“I suspect he feels you shunned him after that, no longer trusted or respected him.”

“How can I trust his judgment?”

“I’m still not sure what Marino did,” Rose replies. “I typed up that particular hell scene and edited it just like I do all of his, and as I’ve told you before, his script didn’t include a hypodermic needle in that big, old, fat dead man’s pocket.”

“He set up the scene. He supervised it.”

“He swears someone else put that needle in the pocket. Probably she did. For money, which thankfully, she didn’t get. I don’t blame Marino for the way he feels. Hell scenes were his idea, and now Dr. Amos is doing them and getting all sorts of attention from the students while Marino’s treated like…”

“He’s not nice to the students. Not from day one.”

“Well, now it’s worse. They don’t know him and think he’s an ill tempered dinosaur, a cranky old has-been. And I know just how it feels to be treated like a cranky old has-been or, worse, to feel like one.”

“You’re anything but cranky or a has-been.”

“At least you agree that I’m old,” Rose says as she steps back through the doorway, adding, “I’ll try him again.”

Inside room 112 of the Last Stand motel, Joe sits at the cheap desk across from the cheap bed and checks the computer for Scarpetta’s plane reservation, jotting down the flight number and other information. He calls the airline.

After five minutes of dead time on hold, he gets a real person.

“I need to change a reservation,” he says.

He recites the information, then changes the seating to coach, as far back in the plane as is available, preferably a middle seat, because his boss doesn’t like windows or the aisle. Just like he did last time so successfully, when she was flying toLos Angeles. He could cancel her flight again. But this is more fun.

“Yes, sir.”

“What about an E-ticket?”

“No sir, a change this close to departure, and you’re going to have to check in at the desk.”

He hangs up, exhilarated, as he imagines the Almighty Scarpetta trapped between two strangers, hopefully two enormous, smelly ones for three hours. He smiles as he plugs a digital recorder into his super hybrid system telephone handset. The window air-conditioning unit rattles loudly but is ineffective. He is getting uncomfortably warm and detects the faint, foul stench of rotting meat from a recent hell scene that included racks of raw pork ribs, beef liver and chicken skin rolled up in carpet and hidden beneath closet flooring.

He scheduled the exercise right after a special lunch he charged to the Academy that included barbecue ribs and rice and resulted in several students gagging when the foul bundle was discovered oozing with rotting fluids and teeming with maggots. In their haste to recover the simulated human remains and clear the scene, Team A neglected to notice a torn bit of fingernail that was also beneath the flooring, lost in the stinking, putrid slop, and as it turned out, that piece of evidence was the only one that could have revealed the identity of the killer.

Joe lights a cigar as he fondly remembers the success of that hell scene, a success made all the better because of Marino’s outrage, his insistence that Joe once again had stolen an idea from him. The big bumpkin cop has yet to figure out that Lucy’s choice of a communications-monitoring system that interfaces with the Academy’s PBX means that given the appropriate security clearance, one can monitor whomever he pleases in almost any way imaginable.

Lucy was careless. The intrepid super-agent Lucy left her Treo-an ultra-high-tech palm-size communications device that is a personal digital assistant, cell phone, e-mail, camera and everything else-inside one of her helicopters. It happened almost a year ago. He’d barely started his fellowship when he had the most amazing bit of luck, was in the hangar with one of the students, an especially pretty one, showing her Lucy’s helicopters when he happened to notice a Treo inside the Bell 407.

Lucy’s Treo.

She was still logged on. He didn’t need her password to access everything in it. He kept the Treo long enough to download all its files before returning it to the helicopter, leaving it on the floor, partially under a seat, where Lucy found it later that day, having no idea what had happened. She still has no idea.

Joe has passwords, dozens of them, including Lucy’s system-administrator password, which enables her and now him to access and alter the computer and telecommunications systems of the South Florida regional headquarters, the central headquarters in Knoxville, satellite offices in New York and Los Angeles, and Benton Wesley and histop-secret PREDATOR research study and everything else he and Scarpetta confide in each other. Joe can redirect files and e-mail, get hold of the unlisted phone numbers of anybody who has ever had anything to do with the Academy, wreak havoc. His fellowship ends in a month, and by the time he moves on, and he will in a big way, he might just have succeeded in causing the Academy to implode and everybody, especially the big stupid thug Marino and the overbearing Scarpetta, to hate each other.

It is easy to monitor the big dope’s office line, to secretly activate his speakerphone so it is like having an open mic in the room. Marino dictates everything, including his hell scenes, and Rose types them up because he can’t spell, has terrible grammar, rarely reads and is practically illiterate.

Joe feels a rush of euphoria as he taps cigar ash into a Coke can and logs into the PBX system. He accesses Marino’s office line, activates the speakerphone to see if he is in and up to something.

When Scarpetta agreed to serve as the consulting forensic pathologist for PREDATOR, she wasn’t enthusiastic about it.

She warnedBenton, tried to talk him out of it, repeatedly reminded him that the subjects of the research study don’t care if someone is a physician or a psychologist or a Harvard professor.

They’ll break your neck or smash your head against a wall just like they will anybody else, she said. There’s no such thing as sovereign immunity.

I’ve been around these people most of my life, he replied. That’s what I do, Kay.

You’ve never done it in this type of setting. Not at an Ivy League-affiliated psychiatric hospital that has historically never dealt with convicted murderers. You’re not only staring into the abyss, you’re installing lights and an elevator in it,Benton.

She hears Rose talking on the other side of the wall in her office.

“Where on earth have you been?” Rose is saying.

“So when am I taking you for that ride?” Marino replies loudly.

“I told you, I’m not getting on the back of that thing. I think there’s something wrong with your phone.”

“I’ve always had this fantasy of seeing you in black leather.”

“I went looking for you, and you weren’t in your office. Or, at least, you didn’t answer the door…”

“I ain’t been in there all morning.”

“But your line’s lit up.”

“No it ain’t.”

“It was a few minutes ago.”

“You checking on me again? I think you’re sweet on me, Rose.”

Marino goes on in his boisterous voice as Scarpetta reviews an e-mail she just got fromBenton, another recruitment ad that is to run in The Boston Globe and on the Internet.

HARVARDMEDICALSCHOOL-AFFILIATED RESEARCHERS ARE CURRENTLY STUDYING BRAIN STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION IN HEALTHY ADULTS AT THEMCLEANHOSPITALBRAINIMAGINGCENTER INBELMONT, MA.

“Go on now. Dr. Scarpetta’s waiting and you’re late again.” She hears Rose chastise Marino in her firm but affectionate way. “You need to quit the disappearing acts.”