The smart board inside classroom 1A is filled with a colorful photograph of a man’s torso. His shirt is unbuttoned, a large knife plunged into his hairy chest.

“Suicide,” one of the students volunteers from his desk.

“Here’s another fact. Although you can’t tell from this picture,” Scarpetta says to the sixteen students who make up this session’s Academy class, “he has multiple stab wounds.”

“Homicide.” The student quickly changes his answer and everybody laughs.

Scarpetta flashes up the next slide, this one of multiple wounds clustered near the fatal one.

“They look shallow,” another student says.

“What about the angle? They should be angled up if he did it to himself?”

“Not necessarily, but here’s a question,” Scarpetta says from the podium in the front of the classroom. “What might his unbuttoned shirt tell you?”

Silence.

“If you were going to stab yourself, would you do it through your clothing?” she asks. “And, by the way, you’re right.” She directs this to the student who made the comment about shallow stab wounds. “Most of these”-she points them out on the smart board-“barely broke the skin. What we call hesitation marks. ”

The students take notes. They are a bright, eager bunch, different ages, different backgrounds, from different areas of the country, two of them fromEngland. Several are detectives who want intensive forensic training in crime-scene investigation. Others are death investigators who want the same thing. Some are college graduates working on master’s degrees in psychology, nuclear biology and microscopy. One is an assistant district attorney who wants more convictions in court.

She displays another slide on the smart board, this one an especially gruesome photograph of a man with his intestines spilling out of a gaping incision to his abdomen. Several students groan. One says “ouch.”

“Who’s familiar with seppuku?” Scarpetta asks.

“Hari-kari,” a voice sounds from the doorway.

Dr. Joe Amos, this year’s forensic pathology fellow, walks in as if it is his class. He is tall and gangly, with an unruly shock of black hair, a long, pointed chin and dark, glittering eyes. He reminds Scarpetta of a black bird, a crow.

“I don’t mean to interrupt,” he says, then he does it anyway. “This guy”-he nods at the gruesome image on the smart board-“took a big hunting knife, stabbed it into one side of his abdomen and slashed across to the other. That’s called motivation.”

“Was it your case, Dr. Amos?” a student asks, this one female and pretty.

Dr. Amos moves closer to her, looks very serious and important. “No. What you need to remember, though, is this: The way you can tell suicide versus homicide is if it’s a suicide, the person will slash the knife across his abdomen and then cut upwards, making the classic L shape that you see in hari-kari. Which is not what you see here.”

He directs the students’ attention to the smart board.

Scarpetta holds in her temper.

“Be kind of hard to do that in a homicide,” he adds.

“This one’s not L-shaped.”

“Precisely,” he says. “Who wants to vote for homicide?”

A few students raise their hands.

“My vote, too,” he says with confidence.

“Dr. Amos? How quickly would he have died?”

“You might survive a few minutes. You’re going to bleed out really fast. Dr. Scarpetta, I wonder if I could see you for a minute. I’m sorry to interrupt,” he says to the students.

She and Joe walk into the hallway.

“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.”