An hour out from Signature Aviation inFort Lauderdale, Lucy gets up for another coffee and a bathroom break. The sky beyond the jet’s small oval windows is overcast with mounting storm clouds.

She settles back into her leather seat and executes more queries ofBrowardCountytax assessment and real-estate records, news stories and anything else she can think of to see what she can find out about the former Christmas shop. From the mid-seventies to the early nineties, it was a diner called Rum Runner’s. For two years after that, it was a fudge and ice-cream parlor called Coco Nuts. Then, in 2000, the building was rented to a Mrs. Florrie Anna Quincy, the widow of a wealthy landscaper fromWest Palm Beach.

Lucy’s fingers rest lightly on the keyboard as she scans a feature article that ran in The Miami Herald not long after The Christmas Shop opened. It says that Mrs. Quincy grew up inChicago, where her father was a commodities broker, and every Christmas he volunteered as a Santa at Macy’s department store.

“Christmas was just the most magical time in our lives,” Mrs. Quincy said. “My father’s love was lumber futures, and maybe because he grew up in the logging country ofAlberta,Canada, we had Christmas trees in the house all year round, big potted spruces decorated with white lights and little carved figures. I guess that’s why I like to have Christmas all year round.”

Her shop is an astonishing collection of ornaments, music boxes, Santas of every description, winter wonderlands and tiny electric trains running on tiny tracks. One has to be careful moving down the aisles of her fragile, fanciful world, and it is easy to forget there are sunshine, palm trees and the ocean right outside her door. Since opening The Christmas Shop last month, Mrs. Quincy says there has been quite a lot of traffic, but far more customers come to browse than to buy…

Lucy sips her coffee and eyes the cream-cheese bagel on the burlwood tray. She is hungry but afraid to eat. She thinks about food constantly, obsessed with her weight, knowing that dieting won’t help. She can starve herself all she wants and it won’t change the way she looks and feels. Her body was her most finely tuned machine, and it has betrayed her.

She executes another search and tries Marino on the phone built into the armrest of her seat as she scans more results from her queries. He answers but the reception is bad.

“I’m in the air,” she says, reading what is on her screen.

“When you going to learn to fly that thing?”

“Probably never. Don’t have time to get all the ratings. I barely have time for helicopters these days.”

She doesn’t want to have time. The more she flies, the more she loves it, and she doesn’t want to love it anymore. Medication has to be explained to the FAA unless it is some innocuous over-the-counter remedy, and the next time she goes to the flight surgeon to renew her medical certificate, she will have to list Dostinex. Questions will be raised. Government bureaucrats will rip apart her privacy and probably find some excuse to revoke her license. The only way around it is to never take the medicine again, and she has tried to do without it for a while. Or she can give up flying completely.

“I’ll stick to Harleys,” Marino is saying.

“I just got a tip. Not about that case. A different one, maybe.”

“From who?” he says suspiciously.

“Benton. Apparently, some patient passed along a story about some unsolved murder in Las Olas.”

She is careful how she words it. Marino hasn’t been told about PREDATOR.Bentondoesn’t want him involved, fearing Marino wouldn’t understand or be helpful. Marino’s philosophy about violent offenders is to rough them up, to lock them up, to put them to death as cruelly as possible. He is probably the last person on the planet to care if a murderous psychopath is really mentally ill as opposed to evil, or if a pedophile can no more help his proclivities than a psychotic individual can help his delusions. Marino thinks psychological insights and explorations in structural and functional brain imaging are a crock of shit.

“Apparently, this patient claims that maybe two and a half years ago, a woman was raped and murdered in The Christmas Shop,” Lucy is explaining to Marino, worried that one of these days she will let it slip that Benton is evaluating inmates.

Marino knows thatMcLean, the teaching hospital for Harvard, the model psychiatric hospital with its self-pay Pavillion that caters to the rich and famous, is certainly not a forensic psychiatric institution. If prisoners are being transported there for evaluations, something unusual and clandestine is going on.

“The what?” Marino asks.

She repeats what she just said, adding, “Owned by a Florrie Anna Quincy, white woman, thirty-eight, husband had a bunch of nurseries in West Palm…”

“Trees or kids?”

“Trees. Mostly citrus. The Christmas Shop was around for only two years, from 2000 to 2002.”

Lucy types in more commands and converts data files to text files that she will e-mail toBenton.

“Ever heard of a place called Beach Bums?”

“You’re breaking up on me,” Marino says.

“Hello? Is this better? Marino?”

“I can hear you.”

“That’s the name of the business there now. Mrs. Quincy and her seventeen-year-old daughter, Helen, vanished in July of 2002. I found an article about it in the newspaper. Not much in the way of follow-up, just a small article here and there and nothing at all in the past year.”

“So maybe they turned up and the media didn’t cover it,” Marino replies.

“Nothing I can find would indicate they’re alive and well. In fact, the son tried to have them declared legally dead last spring with no success. Maybe you can check with the Fort Lauderdale police, see if anybody remembers anything about Mrs. Quincy’s and her daughter’s disappearance. I plan to drop by Beach Bums at some point tomorrow.”

“TheFort Lauderdalecops wouldn’t let it go like that without a damn good reason.”

“Let’s find out what it is,” she says.

At the USAir ticket counter, Scarpetta continues to argue.

“It’s impossible,” she says again, about to lose her temper, she’s so frustrated. “Here’s my record location number, my printed receipt. Right here. First class, departure time six-twenty. How can my reservation have been cancelled?”

“Ma’am, it’s right here in the computer. Your reservation was cancelled at two-fifteen.”

“Today?” Scarpetta refuses to believe it.

There must be a mistake.

“Yes, today.”

“That’s impossible. I certainly didn’t call to cancel.”

“Well, someone did.”

“Then rebook it,” Scarpetta says, reaching in her bag for her wallet.

“The flight’s full. I can waitlist you for coach, but there’s seven other people ahead of you.”

Scarpetta reschedules her flight for tomorrow and calls Rose.

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to come back and get me,” Scarpetta says.

“Oh, no. What happened. Weathered out?”

“Somehow my reservation got cancelled. The plane’s overbooked. Rose, did you call for a confirmation earlier?”

“I most certainly did. Around lunchtime.”

“I don’t know what happened,” Scarpetta says, thinking aboutBenton, about their Valentine’s Day together. “Shit!” she says.