“Projection.” Benton had to will his fury toward Warner Agee to leave the room. “It’s what she’s projecting,” he heard himself say in a reasonable tone.

“All right. What is she projecting, in your view? Who is Santa? Who is Mrs. Claus?”

“I’m Santa,” Benton said, and the wave was passing. It had seemed as big as a tsunami and then receded and was almost gone. He relaxed a little. “Mrs. Claus is hostile toward me for something she perceives I did that was unkind and degrading. I, Santa, said, ‘ho, ho, ho,’ and Mrs. Claus interpreted it as my calling her a whore.”

“Dodie Hodge perceives that she is falsely accused, degraded, unappreciated, trivialized. Yet she knows her perception is false,” Dr. Clark said. “That’s the histrionic personality disorder kicking in. The obvious message of the card is poor Santa is about to take a drubbing because Mrs. Claus grossly misunderstood what he said, and obviously Dodie gets the joke or she wouldn’t have picked the card.”

“Assuming she picked it.”

“You keep alluding to that. To the possibility she might have had some help. Possibly an accomplice.”

“The technical part of it,” Benton said. “Knowing about the recorders, ordering them, assembling the damn thing. Dodie’s impulsive and seeks instant gratification. There’s a degree of deliberation that is inconsistent with what I saw when she was at the hospital. And when did she have time? As I said, she was discharged just this past Sunday. The FedEx was sent yesterday, Wednesday. How did she know to send it here? The handwritten address on the FedEx label is odd. The whole thing is odd.”

“She craves drama, and the singing card is dramatic. You don’t think that’s consistent with her histrionic proclivities?”

“You yourself pointed out she didn’t witness the drama,” Benton said. “Drama’s no fun if there’s no audience. She didn’t see me open the card, doesn’t know for a fact I did. Why not give it to me before she was discharged, do it in person?”

“So someone else put her up to it. Her accomplice.”

“The lyrics bother me,” Benton said.

“Which part?”

“Stick mistletoe where it ought to go and hang an angel from your tree,” Benton said.

“Who’s the angel?”

“You tell me.”

“It could be Kay.” Dr. Clark held his gaze. “ ‘Your tree’ could be a reference to your penis, to your sexual relationship with your wife.”

“And an allusion to a lynching,” Benton said.

The chief medical examiner of New York City was bent over his microscope when Scarpetta lightly knocked on his open door.

“You know what happens when you absent yourself from a staff meeting, don’t you?” Dr. Brian Edison said without looking up as he moved a slide on the stage. “You get talked about.”

“I don’t want to know.” Scarpetta walked into his office and sat in an elbow chair on the other side of his partner’s desk.

“Well, I should qualify. The topic of discussion wasn’t about you, per se.” He swiveled around so he faced her, his white hair unruly, his eyes intense, hawklike. “But tangentially. CNN, TLC, Discovery, every cable network under the sun. You know how many calls we get each day?”

“I’m sure you could hire an extra secretary for that alone.”

“When in fact we’re having to let people go. Support staff, technicians. We’ve cut back on janitorial services and security,” he said. “Lord knows where it will end if the state does what it threatens and slashes our budget by another thirty percent. We’re not in the entertainment business. Don’t want to be, can’t afford to be.”

“I’m sorry if I’m causing problems, Brian.”

He was probably the finest forensic pathologist Scarpetta personally knew and was perfectly clear about his mission, which was somewhat different from hers, and there was no way around it. He viewed forensic medicine as a public health service and had no use for the media in any manifestation beyond its role of informing the public about matters of life and death, such as hazards and communicable diseases, whether it was a potentially deadly crib design or an outbreak of the hantavirus. It wasn’t that his perception was wrong. It was simply that everything else was. The world had changed, and not necessarily for the better.

“I’m trying to navigate my way along a road I didn’t choose,” Scarpetta said. “You walk the highest of roads in a world of low roads. So, what do we do?”

“Stoop to their level?”

“I hope you don’t think that’s what I’m doing.”

“How do you feel about your career with CNN?” He picked up a briarwood pipe that he was no longer allowed to puff inside the building.

“I certainly don’t think of it as a career,” she said. “It’s something I do to disseminate information in a way that I deem is necessary in this day and age.”

“If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

“I’ll stop if you want, Brian. I’ve told you that from the start. I would never do anything, at least not intentionally, to embarrass this office or compromise it in the slightest.”

“Well, we don’t need to go round and around this topic again,” he said. “In theory, I don’t disagree with you, Kay. The public is as badly misinformed about criminal justice and all things forensic as it has ever been. And yes, it’s fouling up crime scenes and court cases and legislation and where tax dollars are allocated. But in my heart I don’t believe that appearing on any of these shows is going to solve the problem. Of course, that’s me, and I’m rather set in my ways and from time to time feel compelled to remind you of the Indian burial grounds you must step around. Hannah Starr being one of them.”

“I assume that was the point of the discussion at the staff meeting. The discussion that wasn’t about me, per se,” Scarpetta replied.

“I don’t watch these shows.” He idly toyed with the pipe. “But the Carley Crispins, the Warner Agees of the world, seem to have made Hannah Starr their hobbyhorse, the next Caylee Anthony or Anna Nicole Smith. Or God forbid you’re asked about our murdered jogger when you’re on TV tonight.”

“The agreement with CNN is I don’t talk about active cases.”

“What about your agreement with this Crispin woman? She doesn’t seem to be known for playing by the rules, and it will be her shooting off her mouth live on the air tonight.”

“I’ve been asked to discuss microscopy, specifically the analysis of hair,” Scarpetta said.

“That’s good, probably helpful. I do know a number of our colleagues in the labs are worried their scientific disciplines are fast being viewed as nonessential because the public, the politicians, think DNA is the magic lamp. If we rub it enough, all problems are solved and the hell with fibers, hair, toxicology, questioned documents, even fingerprints.” Dr. Edison placed his pipe back in an ashtray that hadn’t been dirty in years. “We’re comfortable with Toni Darien’s identification, I presume. I know the police want to release that information to the public.”

“I have no problem with releasing her name, but I certainly don’t intend to release any details about my findings. I’m worried her crime scene was staged, that she wasn’t murdered where she was found and may not have been jogging when she was assaulted.”

“Based on?”

“A number of things. She was struck on the back of the head, one blow to the posterior aspect of the left temporal bone.” Scarpetta touched her head to show him. “A survival time possibly of hours, as evidenced by the large fluctuant and boggy mass, and the hemorrhagic edematous tissues underneath the scalp. Then at some point after she died, a scarf was tied around her neck.”

“Ideas about the weapon?”

“A circular comminuted fracture that pushed multiple bone fragments into the brain. Whatever she was hit with has at least one round surface that is fifty millimeters in diameter.”