“What is it?” she asks.

“The hell scene we have scheduled for later this afternoon,” he says. “I’d like to spice it up a little.”

“This couldn’t wait until after class?”

“Well, I thought you could get one of the students to volunteer. They’ll do anything you ask.”

She ignores the flattery.

“Ask if one of them will help out with this afternoon’s hell scene, but you can’t tell the details in front of everyone.”

“And what are the details, exactly?”

“I was thinking of Jenny. Maybe you’ll let her skip yourthree o’clockclass so she can help me.” He refers to the pretty student who asked him if the evisceration was his case.

Scarpetta has seen them together on more than one occasion. Joe is engaged, but that doesn’t seem to stop him from being quite friendly with attractive female students, no matter how much the Academy discourages it. So far, he hasn’t been caught committing an unredeemable infraction, and, in a way, she wishes he had been. She’d love to get rid of him.

“We get her to play the perp,” he explains quietly, excitedly. “She looks so innocent, so sweet. So we take two students at a time, have them work a homicide, the victim shot multiple times while on the toilet. This is in one of the motel rooms, of course, and Jenny comes in acting all broken up, hysterical. The dead guy’s daughter. We’ll see if the students let their guard down.”

Scarpetta is silent.

“Of course, there’ll be a few cops at the scene. Let’s say they’re looking around, assuming the perp’s fled. Point is, we’ll see if anybody’s smart enough to make sure this pretty young thing isn’t the person who just blew the guy away, her father, while he was taking a dump. And guess what? She is. They let their guard down, she pulls a gun and starts shooting, gets taken out. And voila. A classic suicide by police.”

“You can ask Jenny yourself after class,” Scarpetta says as she tries to figure out why the scenario seems familiar.

Joe is obsessed with hell scenes, an innovation of Marino’s, extreme mock crime scenes that are supposed to mirror the real risks and unpleasantries of real death. She sometimes thinks Joe should give up forensic pathology and sell his soul toHollywood. If he has a soul. The scenario he has just proposed reminds her of something.

“Pretty good, huh?” he says. “It could happen in real life.”

Then she remembers. It did happen in real life.

“We had a case inVirginialike that,” she recalls. “When I was chief.”

“Really?” he says, amazed. “Guess there’s nothing new under the sun.”

“And by the way, Joe,” she says. “In most cases of seppuku, of hari-kari, the cause of death is cardiac arrest due to sudden cardiac collapse due to a sudden drop in intra-abdominal pressure due to sudden evisceration. Not exsanguination.”

“Your case? The one in there?” He indicates the classroom.

“Marino’s and mine. From years back. And one other thing,” she adds. “It’s a suicide, not a homicide.”

The Citation Xflies south at just under mach one as Lucy uploads files on a virtual private network that is so firewall-protected not even Homeland Security can break in.

At least, she believes her information infrastructure is secure. She believes that no hacker, including the government, can monitor the transmissions of classified data generated by the Heterogenous Image Transaction database management system that goes by the acronym HIT. She developed and programmed HIT herself. The government doesn’t know about it, she is sure of it. Few people do, she is sure of it. HIT is proprietary, and she could sell the software easily, but she doesn’t need the money, having made her fortune years ago from other software development, mostly from some of the same search engines she is conducting through cyberspace this minute, looking for any violent deaths that might have occurred in aSouth Floridabusiness of any description.

Other than homicides in the expected convenience and liquor stores, massage parlors and topless clubs, she has found no violent crime, unsolved or otherwise, that might verify what Basil Jenrette toldBenton. However, there once was a business called The Christmas Shop. It was located at the intersection of A1A and East Las Olas Boulevard, along a strip of tacky touristy boutiques and cafes and ice-cream joints on the beach. Two years ago, The Christmas Shop was sold to a chain called Beach Bums that specializes in T-shirts, swimwear and souvenirs.

It is hard for Joe to believe how many cases Scarpetta has worked in what is a relatively brief career. Forensic pathologists rarely land their first job until they are thirty, assuming their arduous educational track is continuous. Added to her six years of postgraduate medical training were three more for law school. By the time she was thirty-five, she was the chief of the most prominent medical examiner system in theUnited States. Unlike most chiefs, she wasn’t just an administrator. She did autopsies, thousands of them.

Most of them are in a database that is supposed to be accessible to her only, and she’s even gotten federal grants to conduct various research studies on violence-sexual violence, drug-related violence, domestic violence-all kinds of violence. In quite a number of her old cases, Marino, a local homicide detective when she was chief, was the lead investigator. So she has his reports in the database as well. It’s a candy store. It’s a fountain spewing fine champagne. It’s orgasmic.

Joe scrolls through case C328-93, the police suicide that is the model for this afternoon’s hell scene. He clicks on the scene photographs again, thinking about Jenny. In the real case, the trigger-happy daughter is facedown in a pool of blood on the living-room floor. She was shot three times, once in the abdomen, twice in the chest, and he thinks about the way she was dressed when she killed her daddy while he was on the toilet and then put on an act in front of the police before pulling out her pistol again. She died barefoot, in a pair of cutoff blue jeans and a T-shirt. She wasn’t wearing panties or a bra. He clicks to her autopsy photographs, not as interested in what she looked like with a Y incision as in how she looked naked on the cold, steel table. She was only fifteen when the police shot her dead, and he thinks of Jenny.

He looks up, smiles at her from the other side of his desk. She has been sitting patiently, waiting for instructions. He opens a desk drawer and pulls out a Glock nine-millimeter, pulls back the slide to make sure the chamber is clear, drops out the magazine and pushes the pistol across the desk to her.

“You ever shot a gun before?” he asks his newest teacher’s pet.

She has the cutest turned-up nose and huge eyes the color of milk chocolate, and he imagines her naked and dead like the girl in the scene photograph on his screen.

“I grew up with guns,” she says. “What’s that you’re looking at, if you don’t mind my asking.”

“E-mail,” he says, and not telling the truth has never bothered him.

He rather likes not telling the truth, likes it far more than dislikes it. Truth isn’t always truth. What is true? What is true is what he decides is true. It’s all a matter of interpretation. Jenny cranes her head to get a better look at what’s on his screen.

“Cool. People e-mail entire case files to you.”

“Sometimes,” he says, clicking to a different photograph, and the color printer behind his desk starts up. “What we’re doing is classified,” he then says. “Can I trust you?”

“Of course, Dr. Amos. I completely understand classified. If I didn’t, I’m training for the wrong profession.”

A color photograph of the dead girl in a pool of blood on the living-room floor slides into the printer tray. Joe turns around to get it, looks it over, hands it to her.