They were naked beneath a down-filled duvet, unable to sleep, tucked into each other and looking out at the view. The Manhattan skyline wasn’t the ocean or the Rockies or the ruins of Rome, but it was a sight they loved, and it was their habit to open the shades at night after turning off the lights.

Benton stroked Scarpetta’s bare skin, his chin on top of her head. He kissed her neck, her ears, and her flesh was cool where his lips had been. His chest was pressed against her back, and she could feel the slow beat of his heart.

“I never ask you about your patients,” she said.

“Clearly I’m not much of a distraction if you’re thinking about my patients,” Benton said in her ear.

She pulled his arms around her and kissed his hands. “Maybe you can distract me again in a few minutes. I’d like to raise a hypothetical question.”

“You’re entitled. I’m surprised you have only one.”

“How would someone like your former patient know where we live? I’m not suggesting she left the package.” Scarpetta didn’t want to say Dodie Hodge’s name in bed.

“One might speculate that if someone is sufficiently manipulative, that person might successfully extract information from others,” Benton said. “For example, there are staff members at McLean who know where our apartment is, since mail and packages are occasionally sent to me here.”

“And staff members would tell a patient?”

“I would hope not, and I’m not saying that’s what happened. I’m not even saying this person’s ever been to McLean, been a patient there.”

He didn’t need to say it. Scarpetta had no doubt that Dodie Hodge had been a patient at McLean.

“I’m also not saying she had anything to do with what was left at our building,” he added.

He didn’t need to say that, either. She knew Benton feared his former patient had left the package.

“What I will say is others might suspect she did, no matter what we discover to the contrary.” Benton spoke softly, the intimacy of his tone incongruous with the conversation.

“Marino suspects it and in fact is probably convinced of it, and you’re not convinced. That’s what you’re saying.” Scarpetta didn’t believe it.

She believed Benton was convinced about this former patient named Dodie who had brazenly called CNN. Benton was convinced she was dangerous.

“Marino might be right. And he might not be,” Benton said. “While someone like this particular former patient might be bad news and potentially harmful, it would be even more harmful if the package was sent by someone else and everyone has quit looking because they think they know the answer. And what if they don’t? Then what happens? What next? Maybe someone really gets hurt next time.”

“We don’t know what the package is. It could be nothing. You’re getting ahead of yourself.”

“It’s something. I can already promise you that,” he said. “Unless you starred in a Batman movie and didn’t tell me, you’re not the chief medical examiner of Gotham City. I don’t like the tone of that. Not exactly sure why it bothers me as much as it does.”

“Because it’s snide. It’s hostile.”

“Maybe. The handwriting interests me. Your description that it was so precise and stylized it looked like a font.”

“Whoever wrote the address has a steady hand, maybe an artistic hand,” Scarpetta said, and she sensed he was thinking about something else.

He knew something about Dodie Hodge that was causing him to focus on the handwriting.

“You’re sure it wasn’t generated by a laser printer,” Benton said.

“I had quite a long time to look at it on the elevator. Black ink, ballpoint. There was sufficient variation in the letter formation to make it obvious the address was hand-printed,” she said.

“Hopefully there will still be something to look at when we get to Rodman’s Neck. The airbill might be our best evidence.”

“If we’re lucky,” she said.

Luck would be a big part of it. Most likely the bomb squad would foil any possible circuitry inside the FedEx box by blasting it with a PAN disrupter, more popularly known as a water cannon, which fires three to four ounces of water, propelled by a modified twelve-gauge shotgun round. The primary target would be the alleged explosive device’s power source-the small batteries that showed up on x-ray. Scarpetta could only hope that the batteries weren’t directly behind the hand-printed address on the airbill. If they were, there would be nothing left but soggy pulp to look at later this morning.

“We can have a general conversation,” Benton then said, sitting up a little, rearranging pillows. “You’re familiar with the borderline personality. An individual who has breaks or splits in ego boundaries and, given enough stress, can act out aggressively, violently. Aggression is about competing. Competing for the male, for the female, competing for the person most fit for breeding. Competing for resources, such as food and shelter. Competing for power, because without a hierarchy there can’t be social order. In other words, aggression occurs when it’s profitable.”

Scarpetta thought of Carley Crispin. She thought about the missing BlackBerry. She’d been thinking about her BlackBerry for hours. Anxiety was a tightness around her heart, no matter what she was doing; even while making love she felt fear. She felt anger. She was extremely upset with herself and didn’t know how Lucy would handle the truth. Scarpetta had been stupid. How could she be so stupid?

“Unfortunately, these basic primitive drives that might make sense in terms of the survival of a species can become malignant and nonadaptive, can get acted out in grossly inappropriate and unprofitable ways,” Benton was saying. “Because when all is said and done, an aggressive act, such as harassing or threatening a prominent person like you, is unprofitable for the initiator. The result will be punishment, a forfeiture of all those things worth competing for. Whether it’s commitment to a psychiatric facility or imprisonment.”

“So, I’m to conclude that this woman who called me on CNN tonight has a borderline personality disorder, can become violent, given sufficient stress, and is competing with me for the male, which would be you,” Scarpetta said.

“She called you to harass me, and it worked,” he said. “She wants my attention. The borderline personality thrives on negative reinforcement, on being the eye of the storm. You add some other unfortunate personality disorders to the mix, and you go from the eye of the storm to maybe the perfect storm.”

“Transference. All those women patients of yours don’t stand a chance. They want what I’ve got right now.”

She wanted it again. She wanted his attention and didn’t want to talk anymore about work, about problems, about human beings who were horrors. She wanted to be close to him, to feel that nothing was off-limits, and her yearning for closeness was insatiable because she couldn’t have what she wanted. She’d never had what she wanted with Benton, and that was why she still wanted him, wanted him palpably. It was why she’d wanted him to begin with, felt drawn to him, felt an intense desire for him the first time they’d met. She felt the same way now, twenty years later, a desperate attraction that fulfilled her and left her empty, and sex with him was like that, a cycle of taking and giving and filling and emptying and then rearming the mechanism so they could go back for more.

“I do love you, you know,” she said into his mouth. “Even when I’m angry.”

“You’ll always be angry. I hope you’ll always love me.”

“I want to understand.” She didn’t and probably couldn’t.

When she was reminded, she couldn’t understand the choices he’d made, that he could have left her so abruptly, so finally, and never checked on her. She wouldn’t have done what he did, but she wasn’t going to bring that up again.