“They’re all crap,” he says. “The fucking trinity. Well, I’ve got a little surprise for them.”

“What?”

“You’ll see. Maybe I’ll share it with you.”

“What is it?”

“Put it this way,” he says. “I’m getting something out of this. She underestimates me, and that’s a huge mistake. At the end of the day, it’s going to be a lot of laughs.”

Part of his fellowship entails his assisting Scarpetta in the Broward County morgue, where she treats him like a common laborer, forcing him to suture up the bodies after autopsies and count the pills in bottles of prescription drugs that come in with the dead and catalogue personal effects as if he is a lowly morgue assistant and not a doctor. She has made it his responsibility to weigh, measure, photograph and undress the bodies, and to sift through any disgusting mess that might linger in the bottom of a body bag, especially if it is putrid, maggot-infested slop from a floater, or rancid flesh and bones from partially skeletonized remains. Most insulting is the chore of mixing up ten percent ordnance gelatin for the ballistic gelatin blocks used by the scientists and students.

“Why? Give me one good reason,” he said to Scarpetta when she gave him the assignment last summer.

“It’s part of your training, Joe,” she replied in her typically unflappable way.

“I’m training to be a forensic pathologist, not a lab tech or a cook,” he complained.

“My method is to train forensic fellows from the ground up,” she said. “There isn’t anything you shouldn’t be able or willing to do.”

“Oh. And I suppose you’re going to tell me you’ve made ordnance jelly blocks, that you used to do that when you were getting started,” he said.

“I still do it and am happy to pass along my favorite recipe,” she replied. “I prefer Vyse but Kind amp; Knox Type two-fifty-A will do just fine. Always start with cold water, between seven and ten degrees centigrade, and add the gelatin to the water and not the other way around. Keep stirring, but not vigorously, because you don’t want to introduce air. Add two-point-five milliliters of Foam Eater per twenty-pound block and make sure the mold pan is whistle-clean. For the piece de resistance, add point-five milliliters of cinnamon oil.”

“That’s cute.”

“Cinnamon oil prevents fungus growth,” she said.

She wrote out her personal recipe and then an equipment list that included a triple-beam balance, graduated pitcher, paint stirrer, 12cc hypodermic syringe, propionic acid, aquarium hose, aluminum foil, large spoon and so on, and next gave him a Martha Stewart demonstration in the lab kitchen, as if that makes it all fine and dandy when he’s scooping animal-pieces-and-parts powder out of twenty-five-pound drums and weighing and curing and lifting or dragging huge, heavy pans and placing them inside ice chests or the walk-in refrigerator and then making sure the students gather at the indoor range or outdoor rifle deck before the damn things start deteriorating, because they do. They melt like Jell-O and are best when served no longer than twenty minutes after removal from refrigeration, depending on the ambient temperature of the test environment.

He retrieves a window screen from a storage closet and props it flush against the Harley-outfitted blocks of ordnance gelatin, then puts on hearing protectors and protective glasses. He nods for Jenny to do the same. He picks up a stainless-steel Baretta 92, a top-of-the-line double-action pistol with a tritium front post sight. He loads a magazine with 147-grain Speer Gold Dot ammunition, which has six serrations around the rim of the hollowpoint so the projectile will expand or blossom even after passing through clothing as heavy as four layers of denim or a thick leather motorcycle jacket.

What will be different in this test-fire is the mesh pattern produced when the bullet passes through the window screen before ripping through the Harley jacket and buzz-sawing a swath through the chest of Mr. Jell-O, as he calls his ordnance-gelatin test dummies.

He racks back the slide and fires fifteen rounds, imagining Mr. Jell-O is Marino.

Palm trees thrash in the wind beyond the conference-room windows. It will rain, Scarpetta thinks. It looks like a bad thunderstorm is headed her way, and Marino is late again and still hasn’t returned her phone calls.

“Good morning and let’s get going,” she says to her staff. “We’ve got a lot to go over, and it’s already quarter of nine.”

She hates being late. She hates it when someone else causes her to be late, and in this instance, it’s Marino. Again, it’s Marino. He is ruining her routines. He is ruining everything.

“This evening, hopefully, I’ll be on a plane, heading toBoston,” she says. “Providing my reservation isn’t magically cancelled again.”

“The airlines are so screwed up,” Joe says. “No wonder they’re all going bankrupt.”

“We’ve been asked to take a look at aHollywoodcase, a possible suicide that has some disturbing circumstances associated with it,” she begins.

“There’s one thing I’d like to bring up first,” says Vince, the firearms examiner.

“Go ahead.” Scarpetta slides eight-by-ten photographs out of an envelope and begins passing them around the table.

“Someone was test-firing in the indoor range about an hour ago.” He looks pointedly at Joe. “It wasn’t on the schedule.”

“I meant to reserve the indoor range last night but forgot,” Joe says. “No one was waiting for it.”

“You’ve got to reserve it. It’s the only way we can keep track of…”

“I was trying out a new batch of ballistic gelatin, where I used hot water instead of cold to see if it made any difference in the calibration test. A difference of one centimeter. Good news. It passed.”

“There’s probably a difference of plus or minus one centimeter every time you mix up the damn stuff,” Vince says irritably.

“We aren’t supposed to use any block that isn’t valid. So I’m constantly checking the calibration and trying to perfect it. That requires me to spend a lot of time in the firearms lab. It’s not my choice.”

Joe looks at Scarpetta.

“Ordnance gelatin is one of my assignments.”

He looks at her again.

“I hope you remembered to use stopper blocks before you started pounding the back wall with a lot of firepower,” Vince says. “I’ve asked you before.”

“You know the rules, Dr. Amos,” Scarpetta says.

In front of his colleagues, she always calls him Dr. Amos instead of Joe. She shows him more respect than he deserves.

“We have to enter everything in the log,” she adds. “Every firearm removed from the reference collection, every round, every test-fire. Our protocols must be followed.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“There are legal implications. Most of our cases end up in court,” she adds.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“All right.” She tells them about Johnny Swift.

She tells them that in early November he had surgery on his wrists, and soon after came toHollywoodto stay with his brother. They were identical twins. The day before Thanksgiving, the brother,Laurel, went out shopping and returned to the house at approximatelyfour thirty p.m.After carrying in the groceries, he discovered Dr. Swift on the couch, dead from a shotgun wound to the chest.

“I sort of remember this case,” Vince says. “It was in the news.”

“Well, I happen to remember Dr. Swift very well,” Joe says. “He used to call Dr. Self. Once when I was on her show, he called in, gave her hell about Tourette’s syndrome, and I happen to agree with her, usually nothing more than an excuse for bad behavior. He rambled on about neurochemical dysfunction, about abnormalities of the brain. Quite the expert,” he says sarcastically.

Nobody is interested in Joe’s appearances on Dr. Self’s show. Nobody is interested in his appearances on any show.