“I mean, you could easily carry a sawed-off shotgun in a knapsack,” Joe is saying.

Scarpetta points the remote at the Hummer and unlocks the doors and replies wearily, “Not necessarily.”

Joe makes her tired. He annoys her more each day.

“Even if you sawed twelve or even eighteen inches off the barrel and six inches off the stock,” she remarks, “you’re still left with an eighteen-inch-long gun, at least. Assuming we’re talking about an autoloader.”

She thinks of the big black bag the citrus inspector was carrying.

“If we’re talking about a pump, you’re likely to have a longer gun than that,” she adds. “Neither scenario works with a knapsack, unless it’s a big one.”

“A tote bag, then.”

She thinks of the citrus inspector, of the long picker that he disassembled and packed inside his black bag. She’s seen citrus inspectors before and never noticed them using pickers. Usually, they look at what they can reach.

“I bet he had a tote bag,” Joe says.

“I’ve got no idea.” She’s about to snap at him.

Throughout the entire autopsy, he prattled and divined and pontificated until she could scarcely think. He found it necessary to announce everything he was doing, everything he was writing on the protocol attached to his clipboard. He felt it necessary to tell her the weight of every organ and deduce when Mrs. Simister ate last based on the partially digested meat and vegetables in her stomach. He made sure Scarpetta heard the crunching sound of calcium deposits when he opened partially occluded coronaries with the scalpel and announced that maybe atherosclerosis killed her.

Ha, ha.

And, well, Mrs. Simister didn’t have much to look forward to, anyway. She had a bad heart. Her lungs had adhesions, probably from old pneumonia, and her brain was somewhat atrophied, so she probably had Alzheimer’s.

If you have to be murdered, Joe said, you may as well be in bad health.

“I’m thinking he hit her in the back of the head with the butt of the gun,” now he is saying. “You know, like this.”

He rams an imaginary head with the imaginary stock of a shotgun.

“She wasn’t even five feet tall,” he continues his scenario. “So for him to slam her head with the butt of a gun that weighs maybe six or seven pounds, assuming it wasn’t sawed off, he would need to be reasonably strong and taller than her.”

“We can’t say that at all,” Scarpetta replies, driving out of the parking lot. “So much depends on his position in relation to her. So much depends on a lot of things. And we don’t know that she was struck with the gun. We don’t know that the killer was a he. Be careful, Joe.”

“Of what?”

“In your great enthusiasm to reconstruct exactly how and why she died, you run the risk of confusing the theoretical with the truth and turning fact into fiction. This isn’t a hell scene. This is a real human being who is really dead.”

“Nothing wrong with creativity,” he says, staring straight ahead, his thin mouth and long, pointed chin set the way they always are when he gets petulant.

“Creativity is good,” she replies. “It should suggest where to look and for what, but not necessarily choreograph the sort of reenactments you see in movies and on TV.”