What I said about distance and trajectories, and what vital organs had been struck by ten-millimeter bullets, was a blur. I could scarcely remember a word of it after I hurried down the courthouse steps and walked swiftly without looking at anyone. Two tenacious reporters followed me for half a block, and finally turned back when they realized it was easier to talk to a stone. The unfairness of what had happened in the witness stand went beyond words. Carrie had needed to fire but one small round and already I was wounded. I knew this would not end.

When I unlocked the back door to my building, for an instant the glare of sunlight made it hard for me to see as I stepped inside the cool shaded bay. I opened the door leading inside and was relieved to see Fielding in the corridor, heading toward me. He was wearing fresh scrubs, and I supposed another case had come in.

'Everything under control?' I asked, tucking my sunglasses inside my pocketbook.

'A suicide from Powhatan. Fifteen-year-old girl shot herself in the head. It seems daddy wouldn't let her see her dirtbag boyfriend anymore. You look terrible, Kay.'

'It's called a shark attack.'

'Uh oh. Damn fucking lawyers. Who was it this time?'

He was ready to beat somebody up.

'Lampkin.'

'Oh, good ole Lamprey the eel!' Fielding squeezed my shoulder. 'It's gonna be all right. Trust me. It really will be. You just gotta block out the bullshit and go on.'

'I know.' I smiled at him. 'I'll be in the decomp room if you need me.'

The solitary task of patiently working on bones was a welcome relief, for I did not want anyone on my staff to detect my dejection and fear. I switched on lights and shut the door behind me. I tied a gown over my clothes and pulled on two layers of latex gloves, and turned on the electric burner and took the lid off the pot. The bones had continued processing after I had left last night, and I probed them with a wooden spoon. I spread a plasticized sheet over a table. The skull had been sawn open during autopsy, and I carefully lifted the dripping calvarium, and the bones of the face with its calcined teeth, from tepid, greasy water. I set them on the sheet to drain.

I preferred wooden tongue depressors versus plastic spatulas to scrape tissue from bone. Metal instruments were out of the question because they would cause damage that might obviate our finding true marks of violence. I worked very carefully, loosening and defleshing while the rest of the skeletal remains quietly cooked in their steamy pot. For two hours I cleaned and rinsed until my wrists and fingers ached. I missed lunch, and in fact never thought of it. At almost two P.M. I found a nick in the bone beneath the temporal region where I had found hemorrhage, and I stopped and stared in disbelief.

I pulled surgical lamps closer, blasting the table with light. The cut to bone was straight and linear, no more than an inch in length and so shallow it easily could have been missed. The only time I had ever seen an injury similar to this was in the nineteenth-century skulls of people who had been scalped. In those instances, the nicks or cuts were not generally associated with temporal bone, but that meant nothing, really.

Scalping was not an exact surgical procedure and anything was possible. Although I had found no evidence that the Warrenton victim was missing areas of scalp and hair, I could not swear to it. Certainly, when we had found her, the head was not intact, and while a scalping trophy might involve most of the cranium, it might also mean the excision of a single lock of hair.

I used a towel to pick up the phone because my hands were unfit to touch anything clean. I paged Marino. For ten minutes I waited for him to call back while I continued to carefully scrape. But I found no other marks. This did not mean, of course, that additional injury had not been lost, for at least a third of the twenty-two bones of the skull were burned away. My mind raced through what I should do. I yanked off my gloves and threw them in the trash, and I was flipping through an address book I had gotten out of my purse when Marino called.

'Where the hell are you?' I asked as stress gushed toxins through my body.

'At Liberty Valance eating.'

'Thank you for getting back to me so quickly,' I said irritably.

'Gee, Doc. It must've been lost in space somewhere, because I just got it. What the shit's going on?'

I could hear the background noise of people drinking and enjoying food that was guaranteed to be heavy and rich but worth it.

'Are you on a pay phone?' I asked.

'Yeah, and I'm off duty, just so you know.'

He took a swallow of something that I figured was beer.

'I've got to get to Washington tomorrow. Something significant has come up.'

'Uh oh. I hate it when you say that.'

'I found something else.'

'You gonna tell me or do I have to stay up all night pacing?'

He had been drinking, and I did not want to talk to him about this now.

'Listen, can you go with me, assuming Dr Vessey can see us?'

'The bones man at the Smithsonian?'

'I'll call him at home as soon as we get off the phone.'

'I'm off tomorrow, so I guess I can squeeze you in.'

I did not say anything as I stared at the simmering pot and turned the heat down just a little.

'Point is, count me in,' Marino said, swallowing again.

'Meet me at my house,' I said. 'At nine.'

'I'll be there with bells on.'

Next I tried Dr Vessey's Bethesda home and he answered on the first ring.

'Thank God,' I said. 'Alex? It's Kay Scarpetta.'

'Oh! Well, how are you?'

He was always a bit befuddled and missing in action in the minds of the hoi polloi who did not spend their lives putting people back together again. Dr Vessey was one of the finest forensic anthropologists in the world, and he had helped me many times before.

'I'll be much better if you tell me you're in town tomorrow,' I said.

'I'll be working on the railroad as always.'

'I've got a cut mark on a skull. I need your help. Are you familiar with the Warrenton fire?'

'Can't be conscious and not know about that.'

'Okay. Then you understand.'

'I won't be there until about ten and there's no place to park,' he said. 'I got in a pig's tooth the other day with aluminum foil stuck in it,' he absently went on about whatever he'd been doing of late. 'I guess from a pig roast, dug up in someone's backyard. The Mississippi coroner thought it was a homicide, some guy shot in the mouth.'

He coughed and loudly cleared his throat. I heard him drink something.

'Still getting bear paws now and then,' he went on, 'more coroners thinking they're human hands.'

'I know, Alex,' I said. 'Nothing has changed.'

MARINO PULLED INTO my driveway early, at quarter of nine, because he wanted coffee and something to eat. He was officially not working, so he was dressed in blue jeans, a Richmond Police T-shirt, and cowboy boots that had lived a full life. He had slicked back what little hair had weathered his years, and he looked like an old beer-bellied bachelor about to take his woman to Billy Bob's.

'Are we going to a rodeo?' I asked as I let him in.

'You know, you always have a way of pissing me off.'

He gave me a sour look that didn't faze me in the least. He didn't mean it.

'Well, I think you look pretty cool, as Lucy would say. I've got coffee and granola.'

'How many times do I got to tell you that I don't eat friggin' birdseed,' he grumbled as he followed me through my house.

'And I don't cook steak-egg biscuits.'

'Well, maybe if you did, you wouldn't spend so many evenings alone.'

'I hadn't thought about that.'

'Did the Smithsonian tell you where we was going to park up there? Because there's no parking in D.C.'