The Body Farm

On the sixteenth of October, shadowy deer crept to the edge of dark woods beyond my window as the sun peeked over the cover of the night.

Plumbing above and below me groaned, and one by one other rooms went bright as sharp tattoos from ranges I could not see riddled the dawn.

I had gone to sleep and gotten up to the sound of gunfire. It is a noise that never stops in Quantico, Virginia, where the FBI Academy is an island surrounded by Marines. Several days a month I stayed on the Academy's security floor, where no one could call me unless I wanted them to or follow me after too many beers in the Boardroom.

Unlike the Spartan dormitory rooms occupied by new agents and visiting police, in my suite were TV, kitchen, telephone, and a bathroom I did not have to share. Smoking and alcohol were not allowed, but I suspected that the spies and protected witnesses typically sequestered here obeyed the rules about as well as I did.

As coffee heated in the microwave, I opened my briefcase to retrieve a file that had been waiting for me when I had checked in last night. I had not reviewed it yet for I could not bring myself to wrap my mind around such a thing, to take such a thing to bed. In that way I had changed.

Since medical school, I had been accustomed to exposing myself to any trauma at any hour. I had worked around the clock in emergency rooms and performed autopsies alone in the morgue until dawn. Sleep had always been a brief export to some dark, vacant place I rarely later recalled. Then gradually over the years something perniciously shifted. I began to dread working late at night, and was prone to bad dreams when terrible images from my life popped up in the slot machine of my unconscious.

Emily Steiner was eleven, her dawning sexuality a blush on her slight body, when she wrote in her diary two Sundays before, on October 1:

Oh, I'm' so happy! Its almost 1 in the morning and Mom doesnt know I'm' writing in my diary because I'm' in bed with the flash light. We went to the cover dish supper at the church and Wren was there! I could tell he noticed me. Then he gave me a fireball! I saved it while he wasn't looking. Its in my secret box. This afternoon we have youth group and he wants me to meet him early and not tell anyone!

At three-thirty that afternoon, Emily left her house in Black Mountain, just east of Asheville, and began the two-mile walk to the church. After the meeting, other children recalled seeing her leave alone as the sun slipped below the foothills at six p. m. She veered off the main road, guitar case in hand, and took a shortcut around a small lake. Investigators believed it was during this walk she encountered the man who hours later would steal her life. Perhaps she stopped to talk to him. Perhaps she was unaware of his presence in the gathering shadows as she hurried home.

In Black Mountain, a western North Carolina town of seven thousand people, local police had worked very few homicides or sexual assaults of children.

They had never worked a case that was both. They had never thought about Temple Brooks Gault of Albany, Georgia, though his face smiled from Ten Most Wanted lists posted across the land.

Notorious criminals and their crimes had never been a concern in this picturesque part of the world known for Thomas Wolfe and Billy Graham.

I did not understand what would have drawn Gault there or to a frail child named Emily who was lonely for her father and a boy named Wren.

But when Gault had gone on his murderous spree in Richmond two years before, his choices had seemed just as devoid of rationality. In fact, they still did not make sense.

Leaving my suite, I passed through sun-filled glass corridors as memories of Gault's bloody career in Richmond seemed to darken the morning. Once he had been within my reach. I literally could have touched him, for a flicker, before he had fled through a window and was gone. I had not been armed on that occasion, and it was not my business to go around shooting people anyway. But I had not been able to shake the chill of doubt that had settled over my spirit back then.

I had not stopped wondering what more I could have done.

Wine has never known a good year at the Academy, and I regretted drinking several glasses of it in the Boardroom the night before. My morning run along J. Edgar Hoover Road was worse than usual. Oh, God, I thought. I'm not going to make it. Marines were setting up camouflage canvas chairs and telescopes on roadsides overlooking ranges. I felt bold male eyes as I slowly jogged past, and knew the gold Department of Justice crest on my navy T-shirt was duly noted.

The soldiers probably assumed I was a female agent or visiting cop, and it disturbed me to imagine my niece running this same route. I wished Lucy had picked another place to intern. Clearly, I had influenced her life, and very little frightened me quite as much as that did. It had become my habit to worry about her during workouts when I was in agony and aware of growing old.

HRT, the Bureau's Hostage Rescue Team, was out on maneuvers, helicopter blades dully batting air. A pickup truck hauling shot-up doors roared past, followed by another caravan of soldiers. Turning around, I began the one-and-a-half-mile stretch back to the Academy, which could have passed for a modern tan brick hotel were it not for its rooftops of antennas and location out in the middle of a wooded nowhere.

When at last I reached the guard booth, I veered around tire shredders and lifted my hand in a weary salute to the officer behind glass.

Breathless and sweating, I was contemplating walking the rest of the way in when I sensed a car slowing at my rear.

"You trying to commit suicide or something?" Captain Pete Marino said loudly across the Armor-Ailed front seat of his silver Crown Victoria.

Radio antennas bobbed like fishing rods, and despite countless lectures from me, he wasn't wearing his seat belt.

"There are easier ways than this," I said through his open passenger's window.

"Not fastening your seat belt, for example."

"Never know when I might have to bail out of my ride in a hurry."

"If you get in a wreck, you'll certainly bail out in a hurry," I said. "Probably through the windshield."

An experienced homicide detective in Richmond, where both of us were headquartered, Marino recently had been promoted and assigned to the First Precinct, the bloodiest section of the city. He had been involved with the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, or VI CAP for years.

In his early fifties, he was a casualty of concentrated doses of tainted human nature, bad diet, and drink, his face etched by hardship and fringed with thinning gray hair. Marino was overweight, out of shape, and not known for a sweet disposition. I knew he was here for the Steiner consultation, but wondered about the luggage in his backseat.

"Are you staying for a while?" I asked.

"Benton signed me up for Street Survival."

"You and who else?" I asked, for the purpose of Street Survival was not to train individuals but task forces.

"Me and my precinct's entry team."

"Please don't tell me part of your new job description is kicking in doors."

"One of the pleasures of being promoted is finding your ass back in uniform and out on the street. In case you haven't noticed. Doc, they ain't using Saturday Night Specials out there anymore."

"Thank you for the tip," I said dryly.

"Be sure to wear thick clothing."

"Huh?" His eyes, blacked out by sunglasses, scanned mirrors as other cars crept past.

"Paint bullets hurt."

"I don't plan on getting hit."

"I don't know anyone who plans on it."

"When did you get in?" he asked me.

"Last night."

Marino slid a pack of cigarettes from his visor.

"You been told much?"

"I've looked at a few things. Apparently the detectives from North Carolina are bringing in most of the case records this morning."

"It's Gault. It's gotta be."

"Certainly there are parallels," I said cautiously. Knocking out a Marlboro, he clamped it between his lips.

"I'm going to nail that goddam son of a bitch if I have to go to hell to find him."

"If you find out he's in hell, I wish you'd just leave him there," I said.

"Are you free for lunch?"

"As long as you're buying."

"I always buy." I stated a fact.

"And you always should." He slipped the car into drive.

"You're a goddam doctor."

I trotted and walked to the track, cut across it and let myself into the back of the gym. Inside the locker room three young, fit women in various stages of nudity glanced at me as I walked in.

"Good morning, ma'am," they said in unison, instantly identifying themselves.

Drug Enforcement Administration agents were notorious around the Academy for their annoyingly chivalrous greetings. I self-consciously began taking off wet clothes, having never grown accustomed to the rather male militaristic attitude here, where women did not think twice about chatting or showing off their bruises with nothing on but the lights. Clutching a towel tightly, I hurried to the showers. I had just turned on the water when a pair of familiar green eyes peeked around the plastic curtain, startling me. The soap shot out of my hands and skidded across the tile floor, stopping near my niece's muddy Nikes.

"Lucy, can we chat after I get out?" I yanked the curtain shut.

"Geez, Len just about killed me this morning," she said happily as she booted the soap back into the stall.

"It was great. Next time we run the Yellow Brick Road I'll ask him if you can come."

"No, thank you." I massaged shampoo into my hair.

"I have no desire for torn ligaments and broken bones."

"Well, you really should run it once. Aunt Kay. It's a rite of passage up here."

"Not for me it isn't."

Lucy was silent for a moment, then uncertain when she said, "I need to ask you something."

Rinsing my hair and pushing it out of my eyes, I gathered the curtain and looked out. My niece was standing back from the stall, filthy and sweaty from head to toe, blood smudging her gray FBI T-shirt. At twenty-one, she was about to graduate from the University of Virginia, her face honed into a beautiful sharpness, her short auburn hair brightened by the sun. I remembered when her hair was long and red, when she wore braces and was fat.

"They want me to come back after graduation," she said.

"Mr. Wesley's written a proposal and there's a good chance the Feds will approve."

"What's your question?" Ambivalence kicked in hard again.

"I just wondered what you thought about it."

"You know there's a hiring freeze."

Lucy looked closely at me, trying to read information I did not want her to have.

"I couldn't be a new agent straight out of college anyway," she said.

"The point is to get me into ERF

now, maybe through a grant. As for what I'll do after that"--she shrugged" who knows? "

ERF was the Bureau's recently built Engineering Research Facility, an austere complex o the same grounds as the Academy. The workings within were classified, and it chagrined me a little that I was the chief medical examiner of Virginia, the consulting forensic pathologist for the Bureau's Investigative Support Unit, and had never been cleared to enter hallways my young niece passed through every day.

Lucy took off her running shoes and shorts, and pulled her shirt and sports bra over her head.

"We'll continue this conversation later," I said as I stepped out of the shower and she stepped in.

"Ouch!" she complained as spray hit her injuries.

"Use lots of soap and water. How did you do that to your hand?"

"I slipped coming down a bank and the rope got me."

"We really should put some alcohol on that."

"No way."

"What time will you leave ERF?"

"I don't know. Depends."

"I'll see you before I head back to Richmond," I promised as I returned to the lockers and began drying my hair. Scarcely a minute later, Lucy, not given to modesty either, trotted past me wearing nothing but the Breitling watch I'd given her for her birthday.

"Shit!" she said under her breath as she began yanking on her clothes.

"You wouldn't believe everything I've got to do today. Repartition the hard disk, reload the whole thing because I keep running out of space, allocate more, change a bunch of files. I just hope we don't have any more hardware problems." She complained on unconvincingly. Lucy loved every minute of what she did every day. "} saw Marino when I was out running. He's up for the week," I said.

"Ask him if he wants to do some shooting." She tossed her running shoes inside her locker and shut the door with an enthusiastic clang.

"I have a feeling he'll be doing plenty of that." My words followed her out as half a dozen more DEA agents walked in, dressed in black.

"Good morning, ma'am." Laces whipped against leather as they took off their boots.

By the time I was dressed and had dropped my gym bag back in my room, it was quarter past nine and I was late.

Leaving through two sets of security doors, I hurried down three flights of stairs, boarded the elevator in the gun-cleaning room, and descended sixty feet into the Academy's lower level, where I routinely waded through hell.

Inside the conference room, nine police investigators, FBI profilers, and a VI CAP analyst sat at a long oak table. I pulled out a chair next to Marino as comments caromed around the room.

"This guy knows a hell of a lot about forensic evidence."

"And anybody who's served time does."

"What's important is he's extremely comfortable with this type of behavior."

"That suggests to me he's never served time."

I added my file to other case material going around the room and whispered to one of the profilers that I wanted a photocopy of Emily Steiner's diary.

"Yeah, well, I disagree," Marino said.

"The fact someone's done time don't mean he fears he's going to do time again."

"Most people would fear it--you know, the proverbial cat on the hot stove."

"Gault ain't most people. He likes hot stoves." I was passed a stack of laser prints of the Steiners' ranch-style house. In back, a first-floor window had been pried open, and through it the assailant had entered a small laundry room of white linoleum and blue-checked walls.

"If we consider the neighborhood, the family, the victim herself, then Gault's getting bolder."

I followed a carpeted hallway into the master bedroom, where the decor was pastel prints of tiny bouquets of violets and loose flying balloons. I counted six pillows on the canopied bed and several more on a closet shelf.

"We're talking about a real small window of vulnerability here." The bedroom with its little girl decor belonged to Emily's mother, Denesa. According to her police statement, she had awakened at gunpoint around two a. m.

"He may be taunting us."

"It wouldn't be the first time."

Mrs. Steiner described her attacker as of medium height and build.

Because he was wearing gloves, a mask, long pants, and a jacket, she was uncertain about race. He gagged and bound her with blaze orange duct tape and put her in the closet. Then he went down the hall to Emily's room, where he snatched her from her bed and disappeared with her in the dark early morning.

"I think we should be careful about getting too hung up on this guy.

On Gault. "

"Good point. We need to keep an open mind."

I interrupted.

"The mother's bed is made?"

The conversation stopped.

A middle-aged investigator with a dissipated, florid face said,

"Affirmative," as his shrewd gray eyes alighted, like an insect, on my ash-blond hair, my lips, the gray cravat peeking out of the open collar of my gray-and-white-striped blouse. His gaze continued its surveillance, traveling down to my hands, where he glanced at my gold Intaglio seal ring and the finger that bore no sign of a wedding band.

"I'm Dr. Scarpetta," I said, introducing myself to him without a trace of warmth as he stared at my chest.

"Max Ferguson, State Bureau of Investigation, Asheville."

"And I'm Lieutenant Hershel Mote, Black Mountain Police." A man crisply dressed in khaki and old enough to retire leaned across the table to offer a big calloused hand.

"Sure is a pleasure. Doc. I've heard right much about ya."

"Apparently" --Ferguson addressed the group-- "Mrs. Steiner made her bed before the police arrived."

"Why?" I inquired.

"Modesty, maybe," offered Liz Myre, the only woman profiler in the unit.

"She's already had one stranger in her bedroom. Now she's got cops coming in."

"How was she dressed when the police got there?" I asked. Ferguson glanced over a report.

"A zip-up pink robe and socks."

"This was what she had worn to bed?" a familiar voice sounded behind me.

Unit Chief Benton Wesley shut the conference room door as he briefly met my eyes. Tall and trim, with sharp features and silver hair, he was dressed in a single-breasted dark suit and was loaded down with paperwork and carousels of slides. No one spoke as he briskly took his chair at the head of the table and jotted several notes with a Mont Blanc pen.

Wesley repeated, without looking up, "Do we know if this was the way she was dressed when the assault took place? Or did she put on the robe after the fact?"

"I'd call it more a gown than a robe," Mote spoke up.

"Flannel material, long sleeves, down to her ankles, zipper up the front."

"She didn't have on nothing under it except panties," Ferguson offered.

"I won't ask you how you know that," Marino said.

"Parity line, no bra. The state pays me to be observant. The Feds, for the record" --he looked around the table"--don't pay me for shit."

"Nobody should pay for your shit unless you eat gold," Marino said.

Ferguson got out a pack of cigarettes.

"Anybody mind if I smoke?"

"I mind. "

"Yeah, me, too."

"Kay." Wesley slid a thick manila envelope my way.

"Autopsy reports, more photos."

"Laser prints?" I asked, and I was not keen on them, for like dot matrix images, they are satisfactory only from a distance.

"Nope. The real McCoy."

"Good."

"We're looking for offender traits and strategies?" Wesley glanced around the table as several people nodded.

"And we have a viable suspect. Or I'm assuming we're assuming we do."

"No question in my mind," Marino said.

"Let's go through the crime scene, then the victimology," Wesley went on as he began perusing paperwork.

"And I think it's best we keep the names of known offenders out of the mix for the moment." He surveyed us over his reading glasses.

"Do we have a map?" Ferguson passed out photocopies.

"The victim's house and the church are marked. So is the path we think she took around the lake on her way home from the church meeting."

Emily Steiner could have passed for eight or nine with her tiny fragile face and form. When her most recent school photograph had been taken last spring, she had worn a buttoned-up kelly green sweater; her flaxen hair was parted on one side and held in place with a barrette shaped like a parrot.

To our knowledge, no other photographs were taken of her until the clear Saturday morning of October 7, when an old man arrived at Lake Tomahawk to enjoy a little fishing. As he set up a lawn chair on a muddy ledge close to the water, he noticed a small pink sock protruding from nearby brush. The sock, he realized, was attached to a foot.

"We proceeded down the path," Ferguson was saying, and he was showing slides now, the shadow of his ballpoint pen pointing on the screen, "and located the body here."

"And that's how far from the church and her house?"

"About a mile from either one, if you drive. A little less than that as a crow flies."

"And the path around the lake would be as a crow flies?"

"Pretty much."

Ferguson resumed.

"She's lying with her head in a northernly direction. We have a sock partially on the left foot, a sock on the other. We have a watch. We have a necklace. She was wearing blue flannel pajamas and panties, and to this day they have not been found.

This is a close-up of the injury to the rear of her skull. " The shadow of the pen moved, and above us through thick walls muffled gunshots sounded from the indoor range.

Emily Steiner's body was nude. Upon close inspection by the Buncombe County medical examiner, it was determined that she had been sexually assaulted, and large dark shiny patches on her inner thighs, upper chest, and shoulder were areas of missing flesh. She also had been gagged and bound with blaze orange duct tape, her cause of death a single small-caliber gunshot wound to the back of the head. Ferguson showed slide after slide, and as images of the girl's pale body in the rushes flashed in the dark, there was silence. No investigator I'd ever met had ever gotten used to maimed and murdered children.

"Do we know the weather conditions in Black Mountain from October one through the seventh?" I asked.

"Overcast. Low forties at night, upper fifties during the day," Ferguson replied.

"Mostly."

"Mostly?" I looked at him.

"On the average," he enunciated slowly as the lights went back on.

"You know, you add the temperatures together and divide by the number of days."

"Agent Ferguson, any significant fluctuation matters," I said with a dispassion that belied my growing dislike of this man.

"Even one day of unusually high temperatures, for example, would alter the condition of the body."

Wesley began a new page of notes. When he paused, he looked at me.

"Dr. Scarpetta, if she was killed shortly after she was abducted, how decomposed should she have been when she was found on October seventh?"

"Under the conditions described, I would expect her to be moderately decomposed," I said.

"I also would expect insect activity, possibly other postmortem damage, depending on how accessible the body was to carnivores."

"In other words, she should be in a lot worse shape than this" --he tapped photographs"--if she'd been dead six days."

"More decomposed than this, yes."

Perspiration glistened at Wesley's hairline and had dampened the collar of his starched white shirt. Veins were prominent in his forehead and neck.

"I'm right surprised no dogs got to her."

"Well, now. Max, I'm not. This ain't the city, with mangy strays everywhere. We keep our dogs penned in or on a leash." Marino indulged in his dreadful habit of picking apart his Styrofoam coffee cup.

Her body was so pale it was almost gray, with greenish discoloration in the right lower quadrant. Fingertips were dry, the skin receding from the nails.

There was slippage of her hair and the skin of her feet. I saw no evidence of defense injuries, no cuts, bruises, or broken nails that might indicate a struggle.

"The trees and other vegetation would have shielded her from the sun," I commented as vague shadows drifted over my thoughts.

"And it doesn't appear that her wounds bled out much, if at all, otherwise I would expect more predator activity."

"We're assuming she was killed somewhere else," Wesley interpolated.

"Absence of blood, missing clothing, location of the body, and so on would indicate she was molested and shot elsewhere, then dumped. Can you tell if the missing flesh was done postmortem?"

"At or around the time of death," I repl ed.

"To remove bite marks again?"

"I can't tell you that from what I have here."

"In your opinion, are the injuries similar to Eddie Heath's?" Wesley referred to the thirteen-year-old boy Temple Gault had murdered in Richmond.

"Yes." I opened another envelope and withdrew a stack of autopsy photographs bound in rubber bands.

"In both cases we have skin excised from shoulder, upper inner thigh. And Eddie Heath was shot in the head, his body dumped."

"It also strikes me that despite the gender differences, the body types of the girl and boy are similar. Heath was small, prepubescent.

The Steiner girl is very small, almost prepubescent. " I pointed out," A difference worth noting is that there are no crisscrosses, no shallow cuts at the margins of the Steiner girl's wounds. "

Marino explained to the North Carolina officers, "In the Heath case, we think Gault first tried to eradicate bite marks by slicing through them with a knife. Then he figures that's not doing the job so he removes pieces of skin about the size of my shirt pocket. This time, with the little girl he's snatched, maybe he just cuts out the bite marks and is done with it."

"You know, I really am uncomfortable with these assumptions. We can't assume it's Gault."

"It's been almost two years, Liz. I doubt Gault got born again or has been working for the Red Cross."

"You don't know that he hasn't. Bundy worked in a crisis center."

"And God talked to the Son of Sam."

"I can assure you God told Berkowitz nothing," Wesley said flatly.

"My point is that maybe Gault--if it's Gault--just cut out the bite marks this time."

"Well, it's true. Like in anything else, these guys get better with practice."

"Lord, I hope this guy don't get any better." Mote dabbed his upper lip with a folded handkerchief.

"Are we about ready to profile this thing?" Wesley glanced around the table.

"Would you go for white male?"

"It's a predominantly white neighborhood."

"Absolutely."

"Age?"

"He's logical and that adds years on."

"I agree. I don't think we're talking about a youthful offender here."

"I'd start with twenties. Maybe late twenties."

"I'd go with late twenties to mid-thirties."

"He's very organized. His weapon of choice, for example, is one he brought with him versus something he found at the scene. And it doesn't look as if he had any trouble controlling his victim."

"According to family members and friends, Emily wouldn't have been hard to control. She was shy, easily frightened."

"Plus, she had a history of being sick, in and out of doctors' offices. She was accustomed to being compliant with adults. In other words, she pretty much did what she was told."

"Not always." Wesley's face was expressionless as he perused the pages of the dead girl's diary.

"She didn't want her mother to know she was up at one a.m." in bed with a flashlight. Nor does it appear she planned to tell her mother she was going to the church meeting early that Sunday afternoon. Do we know if this boy, Wren, showed up early as planned? "

"He didn't show until the meeting started at five."

"What about Emily's relationships with other boys?"

"She had typical eleven-year-old relationships. Do you love me? Circle yes or no."

"What's wrong with that?" Marino asked, and everybody laughed. I continued arranging photographs in front of me like tarot cards as my uneasiness grew.

The gunshot wound to the back of the head had entered the right parietal-temporal region of the skull, lacerating the dura and a branch of the middle meningeal artery. Yet there was no contusion, no subdural or epidural hematomas. Nor was there vital reaction to injuries of the genitalia.

"How many hotels are there in your area?"

"I reckon around ten. Now a couple are bed-and- breakfast places, homes where you can get a room."

"Have you been keeping up with registered guests?"

"To tell you the truth, we hadn't thought about that."

"If Gaulfs in town, he's got to be staying somewhere." Her laboratory reports were equally perplexing: vitreous sodium level elevated to 180, potassium 58 milli equivalents per liter.

"Max, let's start with the Travel-Eze. In fact, if you'll do it, I'll hit the Acorn and Apple Blossom. Might want to try the Mountaineer, too, though that's a little farther down the road."

"Gault's most likely to stay in a place where he has maximum anonymity. He's not going to want the staff noticing his coming and going."

"Well, he's not going to have a whole lot of choice. We don't have nothing all that big."

"Probably not the Red Rocker or Blackberry Inn."

"I wouldn't think so, but we'll check'em out anyway."

"What about Asheville? They must have a few large hotels."

"They got all kinds of things since they passed liquor by the drink."

"You thinking he took the girl to his room and killed her there?"

"No. Absolutely not."

"You can't hold a little kid hostage like that somewhere and not have someone notice. Like housekeeping, room service."

"That's why it would surprise me if Gault's staying in a hotel. The cops started looking for Emily right after she was kidnapped. It was all over the news."

The autopsy had been performed by Dr. James Jenrette, the medical examiner who had been called to the scene. A hospital pathologist in Asheville, Jenrette was under contract with the state to perform forensic autopsies on the rare occasion such a need might arise in the cloistered foothills of western North Carolina. His summary that "some findings were unexplained by the gunshot wound to the head" was simply not enough. I slipped off my glasses and rubbed the bridge of my nose as Benton Wesley spoke.

"What about tourist cabins, rental properties in your area?"

"Yes, sir," Mote answered.

"Lots and lots of them." He turned to Ferguson.

"Max, I reckon we'd better check them, too. Get a list, see who's been renting what."

I knew Wesley sensed my troubled mood when he said, "Dr. Scarpetta?

You look like you have something to add. "

"I'm perplexed by the absence of vital reaction to any of her injuries," I said.

"And though the condition of her body suggests she has been dead only several days, her electrolytes don't fit her physical findings..."

"Her what?" Mote's expression went blank.

"Her sodium is high, and since sodium stays fairly stable after death, we can conclude that her sodium was high at the time of her death."

"What does that mean?"

"It could mean she was profoundly dehydrated," I said.

"And by the way, she was underweight for her age. Do we know anything about a possible eating disorder? Had she been sick? Vomiting? Diarrhea? A history of taking diuretics? " I scanned the faces around the table.

When no one replied, Ferguson said, "I'll run it by the mother. I gotta talk to her anyway when I get back."

"Her potassium is elevated," I went on.

"And this also needs to be explained, because vitreous potassium becomes elevated incrementally and predictably after death as cell walls leak and release it."

"Vitreous?" Mote asked.

"The fluid of the eye is very reliable for testing because it's isolated, protected, and therefore less subject to contamination, putrefaction," I answered.

"The point is, her potassium level suggests she's been dead longer than her other findings indicate."

"How long?" Wesley asked.

"Six or seven days."

"Could there be any other explanation for this?"

"Exposure to extreme heat that would have escalated decomposition," I replied.

"Well, that's not going to be it."

"Or an error," I added.

"Can you check it out?"

I nodded.

"Doc Jenrette thinks the bullet in her brain killed her instantly," Ferguson announced.

"Seems to me you get killed instantly and there's not going to be any vital reaction."

"The problem," I explained, "is this injury to her brain should not have been instantly fatal."

"How long could she have survived with it?" Mote wanted to know.

"Hours," I replied.

"Other possibilities?" Wesley said to me.

"Commotio cerebri. It's like an electrical short circuit--you get a bang on the head, die instantly, and we can't find much if any injury." I paused.

"Or it could be that all of her injuries are postmortem, including the gunshot wound." Everybody let that sink in for a moment. Marino's coffee cup was a small pile of Styrofoam snow, the ashtray in front of him littered with wadded gum wrappers. He said, "You find anything to indicate maybe she was smothered first?"

I told him I had not.

He began clicking his ballpoint pen open and shut.

"Let's talk about her family some more. What do we know about the father besides he's deceased?"

"He was a teacher at Broad River Christian Academy in Swannanoa."

"Same place Emily went?"

"Nope. She went to the public elementary school in Black Mountain. Her daddy died about a year ago," Mote added.

"I noticed that," I said.

"His name was Charles?" Mote nodded.

"What was his cause of death?" I asked.

"I'm not sure. But it was natural."

Ferguson added, "He had a heart condition." Wesley got up and moved to the white board

"Okay." He uncapped a black Magic Marker and began writing.

"Let's go over the details. Victim's from a middle-class family, white, age eleven, last seen by her peers around six o'clock in the afternoon of October 1 when she walked home alone from a church meeting. On this occasion, she took a shortcut, a path that follows the shore of Lake Tomahawk, a small man-made lake.

"If you look at your map, you'll see there is a clubhouse on the north end of the lake and a public pool, both of which are open only in the summer. Over here you've got tennis courts and a picnic area that are available year-round. According to the mother, Emily arrived home shortly after six-thirty. She went straight to her room and practiced guitar until dinner."

"Did Mrs. Steiner say what Emily ate that night?" I asked the group.

"She told me they had macaroni and cheese and salad," Ferguson said.

"At what time?" According to the autopsy report, Emily's stomach contents consisted of a small amount of brownish fluid.

"Around seven-thirty in the evening is what she told me."

"That would have been digested by the time she was kidnapped at two in the morning?"

"Yes," I said.

"It would have cleared her stomach long before then."

"It could be that she wasn't given much in the way of food and water while held in captivity."

"Thus accounting for her high sodium, her possible dehydration?" Wesley asked me.

"That's certainly possible."

He wrote some more.

"There's no alarm system in the house, no dog."

"Do we know if anything was stolen?"

"Maybe some clothes."

"Whose?"

"Maybe the mother's. While she was taped up in the closet, she thought she heard him opening drawers."

"If so, he was right tidy. She also said she couldn't tell if anything was missing or disturbed."

"What did the father teach? Did we get to that?"

"Bible."

"Broad River's one of these fundamentalist places. The kids start the day singing" Sin Shall Not Have Dominion Over Me. ""

"No kidding."

"I'm serious as a heart attack."

"Jesus."

"Yeah, they talk about Him a lot, too."

"Maybe they could do something with my grandson."

"Shit, Hershel, nobody could do nothing with your grandson because you spoil him rotten. How many minibikes he's got now? Three?" I spoke again.

"I'd like to know more about Emily's family. I assume they are religious."

"Very much so."

"Any other siblings?"

Lieutenant Mote took a deep, weary breath.

"That's what's really sad about this one. There was a baby some years back, a crib death."

"Was this also in Black Mountain?" I asked.

"No, ma'am. It was before the Steiners moved to the area. They're from California. You know, we got folks from all over." Ferguson added, "A lot of foreigners head to our hills to retire, vacation, attend religious conventions. Shit, if I had a nickel for every Baptist I wouldn't be sitting here."

I glanced at Marino. His anger was as palpable as heat, his face boiled red.

"Just the kind of place Gault would get off on. The folks there read all the big stories about the son of a bitch in People magazine, The National Enquirer, Parade. But it never enters no one's mind the squirrel might come to town. To them he's Frankenstein. He don't really exist."

"Don't forget they did that TV movie on him, too," Mote spoke again.

"When was that?" Ferguson scowled.

"Last summer. Captain Marino told me. I don't recollect the actor's name, but he's been in a lot of those Termination movies. Isn't that right?"

Marino didn't care. His private posse was thundering through the air.

"I think the son of a bitch's still there." He pushed his chair back and added another wad of gum to the ashtray.

"Anything's possible," Wesley said matter-of factly

"Well." Mote cleared his throat.

"Whatever you boys want to do to help out would be mighty appreciated."

Wesley glanced at his watch.

"Pete, you want to cut the lights again?

I thought we'd run through these earlier cases, show our two visitors from North Carolina how Gault spent his time in Virginia. "

For the next hour horrors flashed in the dark like disjointed scenes from some of my very worst dreams. Ferguson and Mote never took their wide eyes off the screen. They did not say a word. I did not see them blink.

"You never give a fella any credit, Doc." The cigarette wagged as he talked.

"It's not like I haven't cut back." He fired up his lighter.

"Tell the truth. You think about smoking every minute."

"You're right. Not a minute goes by that I don't wonder how I stood doing anything so unpleasant and antisocial."

"Bullshit. You miss it like hell. Right now you wish you was me." He exhaled a stream of smoke and gazed out the window.

"One day this entire joint's going to end up a sinkhole because of these friggin' groundhogs."

"Why would Gault have gone to western North Carolina?" I asked.

"Why the hell would he go anywhere?" Marino's eyes got hard.

"You ask any question about that son of a bitch and the answer's the same.

Because he felt like it. And he ain't gonna stop with the Steiner girl.

Some other little kid--some woman, man, hell, it don't matter--is going to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when Gault gets another itch."

"And you really think he's still there?"

He tapped an ash.

"Yeah, I really think he is."

"Why?"

"Because the fun's just begun," he said as Benton Wesley walked in.

"The greatest goddam show on earth and he's sitting back watching, laughing his ass off as the Black Mountain cops run around in circles trying to figure out what the hell to do. They average one homicide a year there, by the way."

I watched Wesley head for the salad bar. He ladled soup into a bowl, placed crackers on his tray, and dropped several dollars in a paper plate set out for customers when the cashier wasn't around. He did not indicate that he had seen us, but I knew he had a gift for taking in the smallest details of his surroundings while seeming in a fog.

"Some of Emily Steiner's physical findings make me wonder if her body was refrigerated," I said to Marino as Wesley headed toward us.

"Right. I'm sure it was. At the hospital morgue." Marino gave me an odd look.

"Sounds like I'm missing something important," Wesley said as he pulled out a chair and sat down.

"I'm contemplating that Emily Steiner's body was refrigerated before it was left at the lake," I said.

"Based on what?"

A gold Department of Justice cuff link peeked out of his coat sleeve as he reached for the pepper shaker.

"Her skin was doughy and dry," I answered.

"She was well preserved and virtually unmolested by insects or animals."

"That pretty much shoots down the idea of Gault staying in some tourist trap motel," Marino said.

"He sure as hell didn't stash the body in his minibar." Wesley, always meticulous, spooned clam chowder away from him and raised it to his lips without spilling a drop.

"What's been turned in for trace?" I asked.

"Her jewelry and socks," Wesley replied.

"And the duct tape, which unfortunately was removed before being checked for prints. It was pretty cut up at the morgue."

"Christ," Marino muttered.

"But it's distinctive enough to hold promise. In fact, I can't say I've ever seen blaze orange duct tape before." He was looking at me.

"I certainly haven't," I said.

"Do your labs know anything about it yet?"

"Nothing yet except there's a pattern of grease streaks, meaning the edges of the roll the tape came from are streaked with grease. For whatever that's worth."

"What else do the labs have?" I asked. Wesley said, "Swabs, soil from under the body, the sheet and pouch used to transport her from the lake." My frustration grew as he continued to talk. I wondered what had been missed. I wondered what microscopic witnesses had been silenced forever.

"I'd like copies of her photographs and reports, and lab results as they come in," I said.

"Whatever's ours is yours," Wesley replied.

"The labs will contact you directly."

"We got to get time of death straight," Marino said.

"It ain't adding up."

"It's very important we sort that out," Wesley concurred.

"Can you do some more checking?"

"I'll do what I can," I said.

"I'm supposed to be in Hogan's Alley." Marino got up from the table as he glanced at his watch.

"In fact, I guess they've started without me."

"I hope you plan to change your clothes first," Wesley said to him.

"Wear a sweatshirt with a hood."

"Yo. So I get dropped by heat exhaustion."

"Better than getting dropped by nine-millimeter paint bullets," Wesley said.

"They hurt like hell."

"What? You two been discussing this or something?" We watched him leave. He buttoned his blazer over his big belly, smoothed his wispy hair, rearranged his trousers as he walked. Marino had a habit of self-consciously grooming himself like a cat whenever he made an entrance or an exit. Wesley stared at the dirty ashtray where Marino had been sitting. He turned his eyes to me, and I thought they seemed uncommonly dark, his mouth set as if it had never known how to smile.

"You've got to do something about him," he said.

"I wish I had that power, Benton."

"You're the only one who comes close to having that power."

"That's frightening."

"What's frightening is how red his face got during the consultation. He's not doing a goddam thing he's supposed to do. Fried foods, cigarettes, booze. " Wesley glanced away.

"Since Doris left he's gone to hell."

"I've seen some improvement," I said.

"Brief remissions." He met my eyes again.

"In the main he's killing himself." In the main, Marino was and had been all of his life. And I did not know what to do about it.

"When are you going back to Richmond?" he asked, and I wondered what went on behind his walls. I wondered about his wife.

"That depends," I answered.

"I was hoping to spend a little time with Lucy."

"She's told you we want her back?"

I stared out at sunlit grass and leaves stirring in the wind.

"She's thrilled," I said.

"You're not."

"No."

"I understand. You don't want Lucy to share your reality, Kay." His face softened almost imperceptibly.

"I suppose it should relieve me that in one department, at least, you are not completely rational or objective."

I was not completely rational or objective in more than one department, and Wesley knew this all too well.

"I'm not even certain what she's doing over there," I said.

"How would you feel if it were one of your children?"

"The same way I always feel when it's my children. I don't want them in law enforcement or the military. I don't want them familiar with guns. And yet I want them involved in all of these things."

"Because you know what's out there," I said, my eyes again on his and lingering longer than they should. He crumpled his napkin and placed it on his tray.

"Lucy likes what she's doing. So do we."

"I'm glad to hear it."

"She's remarkable. The software she's helping us develop for VI CAP is going to change everything. We're not talking about that much time before it's possible for us to track these animals around the globe. Can you imagine if Gault had murdered the Steiner girl in Australia? Do you think we'd know?"

"Chances are we wouldn't," I said.

"Certainly not this soon. But we don't know it's Gault who killed her."

"What we do know is that time is more lives." He reached for my tray and stacked it on top of his. Both of us got up from the table.

"I think we should drop in on your niece," he said.

"I don't think I'm cleared."

"You're not. But give me a little time and I'll bet I can remedy that."

"I would love it."

"Let's see, it's one o'clock now. How about meeting me back here at four-thirty?" he said as we walked out of the Boardroom.

"How's Lucy getting along in Washington, by the way?" He referred to the least-sought-after dormitory, with its tiny beds and towels too small to cover anything that mattered.

"I'm sorry we couldn't have offered her more privacy."

"Don't be. It's good for her to have a roommate and suite mates not that she necessarily gets along with them."

"Geniuses don't always work and play well with others."

"The only thing she ever flunked on her report card," I said.

I spent the next several hours on the phone, unsuccessfully trying to reach Dr. Jenrette, who apparently had taken the day off to play golf. My office in Richmond, I was pleased to hear, was under control, the day's cases thus far requiring only views, which were external examinations with body fluids drawn. Blessedly, there had been no homicides from the night before, and my two court cases for the rest of the week had both settled. At the appointed time and place, Wesley and I met.

"Put this on." He handed me a special visitor's pass, which I clipped to my jacket pocket next to my faculty name tag.

"No problems?" I asked.

"It was a stretch, but I managed to pull it off."

"I'm relieved to know I passed the background check," I said ironically.

"Well, just barely."

"Thanks a lot." He paused, then lightly touched my back as I preceded him through a doorway.

"I don't need to tell you, Kay, that nothing you see or hear at ERF leaves the building."

"You're right, Benton. You don't need to tell me." Outside the Boardroom, the PX was packed with National Academy students in red shirts browsing at everything imaginable emblazoned with "FBI." Fit men and women politely passed us on steps as they headed to class, not a single blue shirt to be found in the color-coded crowd, for there had been no new agent classes in over a year. We followed a long corridor to the lobby, where a digital sign above the front desk reminded guests to keep visitor's passes properly displayed. Beyond the front doors, distant gunfire peppered the perfect afternoon. The Engineering Research Facility was three beige concrete-and-glass pods with large bay doors and high chain-link fences. Rows of parked cars bore testament to a population I never saw, for ERF seemed to swallow its employees and send them away at moments when the rest of us were unconscious. At the front door, Wesley paused by a sensor module with a numeric keypad that was attached to the wall. He inserted his right thumb over a reading lens, which scanned his print as the data display instructed him to type in his Personal Identification Number. The biometric lock was released with a faint click.

"Obviously, you've been here before," I commented as he held the door for me.

"Many times," he said.

I was left to wonder what business typically brought him here as we followed a beige-carpeted corridor, softly lit and silent, and more than twice the length of a football field. We passed laboratories where scientists in somber suits and lab coats were busily engaged in activities I knew nothing of and could not identify at a glance. Men and women worked in cubicles and over countertops scattered with tools, hardware, video displays, and strange devices. Behind windowless double doors a power saw whined through wood. At an elevator, Wesley's fingerprint was required again before we could access the rarefied quiet where Lucy spent her days. The second floor was, in essence, an air-conditioned cranium enclosing an artificial brain. Walls and carpet were muted gray, space precisely partitioned like an ice cube tray. Each cubicle contained two modular desks with sleek computers, laser printers, and piles of paper. Lucy was easy to spot. She w s the only analyst wearing FBI fatigues.

Her back was to us as she talked into a telephone headset, one hand manipulating a stylus over a computerized message pad, the other typing on a keyboard. If I had not known better, I might have thought she was composing music.

"No, no," she said.

"One long beep followed by two short ones and we're probably talking about a malfunction with the monitor, maybe the board containing the video chips." She swiveled around in her chair when her peripheral vision picked us up.

"Yes, it's a huge difference if it's just one short beep," she explained to the person on the line.

"Now we're talking about a problem in a system board. Listen, Dave, can I get back with you?"

I noticed a biometric scanner on her desk, half buried beneath paper.

On the floor and filling a shelf overhead were formidable programming manuals, boxes of diskettes and tapes, stacks of computer and software magazines, and a variety of pale blue bound publications stamped with the Department of Justice seal.

"I thought I'd show your aunt what you're up to," Wesley said. Lucy slipped off the headset, and if she was happy to see us I could not tell.

"Right now I'm up to my ears in problems," she said.

"We're getting errors on a couple four-eighty-six machines." She added for my benefit, "We're using PCS to develop the Crime Artificial Intelligence Network known as CAIN."

"CAIN?" I marveled.

"That's a rather ironic acronym for a system designed to track violent criminals." Wesley said, "I suppose you could look at it as the ultimate act of contrition on the part of the world's first murderer. Or maybe it simply takes one to know one."

"Basically," Lucy went on, "our ambition is for CAIN to be an automated system that models the real world as much as possible."

"In other words," I said, "it's supposed to think and act the way we do."

"Exactly." She resumed typing.

"The crime analysis report you're accustomed to is right here." Appearing on the screen were queries from the familiar fifteen-page form I had been filling out for years whenever a body was unidentified or the victim of an offender who probably had murdered before and would again.

"It's been condensed a little." Lucy brought up more pages.

"The form's never really been the problem," I pointed out.

"It's getting the investigator to complete the darn thing and send it in."

"Now they'll have choices," Wesley said.

"They can have a dumb terminal in their precinct that will allow them to sit down and fill in the form on-line. Or for the true Luddite, we have paper--a bubble form or the original one, which can be sent off as usual or faxed."

"We're also working with handwriting recognition technology," Lucy went on.

"Computerized message pads can be used while the investigator's in his car, the squad room, waiting around for court. And anything we get on paper--handwritten or otherwise--can be scanned into the system.

"The interactive part comes when CAIN gets a hit or needs supplementary information. He'll actually communicate with the investigator by modem, or by leaving messages in voice or by electronic mail."

"The potential's enormous," Wesley said to me.

I knew the real reason he had brought me here. This cubicle felt far removed from inner-city field offices, bank robberies, and drug busts. Wesley wanted me to believe if Lucy worked for the Bureau, she would be safe. Yet I knew better, for I understood the ambushes of the mind. The clean pages my young niece was showing me in her pristine computer would soon carry names and physical descriptions that would make violence real. She would build a data base that would become a landfill of body parts, tortures, weapons and wounds. And one day she would hear the silent screams. She would imagine the faces of victims in crowds she passed.

"I assume what you're applying to police investigators will also have meaning for us," I said to Wesley.

"It goes without saying that medical examiners will be part of the network." Lucy showed us more screens and elaborated on other marvels in words difficult even for me. Computers were the modern Babel, I had decided. The higher technology reached, the greater the confusion of tongues.

"That's the thing about Structure Query Language," she was explaining.

"It's more declarative than navigational, meaning the user specifies what he wants accessed from the data base instead of how he wants it accessed."

I had begun watching a woman walking in our direction. She was tall, with a graceful but strong stride, a long lab coat flowing around her knees as she slowly stirred a paintbrush in a small aluminum can.

"Have we decided what we're going to run this on eventually?" Wesley continued chatting with my niece.

"A mainframe?"

"Actually, the trend is toward downsized client data base server environments. You know, minis, LANS. Everything gets smaller." The woman turned into our cubicle, and when she looked up, her eyes went straight to mine and held for a piercing instant before shifting away.

"Was there a meeting scheduled that I didn't know about?" she said with a cool smile as she set the can on her desk. I got the distinct impression she was displeased by the intrusion.

"Carrie, we'll have to take care of our project a little later. Sorry," Lucy said. She added," I assume you've met Benton Wesley. This is Dr. Kay Scarpetta, my aunt. And this is Carrie Grethen. "

"A pleasure to meet you," Carrie Grethen said to me, and I was bothered by her eyes.

I watched her slide into her chair and absently smooth her dark brown hair, which was long and pinned back in an old-fashioned French twist.

I guessed she was in her mid-thirties, her smooth skin, dark eyes, and cleanly sculpted features giving her face a patrician beauty both remarkable and rare. As she opened a file drawer, I noted how orderly her work space was compared to my niece's, for Lucy was too far gone into her esoteric world to give much thought to where to store a book or stack paper. Despite her ancient intellect, she was very much the college kid who chewed gum and lived with clutter. Wesley spoke.

"Lucy? Why don't you show your aunt around?"

"Sure." She seemed reluctant as she exited a screen and got up.

"So, Carrie, tell me exactly what you do here," I heard him say as we walked away. Lucy glanced back in their direction, and I was startled by the emotion flickering in her eyes.

"What you see in this section is pretty self-explanatory," she said, distracted and quite tense.

"Just people and workstations."

"All of them working on VI CAP

"There's only three of us involved with CAIN. Most of what's done up here is tactical" --she glanced back again.

"You know, tactical in the sense of using computers to get a piece of equipment to operate better. Like various electronic collection devices and some of the robots Crisis Response and HRT use." Her mind was definitely elsewhere as she led me to the far end of the floor, where there was a room secured by another biometric lock.

"Only a few of us are cleared to go in here," she said, scanning her thumb and entering her Personal Identification Number. The gunmetal-gray door opened onto a refrigerated space neatly arranged with workstations, monitors, and scores of modems with blinking lights stacked on shelves. Bundled cables running out the backs of equipment disappeared beneath the raised floor, and monitors swirling with bright blue loops and whorls boldly proclaimed "CAIN." The artificial light, like the air, was clean and cold.

"This is where all fingerprint data are stored," Lucy told me.

"From the locks?" I looked around.

"From the scanners you see everywhere for physical access control and data security."

"And is this sophisticated lock system an ERF invention?"

"We're enhancing and troubleshooting it here. In fact, right now I'm in the middle of a research project pertaining to it. There's a lot to do." She bent over a monitor and adjusted the brightness of the screen.

"Eventually we'll also be storing fingerprint data from out in the field when cops arrest somebody and use electronic scanning to capture live fingerprints," she went on.

"The offender's prints will go straight into CAIN, and if he's committed other crimes from which latent prints were recovered and scanned into the system, we'll get a hit in seconds."

"I assume this will somehow be linked to automated fingerprint identification systems around the country."

"Around the country and hopefully around the world. The point is to have all roads lead here."

"Is Carrie also assigned to CAIN?" Lucy seemed taken aback.

"Yes."

"So she's one of the three people."

"That's right." When Lucy offered nothing further, I explained, "She struck me as unusual."

"I suppose you could say that about everybody here," my niece answered.

"Where is she from?" I persisted, for I had taken an instant dislike to Carrie Grethen. I did not know why.

"Washington State."

"Is she nice?" I asked.

"She's very good at what she does."

"That doesn't quite answer my question." I smiled.

"I try not to get into the personalities of this place. Why are you so curious?" Defensiveness crept into her tone.

"I'm curious because she made me curious," I simply said.

"Aunt Kay, I wish you'd stop being so protective.

Besides, it's inevitable in light of what you do professionally that you're going to think the worst about everyone. "

"I see. I suppose it's also inevitable, in light of what I do professionally, that I'm going to think everyone is dead," I said dryly.

"That's ludicrous," my niece said.

"I was simply hoping you'd met some nice people here."

"I would appreciate it if you would also quit worrying about, whether I have friends."

"Lucy, I'm not trying to interfere with your life. All I ask is that you're careful."

"No, that isn't all you ask. You are interfering."

"It is not my intention," I said, and Lucy could make me angrier than anyone I knew.

"Yes, it is. You really don't want me here."

I regretted my next words even as I said them.

"Of course I do. I'm the one who got you this damn internship." She just stared at me.

"Lucy, I'm sorry. Let's not argue. Please." I lowered my voice and placed my hand on her arm. She pulled away.

"I've got to go check on something." To my amazement, she abruptly walked off, leaving me alone in a high-security room as arid and chilly as our encounter had become. Colors eddied on video displays, and lights and digital numbers glowed red and green as my thoughts buzzed dully like the pervasive white noise. Lucy was the only child of my irresponsible only sister, Dorothy, and I had no children of my own. But my love for my niece could not be explained by just that.

I understood her secret shame born of abandonment and isolation, and wore her same suit of sorrow beneath my polished armor. When I tended to her wounds, I was tending to my own. This was something I could not tell her. I left, making certain the door was locked behind me, and it did not escape Wesley's notice when I returned from my tour without my guide. Nor did Lucy reappear in time to say goodbye.

"What happened?" Wesley asked as we walked back to the Academy.

"I'm afraid we got into another one of our disagreements," I replied.

He glanced over at me.

"Someday get me to tell you about my disagreements with Michele."

"If there's a course in being a mother or an aunt, I think I need to enroll. In fact, I wish I had enrolled a long time ago. All I did was ask her if she'd made any friends here and she got angry."

"What's your worry?"

"She's a loner." He looked puzzled.

"You've alluded to this before. But to be honest, she doesn't impress me as a loner at all."

"What do you mean?" We stopped to let several cars pass. The sun was low and warm against the back of my neck, and he had taken off his suit jacket and draped it over his arm. He gently touched my elbow when it was safe to cross.

"I was at the Globe and Laurel several nights ago and Lucy was there with a friend. In fact, it may have been Carrie Grethen, but I'm really not sure. But they seemed to be having a pretty good time." My surprise couldn't have been much more acute had Wesley just told e Lucy had hijacked a plane.

"And she's been up in the Boardroom a number of late nights. You see one side of your niece, Kay. What's always a shock to parents or parental figures is that there's another side they don't see."

"The side you're talking about is completely foreign to me," I said, and I did not feel relieved. The idea that there were elements of Lucy I did not know was only more disconcerting. We walked in silence for a moment, and when we reached the lobby I quietly asked, "Benton, is she drinking?"

"She's old enough."

"I realize that," I said.

I was about to ask him more when my heavy preoccupations were aborted by the simple, swift action of his reaching around and snapping his pager off his belt. He held it up and frowned at the number in the display.

"Come on down to the unit," he said, "and let's see what this is about." Lieutenant Hershel Mote could not keep the note of near hysteria out of his voice when Wesley returned his telephone call at twenty-nine minutes past six p. m.

"You're where?" Wesley asked him again on the speaker phone.

"In the kitchen."

"Lieutenant Mote, take it easy. Tell me exactly where you are."

"I'm in SBI Agent Max Ferguson's kitchen. I can't believe this. I've never seen nothing like this."

"Is there anybody else there?"

"It's just me here alone. Except for what's upstairs, like I told you.

I've called the coroner and the dispatcher seeing who he can raise. "

"Take it easy. Lieutenant," Wesley said again with his usual unflappability.

I could hear Mote's heavy breathing.

I said to him, "Lieutenant Mote? This is Dr. Scarpetta.

I want you to leave everything exactly the way you found it. "

"Oh, Lordy," he blurted.

"I done cut him down..."

"It's okay..."

"When I walked in I... Lord have mercy, I couldn't just leave him like that."

"It's all right," I reassured him.

"But it's very important that nobody touches him now."

"What about the coroner?"

"Not even him." Wesley's eyes were on me.

"We're heading out. You'll see us no later than twenty-two hundred hours. In the meantime, you sit tight."

"Yes, sir. I'm just going to sit right in this chair till my chest stops hurting."

"When did this start?" I wanted to know.

"When I got here and found him. I started having these pains in my chest."

"Have you ever had them before?"

"Not that I recollect. Not like this."

"Describe where they are," I said with growing alarm.

"Right in the middle."

"Has the pain gone to your arms or neck?"

"No, ma'am."

"Any dizziness or sweating?"

"I'm sweating a bit."

"Does it hurt when you cough?"

"I've not been coughing. So I don't reckon I can say."

"Have you ever had any heart disease or high blood pressure?"

"Not that I know of."

"And you smoke?"

"I'm doing it now."

"Lieutenant Mote, I want you to listen to me carefully. I want you to put out your cigarette and try to calm down. I'm very concerned because you've had a terrible shock, you're a smoker, and that's a setup for a coronary. You're down there and I'm up here. I want you to call an ambulance right now."

"The pain's settling down a little. And the coroner should be here any minute. He's a doctor."

"That would be Dr. Jenrette?" Wesley inquired.

"He's all we got'round here."

"I don't want you fooling around with chest pains, Lieutenant Mote," I said firmly.

"No, ma'am, I won't." Wesley wrote down addresses and phone numbers. He hung up and made another call.

"Is Pete Marino still running around out there?" he asked whoever had answered the phone.

"Tell him we've got an urgent situation. He's to grab an overnight bag and meet us over at HRT as fast as he can get there. I'll explain when I see him."

"Look, I'd like Katz in on this one," I said as Wesley got up from his desk.

"We're going to want to fume everything we can for prints, in the event things aren't the way they appear."

"Good idea."

"I doubt he'd be at The Body Farm this late. You might want to try his pager."

"Fine. I'll see if I can track him down," he said of my forensic scientist colleague from Knoxville. When I got to the lobby fifteen minutes later, Wesley was already there, a tote bag slung over his shoulder. I had had just enough time in my room to exchange pumps for more sensible shoes, and to grab other necessities, including my medical bag.

"Dr. Katz is leaving Knoxville now," Wesley told me.

"He'll meet us at the scene." Night was settling beneath a distant slivered moon, and trees stirring in the wind sounded like rain. Wesley and I followed the drive in front of Jefferson and crossed a road dividing the Academy complex from acres of field offices and firing ranges. Closest to us, in the demilitarized zone of barbecues and picnic tables shaded by trees, I spotted a familiar figure so out of context that for an instant I thought I was mistaken. Then I recalled Lucy once mentioning to me that she sometimes wandered out here alone after dinner to think, and my heart lifted at the chance of making amends with her.

"Benton," I said, "I'll be right back." The faint sound of conversation drifted toward me as I neared the edge of the woods, and I wondered, bizarrely, if my niece were talking to herself. Lucy was perched on top of a picnic table, and as I drew closer I was about to call her name when I saw she was speaking to someone seated below her on the bench. They were so close to each other their silhouettes were one, and I froze in the darkness of a tall, dense pine.

"That's because you always do that," Lucy was saying in a wounded tone I knew well.

"No, it's because you always assume I'm doing that." The woman's voice was soothing.

"Well, then, don't give me cause."

"Lucy, can't we get past this? Please."

"Let me have one of those."

"I wish you wouldn't start."

"I'm not starting. I just want a puff."

I heard the spurt of a match striking, and a small flame penetrated the darkness. For an instant, my niece's profile was illuminated as she leaned closer to her friend, whose face I could not see. The tip of the cigarette glowed as they passed it back and forth. I silently turned and walked away. Wesley resumed his long strides when I got back to him.

"Someone you know?" he asked.

"I thought it was," I said.

We walked without speaking past empty ranges with rows of target frames and steel silhouettes eternally standing at attention. Beyond, a control tower rose over a building constructed completely of tires, where HRT, the Bureau's Green Berets, practiced maneuvers with live ammunition. A white-and-blue Bell Jetranger waited on the nearby grass like a sleeping insect, its pilot standing outside with Marino.

"We all here?" the pilot asked as we approached.

"Yes. Thanks, Whit," Wesley said.

Whit, a perfect specimen of male fitness in a black flight suit, opened the helicopter's doors to help us board. We strapped ourselves in, Marino and I in back, Wesley up front, and put on headsets as blades began to turn, the jet engine warming. Minutes later, the dark earth was suddenly far beneath our feet as we rose above the horizon, air vents open and cabin lights off. Our transmitted voices blurted on and off in our ears as the helicopter sped south toward a tiny mountain town where another person was dead.

"He couldn't have been home long," Marino said.

"We know... ?"

"He wasn't." Wesley's voice cut in from the copilot's seat.

"He left Quantico right after the consultation. Flew out of National at one."

"We know what time his plane got to Asheville?"

"Around four-thirty. He could have been back to his house by five."

"In Black Mountain?"

"Right."

I spoke.

"Mote found him at six."

"Jesus." Marino turned to me.

"Ferguson must've started beating off the minute he hit" -- The pilot cut in! "We got music if anybody wants it."

"Sure."

"What flavor?"

"Classical."

"Shit, Benton."

"You're outvoted, Pete."

"Ferguson hadn't been home long. That much is clear no matter who or what's to blame," I resumed our jerky conversation as Berlioz began in the background.

"Looks like an accident. Like auto eroticism gone bad. But we don't know." Marino nudged me.

"Got any aspirins?"

I dug in my pocketbook in the dark, then got a mini Maglite out of my medical bag and rooted around some more. Marino muttered profanities when I motioned I could not help him, and I realized he was still in the sweatpants, hooded sweatshirt, and lace-up boots he had been wearing at Hogan's Alley. He looked like a hard drinking coach for some bush-league team, and I could not resist shining the light over incriminating red paint stains on his upper back and left shoulder. Marino had gotten shot.

"Yeah, well, you ought to see the other guys," his voice abruptly sounded in my ears.

"Yo, Benton. Got any aspirins?"

"Airsick?"

"Having too much fun for that," said Marino, who hated to fly. The weather was in our favor as we chopped a path through the clear night at around a hundred and five knots. Cars below us glided like bright-eyed water bugs as the lights of civilization flickered like small fires in the trees. The vibrating darkness might have soothed me to sleep were my nerves not running hot. My mind would not stay still as images clashed and questions screamed.

I envisioned Lucy's face, the lovely curve of her jaw and cheek as she leaned into the flame cupped by her girlfriend's hands. Their impassioned voices sounded in my memory, and I did not know why I was stunned.

I did not know why it should matter. I wondered how much Wesley was aware. My niece had been interning at Quantico since fall semester had begun. He had seen her quite a lot more than I had. There was not a breath of wind until we got into the mountains, and for a while the earth was a pitch-black plain.

"Going up to forty-five hundred feet," our pilot's voice sounded in our headsets.

"Everybody all right back there?"

"I don't guess you can smoke in here," Marino said. At ten past nine, the inky sky was pricked with stars, the Blue Ridge a black ocean swelling without motion or sound. We followed deep shadows of woods, smoothly turning with the pitch of blades toward a brick building that I suspected was a school. Around a corner, we found a football field with police lights flashing and flares burning copper in an unnecessary illumination of our landing zone. And the Nightsun's thirty million peak candlepower blazed down from our belly as we made our descent. At the fifty-yard line, Whit settled us softly like a bird.

"" Home of the War Horses,"" Wesley read from bunting draped along the fence.

"Hope they're having a better season than we are." Marino gazed out his window as the blades slowed down.

"I haven't seen a high school football game since I was in one."

"I didn't know you played football," I remarked.

"Yo. Number twelve."

"What position?"

"Tight end."

"That figures," I said.

"This is actually Swannanoa," Whit announced.

"Black Mountain's just east." We were met by two uniformed officers from the Black Mountain Police. They looked too young to drive or carry guns, their faces pale and peculiar as they tried not to stare. It was as if we had arrived by spacecraft in a blaze of gyrating lights and unearthly quiet. They did not know what to make of us or what was happening in their town, and it was with very little conversation that they drove us away. Moments later, we parked along a narrow street throbbing with engines and emergency lights. I counted three cruisers in addition to ours, one ambulance, two fire trucks, two unmarked cars, and a Cadillac.

"Great," Marino muttered as he shut the car door.

"Everybody and his cousin Abner's here." Crime-scene tape ran from the front porch posts to shrubbery, fanning out on either side of the beige two-story aluminum-sided house. A Ford Bronco was parked in the gravel drive ahead of an unmarked Skylark with police antennas and lights.

"The cars are Ferguson's?" Wesley asked as we mounted concrete steps.

"The ones in the drive, yes, sir," the officer replied.

"That window up in the comer's where he's at."

I was dismayed when Lieutenant Hershel Mote suddenly appeared in the front doorway. Obviously, he had not followed my advice.

"How are you feeling?" I a ked him.

"I'm holding on." He looked so relieved to see us I almost expected a hug. But his face was gray. Sweat ringed the collar of his denim shirt and shone on his brow and neck. He reeked of stale cigarettes. We hesitated in the foyer, our backs to stairs that led to the second floor.

"What's been done?" Wesley asked.

"Doc Jenrette took pictures, lots of'em, but he didn't touch nothing, just like you said. He's outside talking to the squad if you need him."

"There's a lot of cars out there," Marino said.

"Where is everybody?"

"A couple of the boys are in the kitchen. And one or two's poking around the yard and in the woods out back."

"But they haven't been upstairs?" Mote let out a deep breath.

"Well, now, I'm not going to stand here and lie to you. They did go on up and look. But nobody's messed with anything, I can promise you that. The Doc's the only one who got close." He started up the stairs.

"Max is... he's... Well, goddam." He stopped and looked back at us, his eyes bright with tears.

"I'm not clear on how you discovered him," Marino said. We resumed climbing steps as Mote struggled for composure. The floor was covered in the same dark red carpet I had seen downstairs, the heavily varnished pine paneling the color of honey. He cleared his throat.

"About six this evening I stopped by to see if Max wanted to go out for some supper. When he didn't come to the door, I figured he was in the shower or something and came on in.

"Were you aware of anything that might have indicated he had a history of this type of activity?" Wesley delicately asked.

"No, sir," Mote said with feeling.

"I can't imagine it. I sure don't understand... Well, I've heard tell of people rigging up weird things. I can't say I know what it's for."

"The point of using a noose while masturbating is to place pressure on the carotids," I explained.

"This constricts the flow of oxygen and blood to the brain, which supposedly enhances orgasm."

"Also known as going while you're coming," Marino remarked with his typical subtlety. Mote did not accompany us as we moved forward to a lighted doorway at the end of the hall.

SBI Agent Max Ferguson had a manly, modest bedroom with pine chests of drawers and a rack filled with shotguns and rifles over a rolltop desk. His pistol, wallet, credentials, and a box of Rough Rider condoms were on the table by the quilt-covered bed, the suit I'd seen him wearing in Quantico this morning neatly draped over a chair, shoes and socks nearby.

A wooden bar stool stood between the bathroom and closet, inches from where his body was covered with a colorful crocheted afghan. Overhead, a severed nylon cord dangled from an eye hook screwed into the wooden ceiling. I got gloves and a thermometer out of my medical bag. Marino swore under his breath as I pulled the afghan back from what must have been Ferguson's worst nightmare.

I doubted he would have feared a bullet half as much. He was on his back, the size-D cups of a long- line black brassiere stuffed with socks that smelled faintly of musk. The pair of black nylon panties he had put on before he died had been pulled down around his hairy knees, and a condom still clung limply to his penis. Magazines nearby revealed his predilection for women in bondage with spectacularly augmented breasts and nipples the size of saucers.

I examined the nylon noose tightly angled around the towel padding his neck. The cord, old and fuzzy, had been severed just above the eighth turn of a perfect hangman's knot. His eyes were almost shut, his tongue protruding.

"Is this consistent with him sitting on the stool?" Marino looked up at the segment of rope attached to the ceiling.

"Yes," I said.

"So he was beating off and slipped?"

"Or he may have lost consciousness and then slipped," I answered. Marino moved to the window and leaned over a tumbler of amber liquid on the sill.

"Bourbon," he announced.

"Straight or close to it." The rectal temperature was 91 degrees, consistent with what I would have expected had Ferguson been dead approximately five hours in this room, his body covered. Rigor mortis had started in the small muscles. The condom was a studded affair with a large reservoir that was dry, and I went over to the bed to take a look at the box. One condom was missing, and when I stepped into the master bathroom I found the purple foil wrapper in the wicker trash basket.

"That's interesting," I said as Marino opened dresser drawers.

"What is?"

"I guess I assumed he would have put on the condom while he was rigged up."

"Makes sense to me."

"Then wouldn't you expect the wrapper to be near his body?" I picked it out of the trash, touching as little of it as possible, and placed it inside a plastic bag.

When Marino didn't respond, I added, "Well, I guess it all depends on when he pulled down his panties. Maybe he did that before he put the noose around his neck."

I walked back into the bedroom. Marino was squatting by a chest of drawers, staring at the body, a mixture of incredulity and disgust on his face.

"And I always thought the worst thing that could happen is you croak on the John," he said.

I looked up at the eye bolt in the ceiling. There was no way to tell how long it had been there. I started to ask Marino if he had found any other pornography when we were startled by a heavy thud in the hallway.

"What the hell... ?" Marino exclaimed. He was out the door, and I was right behind him. Lieutenant Mote had collapsed near the stairs. He was facedown and motionless on the carpet. When I knelt beside him and turned him over, he was already blue.

"He's in cardiac arrest! Get the squad!" I pulled Mote's jaw forward to make sure his airway was unobstructed. Marino's feet thundered down the stairs as I placed my fingers on Mote's carotid and felt no pulse. I thumped his chest but his heart would not answer. I began CPR, compressing his chest once, twice, three times, four, then tilted his head back and blew once into his mouth. His chest rose, and one-two three-four I blew again.

I maintained a rhythm of sixty compressions per minute as sweat rolled down my temples and my own pulse roared. My arms ached and were becoming as unwilling as stone when I began the third minute and the noise of paramedics and police swelled up from the stairs. Someone gripped my elbow and guided me out of the way as many pairs of gloved hands slapped on leads, hung a bottle of IV fluid, and started a line. Voices barked orders and announced every activity in the loud dispassion of rescue efforts and emergency rooms. As I leaned against the wall and tried to catch my breath, I noticed a short, fair young man incongruously dressed for golf watching the activity from the landing. After several glances in my direction, he approached me shyly.

"Dr. Scarpetta?" His earnest face was sunburned below his brow, which obviously had been spared by a cap. It occurred to me that he probably belonged to the Cadillac parked out front.

"Yes?"

"James Jenrette," he said, confirming my suspicions.

"Are you all right?" He withdrew a neatly folded handkerchief and offered it to me.

"I'm doing okay, and I'm very glad you're here," I said sincerely, for I could not turn over my latest patient to someone who was not an M. D.

"Can I entrust Lieutenant Mote to your care?" My arms trembled as I wiped my face and neck.

"Absolutely. I'll go with him to the hospital." Jenrette next handed me his card.

"If you have any other questions tonight, just page me."

"You'll be posting Ferguson in the morning?" I asked.

"Yes. You're welcome to assist. Then we'll talk about all this." He looked down the hall.

"I'll be there. Thank you." I managed a smile. Jenrette followed the stretcher out, and I returned to the bedroom at the end of the hall. From the window, I watched lights pulse blood red on the street below as Mote was placed inside the ambulance. I wondered if he would live.

I sensed the presence of Ferguson in his flaccid condom and stiff brassiere, and none of it seemed real. The tailgate slammed. Sirens whelped as if in protest before they began to scream. I was not aware that Marino had walked into the room until he touched my arm.

"Katz is downstairs," he informed me. I slowly turned around.

"We'll need another sqi I said. It had long been a theoretical possibility that latent fingerprints could be left on human skin. But the likelihood of recovering them had been so remote as to discourage most of us from trying. Skin is a difficult surface, for it is plastic and porous, and its moisture, hairs, and oils interfere. On the uncommon occasion that a print is successfully transferred from assailant to victim, the ridge detail is far too fragile to survive much time or exposure to the elements. Dr. Thomas Katz was a master forensic scientist who had maniacally pursued this elusive evidence for most of his career. He also was an expert in time of death, which he researched just as diligently with ways and means that were not commonly known to the hoi polloi. His laboratory was called The Body Farm, and I had been there many times. He was a small man with prepossessed blue eyes, a great shock of white hair, and a face amazingly benevolent for the atrocities he had seen. When I met him at the top of the stairs, he was carrying a box window fan, a tool chest, and what looked like a section of vacuum cleaner hose with several odd attachments. Marino was behind him with the rest of what Katz called his "Cyanoacrylate Blowing Contraption," a double-decker aluminum box fitted with a hot plate and a computer fan. He had spent hundreds of hours in his East Tennessee garage perfecting this rather simple mechanical implement.

"Where are we heading?" Katz asked me.

"The room at the end of the hall." I relieved him of the window fan.

"How was your trip?"

"More traffic than I bargained for. Tell me what all's been done to the body."

"He was cut down and covered with a wool afghan. I have not examined him."

"I promise not to delay you too much. It's a lot easier now that I'm not bothering with a tent."

"What do you mean, a tent?" Marino frowned as we entered the bedroom.

"I used to put a plastic tent over the body and do the fuming inside it. But too much vapor and the skin gets too frosted. Dr. Scarpetta, you can set the fan in that window." Katz looked around.

"I might have to use a part of water. It's a bit dry in here."

I gave him as much history as we had at this point.

"Do you have any reason to think this is something other than an accidental auto erotic asphyxiation?" he asked.

"Other than the circumstances," I replied, "no."

"He was working that little Steiner girl's case."

"That's what we mean by circumstances," Marino said.

"Lord, if that hasn't been in the news all over."

"We were in Quantico this morning meeting about that case," I added.

"And he comes straight home and then this." Katz looked thoughtfully at the body.

"You know, we found a prostitute in a Dumpster the other week and got a good outline of a hand on her ankle. She'd been dead four or five days."

"Kay?" Wesley stepped into the doorway.

"May I see you for a minute?"

"And you used this thing on her?" Marino's voice followed us into the hall.

"I did. She had painted fingernails, and as it turns out, they're real good, too."

"For what?"

"Prints."

"Where does this go?"

"Doesn't matter much. I'm going to fume the entire room. I'm afraid it's going to mess up the place."

"I don't think he's gonna complain." Downstairs in the kitchen, I noticed a chair by the phone where I supposed Mote had sat for hours waiting for us to arrive. Nearby on the floor was a glass of water and an ashtray crammed with cigarette butts.

"Take a look," said Wesley, who was accustomed to searching for odd evidence in odd places. He had filled the double sink with foods he had gotten out of the freezer. I moved closer to him as he opened the folds of a small, flat package wrapped in white freezer paper. Inside were shrunken pieces of frozen flesh, dry at the edges and reminiscent of yellowed waxy parchment.

"Any chance I'm thinking the wrong thing?" Wesle/s tone was grim.

"Good God, Benton, I said, stunned.

"They were in the freezer on top of these other things. Ground beef, pork chops, pizza." He nudged packages with a gloved finger.

"I was hoping you'd tell me it's chicken skin. Maybe something he uses for fish bait or who knows what."

"There are no feather holes, and the hair is fine like human hair."

He was silent.

"We need to pack this in dry ice and fly it back with us," I said.

"That won't be tonight."

"The sooner we can get immunological testing done, the sooner we can confirm it's human. DNA will confirm identity." He returned the package to the freezer.

"We need to check for prints."

"I'll put the tissue in plastic and we'll submit the freezer paper to the labs," I said.

"Good." We climbed the stairs. My pulse would not slow down. At the end of the hallway, Marino and Katz stood outside the shut door. They had threaded a hose through the hole where the doorknob had been, the contraption humming as it pumped Super Glue vapors into Ferguson's bedroom.

Wesley had yet to mention the obvious, so finally I did.

"Benton, I didn't see any bite marks or anything else someone may have tried to eradicate."

"I know," he said.

"We're almost done," Katz told us when we got to them.

"A room this size and you can get by with less than a hundred drops of Super Glue."

"Pete," Wesley said, "we've got an unexpected problem."

"I thought we'd already reached our quota for the day," he said, staring blandly at the hose pumping poison beyond the door.

"That should do it," said Katz, who was typically impervious to the moods of those around him.

"All I got to do now is clear out the fumes with the fan. That will take a minute or two." He opened the door and we backed away. The overpowering smell didn't seem to bother him in the least.

"He probably gets high off the stuff," Marino muttered as Katz walked into the room.

"Ferguson's got what appears to be human skin in his freezer." Wesley went straight to the point.

"You want to run that one by me again?" Marino said, startled.

"I don't know what we're dealing with here," Wesley added as the window fan inside the room began to whir.

"But we got one detective dead with incriminating evidence found with his frozen hamburgers and pizza. We got another detective with a heart attack. We've got a murdered eleven-year- old girl."

"Goddam," Marino said, his face turning red.

"I hope you brought enough clothes to stay for a while," Wesley added to both of us.

"Goddam," Marino said again.

"That son of a bitch." He looked straight at me and I knew exactly what he was thinking. A part of me hoped he was wrong. But if Gault wasn't playing his usual malignant games, I wasn't certain the alternative was better.

"Does this house have a basement?" I asked.

"Yes," Wesley answered.

"What about a big refrigerator?" I asked.

"I haven't seen one. But I haven't been in the basement." Inside the bedroom, Katz turned off the window fan. He motioned to us that it was all right to come in.

"Man, try getting this shit off," Marino said as he looked around. Super Glue dries white and is as stubborn as cement. Every surface in the room was lightly frosted with it, including Ferguson's body. With flashlight angled, Katz side lighted smudges on walls, furniture, windowsills, and the guns over the desk. But it was just one he found that brought him to his knees.

"It's the nylon," our friendly mad scientist said with pure delight as he knelt by the body and leaned close to Ferguson's pulled-down panties.

"You know, it's a good surface for prints because of the tight weave. He's got some kind of perfume on." He slipped the plastic sheath off his Magna brush, and the bristles fell open like a sea anemone. Unscrewing the lid from a jar of Delta Orange magnetic powder, Katz dusted a very good latent print that someone had left on the dead detective's shiny black nylon panties. Partial prints had materialized around Ferguson's neck, and Katz used contrasting black powder on them. But there wasn't enough ridge detail to matter. The strange frost everywhere I looked made the room seem cold.

"Of course, this print on his panties is probably his own," Katz mused as he continued to work.

"From when he pulled them down. He might have had something on his hands. The condom's probably lubricated, for example, and if some of that transferred to his fingers, he could have left a good print. You're going to want to take these?" He referred to the panties.

"I'm afraid so," I said. He nodded.

"That's all right. Pictures will do." He got out his camera.

"But I'd like the panties when you're finished with them. As long as you don't use scissors, the print will hold up fine. That's the good thing about Super Glue. Can't get it off with dynamite."

"How much more do you need to do here tonight?" Wesley said to me, and I could tell he was anxious to leave.

"I want to look for anything that might not survive the body's transport, and take care of what you found in the freezer," I said.

"Plus we need to check the basement." He nodded and said to Marino, "While we take care of these things, how about your being in charge of securing this place?" Marino didn't seem thrilled with the assignment.

"Tell them we'll need security around the clock," Wesley added firmly.

"Problem is, they don't got enough uniforms in this town to do anything around the clock," Marino said sourly as he walked off.

"The damn bastard's just wiped out half the police department." Katz looked up and spoke, his Magna brush poised midair.

"Seems like you're pretty certain who you're looking for."

"Nothing's certain," Wesley said.

"Thomas, I'm going to have to ask for another favor," I said to my dedicated colleague.

"I need you and Dr. Shade to run an experiment for me at The Farm."

"Dr. Shade?" Wesley said.

"Lyall Shade is an anthropologist at the University of Tennessee," I explained.

"When do we start?" Katz loaded a new roll of film into his camera.

"Immediately, if possible. It will take a week."

"Fresh bodies or old?"

"Fresh."

"That really is the guy's name?" Wesley went on.

It was Katz who answered as he took a photograph.

"Sure is. Spelled L-Y-A-L-L. Goes all the way back to his great-grandfather, a surgeon in the Civil War."

IV-Lax Ferguson's basement was accessible by concrete steps in back of his house, and I could tell by dead leaves drifted against them that no one had been here for a while. But I could be no more exact than that, for fall had peaked in the mountains. Even as Wesley tried the door, leaves spiraled down without a sound as if the stars were shedding ashes.

"I'm going to have to break the glass," he said, jiggling the knob some more as I held a flashlight. Reaching inside his jacket, he withdrew the Sig Sauer nine-millimeter pistol from its shoulder holster and sharply tapped the butt against a large pane in the center of the door. The noise of glass shattering startled me even though I was prepared for it, and I half expected police to rapidly materialize from the dark. But no footfall or human voice was carried on the wind, and I imagined the existentialist terror Emily Steiner must have felt before she died. No matter where that might have been, no one had heard her smallest cry, no one had come to save her.

Tiny glass teeth left in the mullion sparkled as Wesley carefully put his arm through the opening and found the inside knob.

"Damn," he said, pushing against the door.

"The latch bolt must be rusted." Working his arm in farther to get a better grip, he was straining against the stubborn lock when suddenly it gave. The door flew open with such force that Wesley spilled into the opening, knocking the flashlight out of my hand. It bounced, rolled, and was extinguished by concrete as I was hit by a wall of cold, foul air. In complete darkness, I heard broken glass scrape as Wesley moved.

"Are you all right?" I blindly inched forward, hands held out in front of me.

"Benton?"

"Jesus." He sounded shaky as he got to his feet.

"Are you okay?"

"Damn, I can't believe this." His voice moved farther away from me. Glass crunched as he groped along the wall, and what sounded like an empty paint bucket clanged dully as he knocked it with his foot. I squinted when a naked bulb went on overhead, my eyes adjusting to a vision of Benton Wesley dirty and dripping blood.

"Let me see." I gently took hold of his left wrist as he scanned our surroundings, rather dazed.

"Benton, we need to get you to a hospital," I said as I examined multiple lacerations on his palm.

"You've got glass embedded in several of these cuts, and you're going to need stitches."

"You're a doctor." The handkerchief he wrapped around his hand instantly turned red.

"You need a hospital," I repeated as I noticed blood spreading darkly through the torn fabric of his left trouser leg.

"I hate hospitals." Behind his stoicism, pain smoldered in his eyes like fever.

"Let's look around and get out of this hole. I promise not to bleed to death in the meantime."

I wondered where the hell Marino was. It did not appear that SBI Agent Ferguson had entered his basement in years. Nor did I see any reason why he should have unless he had a penchant for dust, cobwebs, rusting garden tools, and rotting carpet. Water stained the concrete floor and cinderblock walls, and body parts of crickets told me that legions had lived and died down here. As we wandered corner to corner, we saw nothing to make us suspicious that Emily Steiner had ever been a visitor.

"I've seen enough," said Wesley, whose bright red trail on the dusty floor had come full circle.

"Benton, we've got to do something about your bleeding."

"What do you suggest?"

"Look that way for a moment." I directed him to turn his back to me. He did not question why as he complied, and I quickly stepped out of my shoes and hiked up my skirt. In seconds, I had my panty hose off.

"Okay. Let me have your arm," I told him next.

I tucked it snugly between my elbow and side as any physician in similar circumstances might. But as I wrapped the panty hose around his injured hand, I could feel his eyes on me. I became intensely aware of his breath touching my hair as his arm touched my breast, and a heat so palpable I feared he felt it, too, spread up my neck. Amazed and completely flustered, I quickly finished my improvised dressing of his wounds and backed away.

"That should hold you until we can get to a place where I can do something more serious." I avoided his eyes.

"Thank you, Kay."

"I suppose I should ask where we're going next," I went on in a bland tone that belied my agitation.

"Unless you're planning on our sleeping in the helicopter."

"I put Pete in charge of accommodations."

"You do live dangerously."

"Usually not this dangerously." He flipped off the light and made no attempt to relock the basement door. The moon was a gold coin cut in half, the sky around it midnight blue, and through branches of far-off trees peeked the lights of Ferguson's neighbors.

I wondered if any of them knew he was dead. On the street, we found Marino in the front seat of a Black Mountain Police cruiser, smoking a cigarette, a map spread open in his lap. The interior light was on, the young officer behind the wheel no more relaxed than he had seemed hours earlier when he had picked us up at the football field.

"What the hell happened to you?" Marino said to Wesley.

"You decide to punch out a window?"

"More or less," Wesley replied.

Marino's eyes wandered from Wesley's pantyhose bandage to my bare legs.

"Well, well, now ain't that something," he muttered.

"I wish they'd taught that when I was taking CPR."

"Where are our bags?" I ignored him.

"They're in the trunk, ma'am," said the officer.

"Officer T. C. Baird here's going to be a Good Samaritan and drop us by the Travel-Eze, where yours truly's already taken care of reservations," Marino went on in the same irritating tone.

"Three deluxe rooms at thirty-nine ninety-nine a pop. I got us a discount because we're cops."

"I'm not a cop." I looked hard at him. Marino flicked his cigarette butt out the window.

"Take it easy. Doc. On a good day, you could pass for one. "

"On a go d day, so can you," I answered him.

"I think I've just been insulted."

"No, I'm the one who's just been insulted. You know better than to misrepresent me for discounts or any other reason," I said, for I was an appointed government official bound by very clear rules. Marino knew damn well that I could not afford the slightest compromise of scrupulosity, for I had enemies. I had many of them. Wesley opened the cruiser's back door.

"After you," he quietly said to me. Of Officer Baird he asked, "Do we know anything further about Mote?"

"He's in intensive care, sir."

"What about his condition?"

"It doesn't sound too good, sir. Not at this time." Wesley climbed in next to me, delicately resting his bandaged hand on his thigh. He said, "Pete, we've got a lot of people to talk to around here."

"Yeah, well, while you two was playing doctor in the basement, I was already working on that." Marino held up a notepad and flipped through pages scribbled with illegible notes.

"Are we ready to go?" Baird asked.

"More than ready," Wesley answered, and he was losing patience with Marino, too. The interior light went off and the car moved forward. For a while, Marino, Wesley, and I talked as if the young officer wasn't there as we passed over unfamiliar dark streets, cool mountain air blowing through barely opened windows. We sketched out our strategy for tomorrow morning. I would assist Dr. Jenrette with the autopsy of Max Ferguson while Marino talked to Emily Steiner's mother. Wesley would fly back to Quantico with the tissue from Ferguson's freezer, and the results of these activities would determine what we did next. It was almost two a. m. when we spotted the Travel- Eze Motel ahead of us on U. S. 70, its sign neon yellow against the rolling dark horizon.

I couldn't have been happier had our quarters been a Four Seasons, until we were informed at the registration desk that the restaurant had closed, room service had ended, and there was no bar. In fact, the clerk advised in his North Carolina accent, at this hour we would be better off looking forward to breakfast instead of looking back at the dinner we had missed.

"You got to be kidding," Marino said, thunder gathering in his face.

"If I don't get something to eat my gut's going to turn inside out."

"I'm mighty sorry, sir." The clerk was but a boy with rosy cheeks and hair almost as yellow as the motel's sign.

"But the good news is there's vending machines on each floor." He pointed.

"And a Mr. Zip no more'n a mile from here."

"Our ride just left." Marino glared at him.

"What? I'm supposed to walk a mile at this hour to some joint called Mr. Zip?" The clerk's smile froze, fear shining in his eyes like tiny candles as he looked to Wesley and me for reassurance. But we were too worn out to be much help. When Wesley rested his bloody panty-hose wrapped hand on the counter, the lad's expression turned to horror.

"Sir! Do you need a doctor?" His voice went up an octave and cracked.

"Just my room key will be fine," Wesley replied. The clerk turned around and nervously lifted three keys from their consecutive hooks, dropping two of them to the carpet. He stooped to pick them up and dropped one of them again. At last, he presented them to us, the room numbers stamped on the attached plastic medallions big enough to read at twenty paces.

"You ever heard of security in this joint?" Marino said as if he had hated the boy since birth.

"You're supposed to write the room number on a piece of paper which you privately slip to the guest so every drone can't see where he keeps the wife and Rolex. In case you ain't keeping up with the news, you had a murder real close to here just a couple weeks back." In speechless bewilderment the clerk watched Marino next hold up his key as if it were a piece of incriminating evidence.

"No minibar key? Meaning forget having a drink in the room at this hour, too?" Marino raised his voice some more.

"Never mind. I don't want no more bad news." As we followed a sidewalk to the middle of the small motel, TV screens flickered blue and shadows moved behind filmy curtains over plate-glass windows. Alternating red and green doors reminded me of the plastic hotels and homes of Monopoly as we climbed stairs to the second floor and found our rooms. Mine was neatly made and cozy, the television bolted to the wall, water glasses and ice bucket wrapped in sanitary plastic. Marino repaired to his quarters without bidding us good-night, shutting his door just a little too hard.

"What the hell's eating him?" Wesley asked as he followed me into my room.

I did not want to talk about Marino, and pulling a chair close to one of the double beds, I said, "Before I do anything we need to clean you up."

"Not without painkiller." Wesley went out to fill the ice bucket and removed a fifth of Dewar's from his tote bag. He fixed drinks while I spread a towel on the bed and arranged it with forceps, packets of Betadine, and 5-0 nylon sutures.

"This is going to hurt, isn't it." He looked at me as he took a big swallow of Scotch.

I put on my glasses and replied, "It's going to hurt like hell. Follow me."

I headed into the bathroom. For the next several minutes, we stood side by side at the sink while I washed his wounds with warm soapy water. I was as gentle as possible and he did not complain, but I could feel him flinch in the small muscles of his hand. When I glanced at his face in the mirror, he was perspiring and pale. He had five gaping lacerations in his palm.

"You're just lucky you missed your radial artery," I said.

"I can't tell you how lucky I feel." Looking at his knee, I added, "Sit here." I lowered the toilet lid.

"Do you want me to take my pants off?"

"Either that or we cut them." He sat down.

"They're ruined anyway." With a scalpel, I sliced through the fine wool fabric of his left trouser leg while he sat very still, his leg fully extended. The cut on his knee was deep, and I shaved around it and washed it thoroughly, placing towels on the floor to blot bloody water dripping everywhere. As I led Wesley back into the bedroom, he limped over to the bottle of Scotch and refilled his glass.

"And by the way," I told him, "I appreciate the thought, but I don't drink before surgery."

"I guess I should be grateful," he answered.

"Yes, you should be." He seated himself on the bed, and I took the chair, moving it close. I tore open foil packets of Betadine and began to swipe his wounds.

"Jesus," he said under his breath.

"What is that, battery acid?"

"It's a topical antibacterial iodine."

"You keep that in your medical bag?"

"Yes."

"I didn't realize first aid was an option for most of your patients."

"Sadly, it isn't. But I never know when I might need it." I reached for the forceps.

"Or when someone else at a scene might--like you." I withdrew a sliver of glass and placed it on the towel.

"I know this may come as a great shock to you. Special Agent Wesley, but I started out my career with living patients."

"And when did they start dying on you?"

"Immediately." He tensed as I extracted a very small sliver.

"Hold still," I said.

"So what's Marino's problem? He's been a total ass lately."

I placed two more slivers of glass on the towel and stanched the bleeding with gauze.

"You'd better take another swallow of your drink."

"Why?"

"I've gotten all of the glass."

"So you're finished and we're celebrating." He sounded the most relieved I had ever heard him.

"Not quite." I leaned close to his hand, satisfied that I had not missed anything. Then I opened a suture packet.

"Without Novocain?" he protested.

"As few stitches as you need to close these cuts, numbing you would hurt as much as the needle," I calmly explained, gripping the needle with the forceps.

"I'd still prefer Novocain."

"Well, I don't have any. It might be better if you don't look. Would you like me to turn on the TV?" Wesley stoically stared away from me as he answered between clenched teeth! "Just get it over with." He did not utter a protest while I worked, but as I touched his hand and leg I could feel him tremble. He took a deep breath and began to relax when I dressed his wounds with Neosporin and gauze.

"You're a good patient." I patted his shoulder as I got up.

"Not according to my wife."

I could not remember the last time he had referred to Connie by name. On the rare occasion he mentioned her at all, it was a fleeting allusion to a force he seemed conscious of, like gravity.

"Let's sit outside and finish our drinks," he said. The balcony beyond my room door was a public one that stretched the entire length of the second floor. At this hour the few guests who might have been awake were too far away to hear our conversation. Wesley arranged two plastic chairs close together. We had no table between us, so he set our drinks and bottle of Scotch on the floor.

"Do you want more ice?" he asked.

"This is fine." He had turned off lamps inside the room, and beyond us the barely discernible shapes of trees began to move in concert the longer I stared at them. Headlights were small and sporadic along the distant highway.

"On a scale of one to ten, how awful would you rank this day?" he spoke quietly in the dark.

I hesitated, for I had known many awful days in my career.

"I suppose I'd give it a seven."

"Assuming ten's the worst."

"I have yet to have a ten."

"What would that be?" I felt him look at me.

"I'm not sure," I said, superstitious that naming the worst might somehow manifest it. He fell silent and I wondered if he was thinking about the man who had been my lover and his best friend. When Mark had been killed in London several years before, I had believed there could be no pain worse than that. Now I feared I was wrong. Wesley said, "You never answered my question, Kay."

"I told you I wasn't sure."

"Not that question. I'm talking about Marino now. I asked you what his problem is."

"I think he's very unhappy," I answered.

"He's always been unhappy."

"I said very." He waited.

"Marino doesn't like change," I added.

"His promotion?"

"That and what's going on with me."

"Which is?" Wesley poured more Scotch into our glasses, his arm brushing against me.

"My position with your unit is a significant change." He did not agree or disagree but waited for me to say more.

"I think he somehow perceives that I've shifted my alliances." I realized I was getting only more vague.

"And that is unsettling. Unsettling for Marino, I mean. " Still, Wesley offered no opinion, ice cubes softly rattling as he sipped his drink. We both knew very well what part of Marino's problem was, but it was nothing that Wesley and I had done. Rather, it was something Marino sensed.

"It's my opinion that Marino's very frustrated with his personal life," Wesley said.

"He's lonely."

"I believe both of those things are true," I said.

"You know, he was with Doris for thirty-some years and then suddenly finds himself single again. He's clueless, has no idea how to go about it."

"Nor has he ever really dealt with her leaving. It's stored up. Waiting to be ignited by something unrelated. "

"I've worried about that. I've worried about what that something unrelated might be."

"He still misses her. I believe he still loves her," I said, and the hour and the alcohol made me feel sad for Marino. I rarely could stay angry with him long. Wesley shifted his position in his chair.

"I guess that would be a ten. At least for me."

"To have Connie leave you?" I looked over at him.

"To lose someone you're in love with. To lose a child you're at war with. To not have closure." He stared straight ahead, his sharp profile softly backlit by the moon.

"Maybe I'm kidding myself, but I think I could take almost anything as long as there's resolution, an ending, so I can be free of the past."

"We are never free of that."

"I agree that we aren't entirely." He continued staring ahead when he next said, "Marino has feelings for you that he can't handle, Kay. I think he always has."

"They're best left unacknowledged."

"That sounds somewhat cold."

"I don't mean it coldly," I said.

"I would never want him to feel rejected."

"What makes you assume e doesn't already feel that way?"

"I'm not assuming he doesn't." I sighed.

"In fact, I'm fairly certain he's feeling pretty frustrated these days."

"Actually, jealous is the word that comes to mind."

"Of you."

"Has he ever tried to ask you out?" Wesley went on as if he had not heard what I just said.

"He took me to the Policeman's Ball."

"Umm. That's pretty serious."

"Benton, let's not joke about him."

"I wasn't joking," he said gently.

"I care very much about his feelings and I know you do." He paused.

"In fact, I understand his feelings very well."

"} understand them, too." Wesley set down his drink.

"I guess I should go in and try to get at least a couple hours' sleep," I decided without moving. He reached over and placed his good hand on my wrist, his fingers cool from holding his glass.

"Whit will fly me out of here when the sun is up."

I wanted to take his hand in mine. I wanted to touch his face.

"I'm sorry to leave you."

"All I need is a car," I said as my heart beat harder.

"I wonder where you rent one around here. The airport, maybe?"

"I guess that's why you're an FBI agent. You can figure out things like that." His fingers worked their way down to my hand and he began to stroke it with his thumb. I had always known our path one day would lead to this. When he had asked me to serve as his consultant at Quantico, I had been aware of the danger. I could have said no.

"Are you in much pain?" I asked him.

"I will be in the morning, because I'm going to have a hangover."

"It is the morning."

I leaned back and shut my eyes as he touched my hair. I felt his face move closer as he traced the contours of my throat with his fingers, then his lips. He touched me as if he had always wanted to, while darkness swept in from the far reaches of my brain and light danced across my blood. Our kisses were stolen like fire. I knew I had found the unforgivable sin I had never been able to nan-it did not care. We left our clothes where they landed and w( bed. We were tender with his wounds but not del by them, and made love until dawn began to around the horizon's edge. Afterward I sat on the ] watching the sun spill over the mountains, colorir leaves. I imagined his helicopter lifting and turnin a dancer in air.

in the center of downtown, across the street from the Exxon station, was Black Mountain Chevrolet, where Officer Baird delivered Marino and me at 7:45 a. m. Apparently, the local police had been spreading word throughout the business community that the "Feds" had arrived and were staying "under cover" at the Travel-Eze. Though I did not feel quite the celebrity, neither did I feel anonymous when we drove off in a new silver Caprice while it seemed that everyone who had ever thought of working for the dealership stood outside the showroom and watched.

"I heard some guy call you Quincy," Marino said as he opened a steak biscuit from Hardee's.

"I've been called worse. Do you have any idea how much sodium and fat you're ingesting right now?"

"Yeah. About one third of what I'm going to ingest. I got three biscuits here, and I plan to eat every damn one of them. In case you've got a problem with your short-term memory, I missed dinner last night."

"You don't need to be rude."

"When I miss food and sleep, I get rude."

I did not volunteer that I had gotten less sleep than Marino, but I suspected he knew. He would not look me in the eye this morning, and I sensed that beneath his irritability he was very depressed.

"I didn't sleep worth a damn," he went on.

"The acoustics in that joint suck."

I pulled down the visor as if that somehow would alleviate my discomfort, then turned the radio on and switched stations until I landed on Bonnie Raitt. Marino's rental car was being equipped with a police radio and scanner and would not be ready until the end of the day. I was to drop him off at Denesa Steiner's house and someone would pick him up later. I drove while he ate and gave directions.

"Slow down," he said, looking at a map.

"This should be Laurel coming up on our left. Okay, you're going to want to hang a right at the next one." We turned again to discover a lake directly ahead of us that was no bigger than a football field and the color of moss. Its picnic areas and tennis courts were deserted, and it did not appear that the neatly maintained clubhouse was currently in use. The shore was lined with trees beginning to brown with the wane of fall, and I imagined a little girl with guitar case in hand heading home in the deepening shadows. I imagined an old man fishing on a morning like this and his shock at what he found in the brush.

"I want to come out here later and walk around," I said.

"Turn here," Marino said.

"Her house is at the next corner."

"Where is Emily buried?"

"About two miles over that way." He pointed east.

"In the church cemetery."

"This is the church where her meeting was?"

"Third Presbyterian. If you view the lake area as being sort of like the Washington Mall, you got the church at one end and the Steiner crib at the other with about two miles in between."

I recognized the ranch-style house from the photographs I had reviewed at Quantico yesterday morning. It seemed smaller, as so many edifices do when you finally see them in life. Situated on a rise far back from the street, it was nestled on a lot thick with rhododendrons, laurels, sour-woods, and pines. The gravel sidewalk and front porch had been recently swept, and clustered at the edge of the driveway were bulging bags of leaves. Denesa Steiner owned a green Infiniti sedan that was new and expensive, and this rather surprised me. I caught a glimpse of her arm in a long black sleeve holding the screen door for Marino as I drove away. The morgue in Asheville Memorial Hospital was not unlike most I had seen. Located in the lowest level, it was a small bleak room of tile and stainless steel with but one autopsy table that Dr. Jenrette had rolled close to a sink. He was making the Y incision on Ferguson's body when I arrived at shortly after nine. As blood became exposed to air, I detected the sickening sweet odor of alcohol.