He and Helen are safely tucked away at Butler. Basil is no longer Benton’s PREDATOR dream subject. Basil won’t be visiting McLean anymore.

“I’m not defending him. I’m trying to explain it,” Benton says.

He slows down on South 27 near an exit that leads to a CITGO truck stop. He turns right onto a narrow dirt road and stops the car. A rusting chain stretches across the dirt road, and there are a lot of tire tracks. Benton gets out and unhooks the thick, rusting chain. It clanks when he tosses it to one side. He drives through, stops, gets out again, and puts the chain back the way it was. The press, the curious, don’t know what’s going on out here yet. Not that a rusting chain will stop the unwelcome and uninvited. But it can’t hurt.

“Some people say once you’ve seen a case or two of DID, you’ve seen them all,” he says. “I happen to disagree, but for something so incredibly complicated and bizarre, the symptoms are remarkably consistent. A dramatic transformation when one alter becomes another, each dominant, each determining behavior. Facial changes, changes in posture, gait, mannerisms, even dramatic alterations of pitch, voice, speech. A disorder often associated with demon possession.”

“Do you think Helen’s alters—Jan, Stevie, whoever paraded as a citrus inspector and shot people to death and God knows who else she is—are aware of each other?”

“When she was at McLean, she denied she was a multiple, even when staff repeatedly witnessed her transforming into alters right in front of them. She suffered auditory and visual hallucinations. On occasion, one alter talked to another right in front of the clinician. Then she was Helen Quincy again, sitting politely, sweetly, in her chair, acting like the psychiatrist was the crazy one for believing she had multiple personalities.”

“I wonder if Helen ever emerges anymore,” Scarpetta says.

“When she and Basil killed her mother, she changed her identity to Jan Hamilton. That was utilitarian, not an alter, Kay. Don’t even think about Jan as a personality, if you understand what I’m saying. It was just a phony ID that Helen, Stevie, Hog and who-knows-what hid behind.”

Dust billows up as they bump over the overgrown dirt road, a dilapidated house in the distance, weeds and brush everywhere.

“I suspect that, figuratively speaking, Helen Quincy stopped existing when she was twelve,” Scarpetta says.

Lucy’s helicopter has settled in a small clearing, the blades still turning as she shuts down the engine. Parked near the house are a removal-service van, three marked police cruisers, two Academy SUVs and Reba’s Ford LTD.

The Sea Breeze Resort is too far inland to catch a breeze from the sea, and it isn’t a resort. There isn’t even a swimming pool. According to the man at the desk inside the dingy front office with its rattling air conditioner and plastic plants, long-term rentals get special discounts.

He says Jan Hamilton kept odd hours, disappearing for days, especially of late, and at times she dressed strangely. Sexy one minute, sort of in drag the next.

My motto? Live and let live, the man at the desk said when Marino tracked Jan here.

It wasn’t hard. After she crawled out of the magnet and the guards had Basil on the floor and it was all over, she cowered in a corner and started to cry. She wasn’t Kenny Jumper anymore, had never heard of him, denied having any idea what anybody was talking about, including knowing Basil, including why she was on the floor inside the MRI suite at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. She was very polite and cooperative with Benton, gave him her address, said she worked as a part-time bartender in South Beach, a restaurant called Rumors owned by a very nice man named Laurel Swift.

Marino crouches before the open closet. It doesn’t have a door, just a rod for hanging clothes. On the soiled carpet are stacks of clothing, neatly folded. He goes through them with gloved hands, sweat dripping in his eyes, the window-unit air conditioner not doing a very good job.

“One long black coat with a hood,” he says to Gus, one of Lucy’s Special Ops agents. “Sounds familiar.”

He hands the folded coat to Gus, who places it inside a brown paper bag, writes the date and item and where it was found. There are dozens of brown paper bags by now, all sealed with evidence tape. Basically, they are packing up Jan’s entire room. Marino wrote the search warrant from hell: Put everything in it and the kitchen sink, in his words.

His big, gloved hands sort through more clothing, shabby, baggy men’s clothing, a pair of shoes with the heels cut out, a Miami Dolphins cap, a white shirt with Department of Agriculture on the back, that’s all, not the full name of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, just Department of Agriculture, the block printing hand-done with what Marino guesses was a Sharpie.

“How could you not know he was really a she?” Gus asks him, sealing another bag.

“You weren’t there.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Gus says, holding out his hand, waiting for the next thing, a pair of black panty hose.

Gus is armed and dressed in fatigues, because that is how Lucy’s Special Ops agents always dress, even if it is unnecessary, and on an eighty-five-degree day when the suspect, a twenty-year-old girl, is safely locked up in a state hospital in Massachusetts, it probably wasn’t necessary to deploy four Special Ops agents to the Sea Breeze Resort. But that was what Lucy wanted. That was what her agents wanted. No matter how detailed Marino has been in his explanation of what Benton relayed to him about Helen’s different personalities or alters, as Benton calls them, the agents don’t quite believe there aren’t other dangerous people running around, that maybe Helen has accomplices—like Basil Jenrette, they point out—who are real.

Two of her agents are going through a computer on a desk by a window that looks out over the parking lot. There is also a scanner, a color printer, packages of magazine-grade paper and half a dozen fishing magazines.

Planks on the front porch are warped, some of them rotted, others missing, exposing the sandy soil beneath the one-story paint-peeled frame house not far from the Everglades.

It is quiet, save for the distant traffic that sounds like gusting wind, and the scraping and stabbing of shovels. Death pollutes the air and in the heat of the late afternoon seems to shimmer darkly in waves that get worse the closer one gets to the pits. The agents, the police and scientists have found four of them. Based on soil disturbances and discoloration, there are more.

Scarpetta and Benton are in the foyer just inside the door, where there is a fish tank and a large, dead spider curled up on a rock. Leaning against a wall is a Mossberg twelve-gauge shotgun and five boxes of cartridges. Scarpetta and Benton watch two men, sweating in suits and ties and blue nitrile gloves, push a stretcher bearing the pouched remains of Ev Christian, wheels clattering. They stop at the wide-open door.

“When you get her to the morgue,” Scarpetta says to them, “I’m going to need you to come right back.”

“We figured that. I believe it’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” one attendant says to her.

“You got your work cut out for you,” says the other.

They fold up the legs with loud clacks and carry the stretcher bearing Ev Christian toward the dark-blue van.

“How’s this going to end up in court?” one of the attendants thinks to ask from the bottom of the steps. “I mean, if this lady’s a suicide, how do you charge someone with murder if it’s a suicide?”

“We’ll see you shortly,” Scarpetta says.

The men hesitate, then move on, and she watches Lucy appear from the back of the house. She has on protective clothing and dark glasses but has taken off her face mask and gloves. She trots toward the helicopter, the one where she left her Treo not long after Joe Amos began his fellowship.

“There’s really nothing to say she didn’t do it,” Scarpetta says to Benton as she opens packets of disposable protective clothing—a set for her, a set for him—and by she, Scarpetta means Helen Quincy.

“Nothing to say she did, either. They’re right.” Benton stares at the stretcher and its grim cargo as the attendants clack open the aluminum legs again so they can open the back of the van. “A suicide that’s a homicide, the perpetrator DID. The lawyers will have a field day.”

The stretcher lists on the sandy, weed-choked soil, and Scarpetta worries it might fall over. It’s happened before, a pouched body lands on the ground, very inappropriate, very disrespectful. She is getting more anxious by the moment.

“The autopsy will probably show she is a death by hanging,” she says, looking out at the bright, hot afternoon and the activity in it, watching Lucy get something out of the back of the helicopter, an ice chest.

The same helicopter where she left her Treo, an act of forgetfulness that in many ways started everything and led everybody here to this hellhole, this plague pit.

“That’s probably all it will show in terms of what killed her,” Scarpetta is saying. “But the rest of it is a different story.”

The rest of it is Ev’s pain and suffering, her naked, bloated body tethered by ropes looped over a rafter, one of them looped around her neck. She is covered by insect bites and rashes, her wrists and ankles with fulminating infections. When Scarpetta palpated her head, she felt bits of fractured bone move beneath her fingers, the woman’s face pulverized, her scalp lacerated, contusions all over her, reddish abraded areas inflicted at or around the time of death. Scarpetta suspects that Jan or Stevie or Hog, or whoever she was when she tortured Ev inside this house, kicked Ev’s body severely and repeatedly after discovering she had hanged herself. On Ev’s lower back, belly and buttocks are faint impressions in the shape of a shoe or boot.

Reba comes around from the side of the house and carefully climbs the rotting steps and picks her way across the porch. She is bright white in her disposable clothing and pushes up her face mask. She’s carrying a brown paper bag, neatly folded at the top.

“There’s some black plastic trash bags,” she says. “In a separate grave, a shallow one. And a couple Christmas ornaments inside. Broken, but it looks like Snoopy in a Santa cap and maybe Little Red Riding Hood.”

“That’s how many bodies?” Benton says, and he has gone into his mode.

When death, even the most vile death, is in his face, he doesn’t flinch. He appears rational and calm. He almost appears not to care, as if the Snoopy and Little Red Riding Hood ornaments are just more information to file away.

He might be rational but he isn’t calm. Scarpetta saw the way he was in the car just a few hours ago and more recently inside this house when they began to realize far more clearly the nature of the original crime, the one that happened when Helen Quincy was twelve. In the kitchen is a rusting refrigerator, and in it are Yoo-hoo chocolate drinks, Nehi grape and orange sodas and a carton of chocolate milk with expiration dates that go back eight years, when Helen was twelve and forced to stay with her aunt and uncle. There are dozens of pornographic magazines from that same period of time, suggesting that the devoutly religious Sunday-school teacher, Adger, quite likely brought his young niece out here not once. But often.

“Well, the two boys,” Reba is saying, her face mask moving on her chin when she talks. “Looks to me like their heads are bashed in. But that’s not my department,” she says to Scarpetta. “Then some commingled remains. Nude it looks to me, but there’s clothes in there, too. Not on them but in the pits, like maybe they dumped some of their victims in there and then just tossed in their clothing.”

“Obviously, he killed more than he said,” Benton says as Reba opens the paper bag. “Posed some, buried some.”

She holds open the bag so Scarpetta and Benton can see the snorkel and dirty pink Keds sneaker, a girl’s size, inside it.

“Matches the shoe up there on the mattress,” Reba says. “Found this one in a hole we assumed was going to have more bodies. Nothing in it but this.” She indicates the snorkel, the pink shoe. “Lucy found it. I got not a clue.”

“I’m afraid I probably do,” Scarpetta says, lifting out the snorkel and the little girl’s shoe with her gloved hands, imagining twelve-year-old Helen in that hole as dirt is being shoveled in, a snorkel her only means of air as her uncle tortured her.

“Shutting children in trunks, chaining them in basements, burying them with nothing but a hose leading to the surface,” Scarpetta says as Reba looks at her.

“No wonder she’s all these people,” Benton says, not so stoic now. “Fucking bastard.”

Reba turns away, stares off, swallowing. She gets hold of herself as she folds the top of the brown paper bag, slowly, neatly.

“Well,” she says, clearing her throat. “We got cold drinks. We haven’t touched anything. Didn’t open the trash bags in the pit with the Snoopy ornament, but by the feel and smell of them, there’s body parts in there. One of them has a tear and you can see what looks to me like matted red hair—that kind of dyed henna red color? An arm and a sleeve. I think this one’s dressed. The rest sure aren’t. Diet Cokes, Gatorade and water. I’m taking orders. Or if you want something else, we can send someone. Well, maybe not.”

She looks toward the back of the house, toward the pits. She keeps swallowing and blinking, her lower lip trembling.

“I don’t think any of us are exactly socially acceptable right now,” she adds, clearing her throat again. “Probably shouldn’t be walking into a 7-Eleven smelling like this. I just don’t see how…if he did that, we got to get him. They should do to him the same damn thing he did to her! Bury him alive only don’t give him a goddamn snorkel to breathe! Cut his fucking balls off!”

“Let’s get suited up,” Scarpetta says quietly, to Benton.

They unfold disposable white coveralls, start putting them on.

“No way we can prove it,” Reba says. “No damn way.”

“Don’t be so sure of that,” Scarpetta says, handing Benton shoe covers. “He left an awful lot in there, never thinking we’d come looking.”

They cover their hair with caps and go down the warped old steps, pulling on gloves, covering their faces with the face masks.

Patricia Cornwell is one of the world’s major international bestselling authors, translated into thirty-six languages in more than fifty countries. She is a founder of the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine, a founding member of the National Forensic Academy, and a member of the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital’s National Council, where she is an advocate for psychiatric research. In 2008, Cornwell won the Galaxy British Book Awards’s Books Direct Crime Thriller of the Year—the first American ever to win this prestigious award. Her most recent bestsellers include Scarpetta, Book of the Dead, and The Front. Her earlier works include Postmortem—the only novel to win five major crime awards in a single year—and Cruel & Unusual, which won the coveted Gold Dagger Award in 1993. Dr. Kay Scarpetta herself won the 1999 Sherlock Award for the best detective created by an American author.