If anything, she seems secretly pleased that her sense of style is dated, some of her suits so old that she was wearing them more than a decade ago when she first started working for Scarpetta. Rose hasn't changed her hair, either, still pinning it up in a fussbudget French twist and refusing to get rid of the gray. Good structure makes the building, and her bones are exquisite. At the age of sixty-seven, men find her attractive, but she hasn't dated since her husband died. The only man Scarpetta has ever seen her flirt with is Pete Marino, and she doesn't mean it and he knows it, but they have tormented each other since Scarpetta was appointed chief medical examiner of Virginia, what now seems as though it were another incarnation.

Billy is panting as he appears at the desk. He is not quite a year old, white with a large brown spot on the middle of his back, and his under-bite reminds Scarpetta of a backhoe. He sits at her feet, looking up.

"I don't have any…"

"Don't say that word!" Rose exclaims.

"I wasn't going to. I was going to spell it."

"He can spell now."

Billy suffers no language barrier with the words bye-bye and treat. He also recognizes no and sit but pretends he doesn't, stubbornness the right of his breed.

"You better not have been chewing on anything back there," Scarpetta warns him.

In the last month, Billy has taken a fancy to gnawing and ripping molding off doorframes and around the base of the walls, especially in Scarpetta's bedroom.

"This isn't your house, and I will have to pay for all repairs when I move out." She wags her finger at him.

"It would be worse if it was your house," Rose remarks as the dog continues to stare up at Scarpetta and wag his tail, which looks like a croissant.

She picks up a slim stack of mail from her desk and offers it to her boss.

"I've dealt with the bills. There are a couple personal letters. And the usual journals and so forth. And this, from Lucy."

She directs Scarpettas attention to a large manila envelope, her name and address neatly written in black Magic Marker, the return address Lucy's New York office, also written in Magic Marker. The envelope is marked Personal in large letters and underlined twice. It is a die-hard habit for Scarpetta to look at postmarks, and this one is puzzling.

"The postal code isn't for her part of the city," Scarpetta says. "Lucy always mails things from her office, and as a matter of fact, she always overnights mail to me. I can't remember a single time she's ever sent me anything by regular mail, not since she was in college."

Rose doesn't seem concerned. " A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,'" she quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson. In fact, it is her favorite quote.

Rose shakes the envelope. "Doesn't sound like anything dangerous in there," she teases. "If you're feeling one of your bouts of paranoia coming on, I'll open it for you, but it's marked Personal… "

"Never mind." Scarpetta takes it and her other mail from Rose.

"And Dr. Lanier from Baton Rouge left a message." Rose pecks at the keyboard and corrects another typo. "It's regarding the Charlotte Dard case. He says you'll get it Monday, his reports and all that. He sounded stressed. He wants to know what you find, immediately."

She gives her boss a look that always reminds Scarpetta of a schoolteacher about to single out some unsuspecting student and put him or her on the spot. "I think somethings going on in this case, something worse than a drug overdose."

Scarpetta massages Billys soft, speckled ears. "Her cause of death isn't straightforward. That's plenty bad. What's worse, the case is eight years old."

"I don't understand why it's such a big deal right now, as if they don't have enough unsolved murders and suspicious deaths down there. Those abducted women. Lord."

"I don't know why it's suddenly become a priority, either," Scarpetta replies. "But the fact is, it has, and I feel obliged to do what I can."

"Because nobody else can be bothered."

"I can be bothered, can't I, Billy-Billy?"

"Well, let me tell you a thing or two, Dr. Echo. I think there's something the coroner down there has no intention of telling you."

"There had better not be," Scarpetta remarks as she walks off.

LUCY DESPERATELY NEEDS a ladies' room. Forget looking for a gas station or a rest stop. She pushes the Mercedes up to 160 kilometers per hour, despite Rudy's warning about speeding. Focusing on the dark road, she tries hard to concentrate and ignore her bladder. The drive seems to take twice as long as it should, but she makes excellent time and is ahead of schedule by thirty-five minutes. She redials Rudy's cell phone.

"On final," she says. "Just got to land this thing somewhere." "Shut up," Rudy orders someone in the room, as the TV plays loudly. "Don't make me tell you again."

ROCCO CAGGIANO'S FAVORITE form of relaxation is to sit for hours in beer gardens, drinking one Gross Bier after another.

The pale gold elixirs are served in tall, plain glasses, and he prefers clean-tasting lagers and will not touch wheat beers. Rocco has never understood how he can drink a gallon of beer in one sitting but not a gallon of water. He could not drink a gallon of water during an entire day, probably not even in three days, and he has always puzzled over how much beer, wine, champagne or mixed drinks he can put away when he can scarcely finish a single glass of water.

In fact, he hates water. Perhaps what a psychic once told him is true: He drowned in a former life. What a terrible way to die, and he often thinks of the killer in England who drowned one wife after another in the tub by grabbing her feet and yanking until her head was under water and she could do nothing but helplessly flop her arms like a fish on a dock. The scenario was a constant emotional itch when Caggiano began to hate his first wife, then his second. Alimony was cheaper than the price he would pay if some medical examiner discovered bruises or God knows what. But even if he did drown in a former life and thought drowning someone was a good way to commit murder, this, in his mind, would not explain the enigma-the purely biological phenomenon-of how much alcohol he can consume and why he cannot and will not finish even one glass of water.

No one has ever been able to settle his mind with an answer he accepts. Small conundrums have always worried him like a sandspur stuck to his sock.

"It must be 'cause you pee all the time when you drink beer," Caggiano introduces the question at virtually every social gathering. "When you pee, you make room for more, right?"

"You drink a gallon of water, you will be pissing all the time, too," a Dutch customs agent challenged him some months back when he, Rocco and several other friends of the Chandonne cartel were taking time out in a beer garden in Munich.

"I hate water," Rocco said.

"Then how do you know this about whether you would pee water as fast as beer?" a German container ship's captain asked.

"He doesn't know."

"Yes. You ought to test it out, Rocco."

"We'll drink beer, you drink water, and see who pees the most and the fastest."

The men laughed and clanked glasses in a drunken toast, slopping beer all over the wooden table. It had been a good day. Before they caroused at the beer garden, they had wandered into the nudist park where a naked man on a bicycle pedaled past and the Dutchman yelled at him in Dutch that he'd better be careful which gear he shifted, while the ship's captain yelled in German that his kickstand was very small. Rocco yelled in English that the man didn't have to worry about his dick getting caught in the spokes because it didn't even hang over the seat. The bicyclist pedaled on, ignoring them.