At the very least, as a matter of professional courtesy, a visiting forensic pathologist would be welcomed at staff meeting and in the morgue, especially if she is providing expertise pro bono to the medical examiner's office that she once headed. Dr. Marcus could not have insulted Scarpetta more had he asked her to drop off his dry cleaning or wait in the parking lot.

I'm afraid your guest really can't be in here." Dr. Marcus makes that clear once again as he looks around impatiently. "Julie, can you show this gentleman back out to the lobby?"

"He's not my guest and he's not waiting in the lobby," Scarpetta says quietly.

"I beg your pardon?" Dr. Marcus's small thin face looks at her.

"We're together," she says.

"Perhaps you don't understand the situation," Dr. Marcus replies in a tight voice.

"Perhaps I don't. Let's talk." It is not a request.

He almost flinches, his reluctance is so acute. "Very well," he acquiesces. "We'll duck into the library for a minute."

"Will you excuse us?" She smiles at Marino.

"No problem." He walks inside Julie's cubicle and picks up a stack of autopsy photographs and starts going through them like playing cards. He snaps one out between forefinger and thumb like a blackjack dealer. "Know why drug dealers got less body fat than let's say you and me?" He drops the photograph on her keyboard.

Julie, who can't be more than twenty-five and is attractive but a bit plump, stares at a photograph of a muscular young black male, as naked as the day he was born. He is on top of an autopsy table, chest cut open wide, hollowed out, organs gone except for one very conspicuously large organ, probably his most vital organ, at least to him, at least when he was alive enough to care about it. "What?" Julie asks. "You're kidding me, right?"

"I'm serious as a heart attack." Marino pulls up a chair and sits next to her, very close. "See, darling, body fat directly correlates to the weight of the brain. Witness you and me. Always a struggle, ain't it?"

"No kidding. You really think smarter people get fat?"

"A fact of life. People like you and me gotta work extra hard."

"Don't tell me you're on one of those eat-all-you-want-except-white stuff diets."

"You got it, babe. Nothing white for me except women. Now me? If I was a drug dealer, I wouldn't give a shit. Eat whatever the hell I wanted. Twinkies, Moon Pies, white bread and jelly. But that's because I wouldn't have a brain, right? See, all these dead drug dealers are dead because they're stupid, and that's why they ain't got body fat and can eat all the white shit they want."

Their voices and laughter fade as Scarpetta follows a corridor so familiar she remembers the brush of the gray carpet beneath her shoes, the exact feel of the firm low-pile carpet she picked out when she designed her part of the building.

"He really is most inappropriate," Dr. Marcus is saying. "One thing I do require in this place is proper decorum."

Walls are scuffed, and the Norman Rockwell prints she bought and framed herself are cockeyed and two are missing. She stares inside the open doorways of offices they pass, noticing sloppy mounds of paperwork and microscopic slide folders and compound microscopes perched like big tired gray birds on overwhelmed desks. Every sight and sound reaches out to her like needy hands, and deep down she feels what has been lost and it hurts much more than she ever thought it could.

"Now I'm making the connection, regrettably. The infamous Peter Marano. Yes indeed. Quite a reputation that man has," Dr. Marcus says.

"Marino," she corrects him.

A right turn and they do not pause at the coffee station but Dr. Marcus opens a solid wooden door that leads into the library, and she is greeted by medical books abandoned on long tables and other reference books tilted and upended on shelves like drunks. The huge horseshoe-shaped table is a landfill of journals, scraps of paper, dirty coffee cups, even a Krispy Kreme doughnut box. Her heart pounds as she looks around. She designed this generous space and was proud of the way she budgeted her funds because medical and scientific textbooks and a library to hold them are exorbitantly expensive and beyond what the state considers necessary for an office whose patients are dead. Her attention hovers over sets of Greenfield's Neuro-pathology and law reviews that she donated rrom her own collection. The volumes are out of order. One of them is upside down. Her anger spikes.

She fastens her eyes on Dr. Marcus and says, "I think we'd better lay down some ground rules."

"Goodness, Kay. Ground rules?" he asks with a puzzled frown that is feigned and annoying.

She can't believe his blatant condescension. He reminds her of a defense attorney, not a good one, who hoodwinks the courtroom by stipulating away the seventeen years she spent in postgraduate education and reduces her on the witness stand to Ma'am or Mrs. or Ms. or, worst of all, Kay.

"I'm sensing resistance to my being here…" she starts to say.

"Resistance? I'm afraid I don't understand."

"I think you do…"

"Let's don't make assumptions."

"Please don't interrupt me, Dr. Marcus. I don't have to be here." She takes in trashed tables and unloved books and wonders if he is this contemptuous with his own belongings. "What in God's name has happened to this place?" she asks.

He pauses as if it requires a moment of divining to understand what she means. Then he comments blandly, "Today's medical students. No doubt they were never taught to pick up after themselves."

"In five years they've changed that much," she says, dryly.

"Perhaps you're misinterpreting my mood this morning," he replies in the same coaxing tone that he used with her over the phone yesterday. "Granted, I have a lot on my mind, but I'm quite pleased you're here."

"You seem anything but pleased." She keeps her eyes steadily on him while he stares past her. "Let's start with this. I didn't call you. You called me. Why?" I should have asked you yesterday, she thinks. I should have asked you then.

"I thought I'd made myself clear, Kay. You're a very respected forensic pathologist, a well-known consultant." It sounds like an ingenuous endorsement for someone he secretly can't stand.

"We don't know each other. We've never even met. I'm having a hard time believing you called me because I'm respected or well known." Her arms are folded and she is glad she wore a serious dark suit. "I don't play games, Dr. Marcus."

"I certainly don't have time for games." Any attempt at cordiality fades from his face and pettiness begins to glint like the sharp edge of a blade.

"Did someone suggest me? Were you told to call me?" She is certain she detects the stench of politics.

He glances toward the door in a not so subtle reminder that he is a busy, important man with eight cases and a staff meeting to run. Or perhaps he is worrying that someone is eavesdropping. "This is not productive," he says. "I think it's best we terminate this discussion."

"Fine." She picks up her briefcase. "The last thing I want is to be a pawn in some agenda. Or shut off in a room, drinking coffee half the day. I can't help an office that isn't open to me, and my number-one ground rule, Dr. Marcus, is that an office requesting my assistance must be open to me."

"All right. If you want candor, indeed you shall have it." His imperiousness fails to hide his fear. He doesn't want her to leave. He sincerely doesn't. "Frankly, bringing you here wasn't my idea. Frankly, the health commissioner wanted an outside opinion and somehow came up with you," he explains as if her name were drawn from a hat.

"He should have called me himself," she replies. "That would have been more honest."

"I told him I would do it. Frankly, I didn't want to put you on the spot," he explains, and the more he says "frankly," the less she believes a word he says. "What happened is this. When Dr. Fielding couldn't determine a cause or manner of death, the girl's father, Gilly Paulsson's father, called the commissioner."