She paused, regarding me over her reading glasses.

'But I can stay if you want me to,' she added.

'I've got some things to do,' I told her. 'And the last thing I would think of is to interfere with a church dinner. Yours or anyone's. I'm always in enough trouble with God as is.'

'Then I'll say good night,' Rose said. 'My dictations are in your basket. I'll see you in the morning.'

After her footsteps vanished down the corridor, I was enveloped by silence broken only by the sounds of paper I was moving around on my desk. I thought of Benton several times and warded off my desire to call him, because I was not ready to relax, or maybe I simply did not want to feel human quite yet. It is, after all, hard to feel like a normal person with normal emotions when one is about to boil human remains in what is essentially a large soup pot. A few minutes after seven, I followed the corridor to the decomposition room, which was two doors down and across from the cooler.

I unlocked the door and entered what was nothing more than a small autopsy room with a freezer and special ventilation. The remains were covered by a sheet on a transportable table, a new forty-quart pot filled with water on an electric burner beneath a chemical hood. I put on a mask and gloves and turned the burner on a low heat that would not further damage the bones. I poured in two scoops of laundry detergent and a cup of bleach to hasten the loosening of fibrous membranes, cartilage, and grease.

I opened the sheets, exposing bones stripped of most of their tissue, the extremities pitifully truncated like burned sticks. I gently placed femurs and tibias into the pot, then the pelvis and parts of the skull. Vertebrae and ribs followed as water got hotter and a sharp-smelling steam began to rise. I needed to see her bare, clean bones because they might have something to tell me, and there simply was no other way to do it.

For a while I sat in that room, the hood loudly sucking up air as I drifted in my chair. I was tired. I was emotionally drained and feeling all alone. Water heated up, and what was left of a woman I believed had been murdered began to process in the pot, in what seemed one more indignity and callous slight to who she was.

'Oh God,' I sighed, as if God might somehow hear me. 'Bless her, wherever she is.'

It was hard to imagine being reduced to bones cooking in a pot, and the more I thought about it the more depressed I got. Somewhere someone had loved this woman, and she had accomplished something in this life before her body and identity had been so cruelly stripped away. I had spent my existence trying to ward off hate, but by now it was too late. It was true that I hated sadistic evil people whose purpose in life was to torment life and take it, as if it were theirs to appropriate. It was true that executions deeply disturbed me, but only because they resurrected heartless crimes and the victims society barely remembered.

Steam rose in a hot, moist vapor, tainting the air with a nauseating stench that would lessen the longer the bones were processed. I envisioned someone thin and tall and blond, someone wearing jeans and lace-up boots, with a platinum ring tucked in her back pocket. Her hands were gone, and I probably would never know the size of her fingers or if the ring had fit, but it wasn't likely. Fielding probably was right, and I knew I had one more thing to ask Sparkes.

I thought of her wounds and tried to reconstruct how she might have gotten them, and why her fully clothed body had been in the master bathroom. That location, if we were correct about it, was unexpected and odd. Her jeans had not been undone, for when I had recovered the zipper it had been zipped shut, and certainly her buttocks had been covered. Based on the synthetic fabric that had melted into her flesh, I also had no reason to suspect that her breasts had been exposed, not that any of these findings ruled out a sexual assault. But they certainly argued against one.

I was checking the bones through a veil of steam when the telephone rang, startling me. At first I thought it might be some funeral home with a body to deliver, but then I realized that the flashing light was one of the lines for the autopsy room. I could not help but remember what Ruffin had said about spooky early morning calls, and I halfway expected to hear no one on the other end.

'Yes,' I said abruptly.

'Geez, who pissed in your cornflakes?' Marino answered back.

'Oh,' I said, relieved. 'Sorry, I thought it was someone playing pranks.'

'What do you mean, pranks?'

'Later,' I said. 'What's going on?'

'I'm sitting in your parking lot and was hoping you might let me in.'

'I'll be right there.'

In fact, I was very pleased to have company. I hurried to the enclosed bay, and I pushed a button on a wall. The huge door began to crank up, and Marino ducked under it, the dark night smudged with sodium vapor lights. I realized the sky had gotten overcast with clouds that portended rain.

'Why are you here so late?' Marino asked in his usual grumpy way as he sucked on a cigarette.

'My office is smoke-free,' I reminded him.

'Like anybody in this joint's gotta worry about secondary smoke.'

'A few of us are still breathing,' I said.

He flicked the cigarette to the concrete floor and irritably crushed it with his foot, as if we had never been through this routine, not even once in our lives. In fact, this had gotten to be a standard act with us that in its own dysfunctional way somehow reaffirmed our bond to each other. I was quite certain that Marino's feelings would be injured if I didn't nag him about something.

'You can follow me into the decomp room,' I said to him as I shut the bay door. 'I'm in the middle of something.'

'I wish I'd known before,' he complained. 'I would've just dealt with you over the phone.'

'Don't worry. It's not too bad. I'm just cleaning up some bones.'

'Maybe that ain't bad to you,' he said, 'but I've never gotten used to smelling people cook.'

We walked inside the decomposition room and I handed him a surgical mask. I checked the processing to see how it was going and turned the heat down fifty degrees to make sure the water did not boil over and knock bones against each other and the sides of the pot. Marino bent the mask to fit over his nose and mouth and tied sloppy bows in the back. He spotted a box of disposable gloves, snatched a pair and worked them on. It was ironical that he was obsessive in his concerns about outside agents invading his health, when in fact the gravest danger was simply the way he lived. He was sweating in khakis and a white shirt and tie and at some point during the day had been assaulted by ketchup.

'Got a couple interesting things for you, Doc,' he said, leaning against a brightly polished sink. 'We ran the tags on the burned-up Mercedes behind Kenneth Sparkes's house, and it comes back to an '81 Benz 240D, blue. The odometer's probably rolled over at least twice. Registration's a little scary, comes back to a Dr Newton Joyce in Wilmington, North Carolina. He's in the book but I couldn't get him, just his answering machine.'

'Wilmington is where Claire Rawley went to school, and close to where Sparkes had his beach house,' I reminded him.

'Right. So far the signs are still pointing that way.'

He stared blankly at the steaming pot on the burner.

'She drives someone else's car to Warrenton and somehow gets inside Sparkes's house when he's not home, and gets murdered and burns up in a fire,' he said, rubbing his temples. 'I tell you, this one stinks about as bad as what you're cooking there, Doc. We're missing a really big piece, because nothing's making sense.'

'Are there any Rawleys in the Wilmington area?' I asked. 'Any possibility she has relatives there?'

'They got two listings, and neither of them have ever heard of a Rawley named Claire,' he said.