'Hello.' The administrator cheerfully let me in. 'How are we this morning, Dr

Scarpetta?'

His name was Jimmy Shaw, and he was very young and Irish, with hair as fiery as copper ivy, and eyes as blue as sky.

'I've been better,' I confessed.

'Well, I was just boiling tea,' he said, shutting us inside a narrow, dimly lit hallway, which we followed to his office. 'Sounds like you could use a cup.'

'That would be lovely, Jimmy,' I said.

'As for the good doctor, she should be finishing up an inquest.' He glanced at his watch as we entered his cluttered small space. 'She should be out in no time.'

His desk was dominated by a large Coroner's Inquiries book, black and bound in heavy leather, and he had been reading a biography of Steve McQueen and eating toast before I arrived. Momentarily, he was setting a mug of tea within my reach, not asking how I took it, for by now he knew.

'A little toast with jam?' he asked as he did every morning.

'I ate at the hotel, thanks.' I gave the same reply as he sat behind his desk.

'Never stops me from eating again.' He smiled, slipping on glasses. 'I'll just go over your schedule, then. You lecture at eleven this morning, then again at one P.M. Both at the college, in the old pathology building. I should expect about seventy-five students for each, but there could be more. I don't know. You're awfully popular over here, Dr Kay Scarpetta,' he cheerfully said. 'Or maybe it's just that American violence is so exotic to us.'

'That's rather much like calling a plague exotic,' I said.

'Well, we can't help but be fascinated by what you see.'

'And I guess that bothers me,' I said in a friendly but ominous way. 'Don't be too fascinated.'

We were interrupted by the phone, which he snapped up with the impatience of one who answers it too often.

Listening for a moment, he brusquely said. 'Right, right. Well, we can't place an order like that just yet. I'll have to ring you back another time.

'I've been wanting computers for years,' he complained to me as he hung up. 'No bloody money when you're the dog wagged by the Socialist tail.'

'There will never be enough money. Dead men don't vote.'

'The bloody truth. So what's the topic of the day?' he wanted to know.

'Sexual homicide,' I replied. 'Specifically the role DNA can play.'

'These dismemberments you're so interested in.' He sipped tea. 'Do you think they're sexual? I mean, would that be the motivation on the part of whoever would do this?' His eyes were keen with interest.

'It's certainly an element,' I replied.

'But how can you know that when none of the victims has ever been identified? Couldn't it just be someone who kills for sport? Like, say, your Son of Sam, for example?'

'What the Son of Sam did had a sexual element,' I said, looking around for my pathologist friend. 'Do you know how much longer she might be? I'm afraid I'm in a bit of a hurry.'

Shaw glanced at his watch again. 'You can check. Or I suppose she may have gone on to the morgue. We have a case coming in. A young male, suspected suicide.'

'I'll see if I can find her.' I got up.

Off the hallway near the entrance was the coroner's court, where inquests for

unnatural deaths were held before a jury. This included industrial and traffic accidents, homicides and suicides, the proceedings in camera, for the press in Ireland was not allowed to print many details. I ducked inside a stark, chilly room of varnished

benches and naked walls, and found several men inside, tucking paperwork into briefcases.

'I'm looking for the coroner,' I said.

'She slipped out about twenty minutes ago. Believe she had a viewing,' one of them said.

I left the building through the back door. Crossing a small parking lot, I headed to the morgue as an old man came out of it. He seemed disoriented, almost stumbling as he looked about, dazed. For an instant, he stared at me as if I held some answer, and my heart hurt for him. No business that had brought him here could possibly be kind. I watched him hurry toward the gate as Dr Margaret Foley suddenly emerged after him, harried, her graying hair disarrayed.

'My God!' She almost ran into me. 'I turn my back for a minute and he's gone.'

The man let himself out, the gate flung open wide as he fled. Foley trotted across the parking lot to shut and latch it again. When she got back to me, she was out of breath and almost tripped over a bump in the pavement.

'Kay, you're out and about early,' she said.

'A relative?' I asked.

'The father. Left without identifying him, before I could even pull back the sheet. That will foul me up the rest of the day.'

She led me inside the small brick morgue with its white porcelain autopsy tables that probably belonged in a medical museum and old iron stove that heated nothing anymore. The air was refrigerated-chilly, modern equipment nonexistent except for electric autopsy saws. Thin gray light seeped through opaque skylights, barely illuminating the white paper sheet covering a body that a father could not bear to see.

'It's always the hardest part,' she was saying. 'No one should ever have to look at anyone in here.'

I followed her into a small storeroom and helped carry out boxes of new syringes, masks and gloves.

'Strung himself up from the rafters in the barn,' she went on as we worked. 'Was being treated for a drink problem and depression. More of the same. Unemployment, women, drugs. They hang themselves or jump off bridges.' She glanced at me as we restocked a surgical cart. 'Thank God we don't have guns. Especially since I don't

have an X-ray machine.'

Foley was a slight woman with old-fashioned thick glasses and a penchant for tweed. We had met years ago at an international forensic science conference in Vienna, when female forensic pathologists were a rare breed, especially overseas. We quickly had become friends.

'Margaret, I'm going to have to head back to the States sooner than I thought,' I said, taking a deep breath, looking about, distracted. 'I didn't sleep worth a damn last night.' She lit a cigarette, scrutinizing me. 'I can get you copies of whatever you want. How fast do you need them? Photographs may take a few days, but they can be sent.'

'I think there is always a sense of urgency when someone like this is on the loose,' I

said.

'I'm not happy if he's now your problem. And I'd hoped after all these years he had bloody quit.' She irritably tapped an ash, exhaling the strong smoke of British tobacco.

'Let's take a load off for a minute. My shoes are already getting tight from the swelling. It's hell getting old on these bloody hard floors.'

The lounge was two squat wooden chairs in a corner, where Foley kept an ashtray on a gurney. She put her feet up on a box and indulged her vice.

'I can never forget those poor people.' She started talking about her serial cases again.

'When the first one came to me, I thought it was the IRA. Never seen people torn asunder like that except in bombings.'

I was reminded of Mark in a way I did not want to be, and my thoughts drifted to him when he was alive and we were in love. Suddenly he was in my mind, smiling with eyes full of a mischievous light that became electric when he laughed and teased. There had been a lot of that in law school at Georgetown, fun and fights and staying up all night, our hunger for each other impossible to appease. Over time we married other people, divorced and tried again. He was my leitmotif, here, gone, then back on the phone or at my door to break my heart and wreck my bed.

I could not banish him. It still did not seem possible that a bombing in a London train station would finally bring the tempest of our relationship to an end. I did not imagine him dead. I could not envision it, for there was no last image that might grant peace. I had never seen his body, had fled from any chance, just like the old Dubliner who could not view his son. I realized Foley was saying something to me.