I didn't even ask.

To send Lucy home in the midst of yet another family crisis was unthinkable. Her absences from her mother had been prolonged before, whenever Dorothy had to dash out of town for an editorial meeting or a research trip or one of her numerous "book talks" that always seemed to detain her longer than anyone had supposed. Lucy would remain with her grandmother until the wandering writer eventually made it back home. Maybe we had learned to accept these lapses into blatant irresponsibility. Maybe even Lucy had. But eloping? Good God.

"She didn't say when she'd be back?"

I turned away from Lucy and lowered my voice.

"What?" my mother said loudly. "Tell me such a thing? Why should she tell her mother that? Oh! How could she do this again, Kay! He's twice her age! Armando was twice her age and look what happened to him! He drops dead by the pool before Lucy's even old enough to ride a bicycle…"

It took me a while to ease her out of hysteria. After I hung up, I was left with the fallout.

I couldn't think of a way to cushion the news. "Your mother's gone out of town for a little while, Lucy. She's gotten married to Mr. Blank, who illustrates her books for her…"

She was as still as a statue. I reached out my arms to pull her into an embrace.

"They're in Nevada at the moment-"

The chair jerked back and fell against the wall as she wrenched away from me and fled to her room.

How could my sister do this to Lucy? I was sure I would never forgive her, not this time. It was bad enough when she married Armando. She was barely eighteen. We warned her. We did everything to talk her out of it. He hardly spoke English, was old enough to be her father, and we were uneasily suspicious of his wealth, of his Mercedes, his gold Rolex and his posh waterfront apartment. Like a lot of people who appear mysteriously in Miami, he enjoyed a high rolling life-style that couldn't be explained logically.

Damn Dorothy. She knew about my work, knew how demanding and relentless it was. She knew I'd been hesitant about Lucy's coming at all right now because of these cases! But it was planned, and Dorothy cajoled and convinced with her charms.

"If it gets too inconvenient, Kay, you can just send her back and we'll reschedule," she had said sweetly. "Really. She's so desperately looking forward to it. It's all she talks about these days. She simply adores you. A genuine case of hero worship if I ever saw it."

Lucy was sitting stiffly on the edge of her bed, staring at the floor.

"I hope they get killed in a plane crash" was the only thing she said to me as I helped her into her pajamas.

"You don't mean that, Lucy."

I smoothed the daisy-spangled spread beneath her chin. "You can stay with me for a while. That will be nice, won't it?"

She squeezed her eyes shut and turned her face to the wall.

My tongue felt thick and slow. There were no words that would ease her pain, so I sat looking helplessly at her for a while. Hesitantly, I moved closer to her and began to rub her back. Gradually her misery seemed to fade, and eventually she began breathing the deep, regular breaths of sleep. I kissed the top of her head and softly shut her door.

Halfway back to the kitchen, I heard Bill pull in.

I got to the door before he had a chance to ring the bell.

"Lucy's asleep," I whispered.

"Oh," he playfully whispered back. "Too bad - so I wasn't worth waiting up for-"

He suddenly turned, following my startled eyes out to the street. Headlights cut around the bend and were instantly extinguished at the same time a car I could not make out came to an abrupt stop. Now it was accelerating in reverse, the engine loudly straining.

Pebbles and grit popped as it turned around beyond the trees and sped away.

"Expecting company?" Bill muttered, staring out into the darkness.

I slowly shook my head.

He stole a glance at his watch and lightly nudged me into the foyer.

Whenever Marino came to the OCME, he never failed to needle Wingo, who was probably the best autopsy technician I'd ever worked with and by far the most fragile.

"… Yo. It's what's known as a close encounter of the Ford kind…" Marino was loudly going on.

A bay-windowed state trooper who arrived at the same time Marino did guffawed again.

Wingo's face was bright red as he stabbed the plug of the Stryker saw into the yellow cord reel dangling over the steel table.

Up to my wrists in blood, I mumbled under my breath, "Ignore it, Wingo."

Marino cut his eyes at the trooper, and I waited for the limp wrist act to follow.

Wingo was much too sensitive for his own good and I sometimes worried about him. He so keenly identified with the victims it wasn't uncommon for him to cry over unusually heinous cases.

The morning had presented one of life's cruel ironies. A young woman had gone to a bar in a rural area of a neighboring county last night, and as she started walking home around 2:00 A. M. she was struck by a car that kept on going. The state trooper, examining her personal effects, had just discovered inside her billfold a slip of paper from a fortune cookie which predicted, "You will soon have an encounter that will change the course of your life."

"Or maybe she was looking for Mr. HOODbar…"

I was just on the verge of blowing up at Marino when his voice was drowned out by the Stryker saw, which sounded like a loud dentist's drill as Wingo began cutting through the dead woman's skull. A bony dust unpleasantly drifted on the air and Marino and the trooper retreated to the other end of the suite where the autopsy of Richmond's latest shooting homicide was being performed on the last table.

When the saw was silenced and the skull cap removed, I stopped what I was doing to make a quick inspection of the brain. No subdural or subarachnoid hemorrhages.

"It isn't funny," Wingo began his indignant litany, "not the least bit funny. How can anybody laugh at something like that…"

The woman's scalp was lacerated but that was it. What killed her were multiple pelvic fractures, the blow to her buttocks so violent the pattern of the vehicle's grille was clearly visible on her skin. She wasn't struck by something low to the ground, such as a sports car. Might have been a truck.

"She saved it because it meant something to her. Like it was something she wanted to believe. Maybe that's why she went to the bar last night. She was looking for someone she'd been waiting for all her life. Her encounter. And it turns out to be some drunk driver who knocks her fifty feet into a ditch."

"Wingo," I said wearily as I began taking photographs, "it's better if you don't imagine some things."

"I can't help it…"

"You have to learn to help it."

He cast wounded eyes in the direction of Marino, who was never satisfied unless he got a rise out of him. Poor Wingo. Most members of the rough-and-tumble world of law enforcement were more than a little put off by him. He didn't laugh at their jokes or particularly relish their war stories, and more to the point, he was, well, different.

Tall and lithely built, he had black hair cropped close on the sides with a cockatoo spray on top and a rat tail curling at the nape of his neck. Delicately handsome, he looked like a model in the loose-fitting designer clothes and soft leather European shoes he wore. Even his indigo-blue scrubs, which he bought and laundered himself, were stylish. He didn't flirt. He didn't resent having a woman tell him what to do. He never seemed remotely interested in what I looked like beneath my lab coat or all-business Britches of Georgetown suits. I'd grown so comfortable around him that on the few occasions when he accidentally walked into the locker room while I was changing into my scrubs, I was scarcely aware of him.