Paul Tucker had been appointed Richmond's chief of police several months ago, but we had encountered each other only briefly at a social function. Tonight was the first time we had met at a crime scene, and what I knew about him I could fit on an index card.

He had been a basketball star at the University of Maryland and a finalist for a Rhodes scholarship. He was supremely fit, exceptionally bright and a graduate of the FBI's National Academy. I thought I liked him but wasn't sure.

'Marino doesn't mean any harm,' I said as we passed through a yellow light on East Broad Street.

I could feel Tucker's dark eyes on my face and sense their curiosity. The world is full of people who mean no harm and cause a great deal of it.' He had a rich, deep voice that reminded me of bronze and polished wood.

'I can't argue with that, Colonel Tucker.'

'You can call me Paul.'

I did not tell him he could call me Kay, because after many years of being a woman in a world such as this, I had learned.

'It will do no good to send him to another cultural diversity class,' I went on.

'Marino needs to learn discipline and respect.' He was staring ahead again.

'He has both in his own way.'

'He needs to have both in the proper way.'

'You will not change him, Colonel,' I said. 'He's difficult, aggravating, ill-mannered, and the best homicide detective I've ever worked with.'

Tucker was silent until we got to the outer limits of the Medical College of Virginia and turned right on Fourteenth Street.

'Tell me, Dr. Scarpetta,' he said. 'Do you think your friend Marino is a good precinct commander?'

The question startled me. I had been surprised when Marino had advanced to lieutenant and was stunned when he had become a captain. He had always hated the brass, and then he had become the thing he hated, and he still hated them as if he were not them.

'I think Marino is an excellent police officer. He's unimpeachably honest and has a good heart,' I said.

'Do you intend to answer my question or not?' Tucker's tone hinted of amusement.

'He is not a politician.'

'Clearly.'

The clock tower of Main Street Station announced the time from its lofty position high above the old domed train station with its terra-cotta roof and network of railroad tracks. Behind the Consolidated Laboratory building, we parked in a slot designated Chief Medical Examiner, an unimpressive slip of blacktop where my car spent most of its life.

'He gives too much time to the FBI,' Tucker then said.

'He gives an invaluable service,' I said.

'Yes, yes, I know, and you do, too. But in his case, it poses a serious difficulty. He is supposed to be commanding First Precinct, not working other cities' crimes, and I am trying to run a police department.'

'When violence occurs anywhere, it is everybody's problem,' I said. 'No matter where your precinct or department is.'

Tucker stared thoughtfully ahead at the shut steel bay door. He said, 'I sure as hell couldn't do what you do when it's this late at night and there's nobody around except the people in the refrigerator.'

'It isn't them I fear,' I matter-of-factly stated.

'Irrational as it may be, I would fear them a great deal.'

Headlights bored into dingy stucco and steel all painted the same insipid beige. A red sign on a side door announced to visitors that whatever was inside was considered a biological hazard and went on to give instruction about the handling of dead bodies.

'I've got to ask you something,' Colonel Tucker said.

The wool fabric of his uniform whispered against upholstery as he shifted positions, leaning closer to me. I smelled Hermes cologne. He was handsome, with high cheekbones and strong white teeth, his body powerful beneath his skin as if its darkness were the markings of a leopard or a tiger.

'Why do you do it?' he asked.

'Why do I do what, Colonel?'

He leaned back in the seat. 'Look,' he said as lights danced across the scanner. 'You're a lawyer. You're a doctor. You're a chief and I'm a chief. That's why I'm asking. I don't mean disrespect.'

I could tell he didn't. 'I don't know why,' I confessed.

He was silent for a moment. Then he spoke again. 'My father was a yardman and my mother cleaned houses for rich people in Baltimore.' He paused. 'When I go to Baltimore now I stay in fine hotels and eat in restaurants at the harbor. I am saluted. I am addressed "The Honorable" in some mail I get. I have a house in Windsor Farms.

'I command more than six hundred people who wear guns in this violent town of yours. I know why I do what I do, Dr. Scarpetta. I do it because I had no power when I was a boy. I lived with people who had no power and learned that all the evil I heard preached about in church was rooted in the abuse of this one thing I did not have.'

The tempo and choreography of the snow had not changed. I watched it slowly cover the hood of his car.

'Colonel Tucker,' I said, 'it is Christmas Eve and Sheriff Santa has allegedly just shot someone to death in Whitcomb Court. The media must be going crazy. What do you advise?'

'I will be up all night at headquarters. I will make sure your building is patrolled. Would you like an escort home?'

'I would imagine that Marino will give me a ride, but certainly I will call if I think an additional escort is necessary. You should be aware that this predicament is further complicated by the fact that Brown hates me, and now I will be an expert witness in his case.'

'If only all of us could be so lucky.'

'I do not feel lucky.'

'You're right.' He sighed. 'You shouldn't feel lucky, for luck has nothing to do with it.'

'My case is here,' I said as the ambulance pulled into the lot, lights and sirens silent, for there is no need to rush when transporting the dead.

'Merry Christmas, Chief Scarpetta,' Tucker said as I got out of his car.

I entered through a side door and pressed a button on the wall. The bay door slowly screeched open, and the ambulance rumbled inside. Paramedics flung open the tailgate. They lifted the stretcher and wheeled the body up a ramp as I unlocked a door that led inside the morgue.

Fluorescent lighting, pale cinder block and floors gave the corridor an antiseptic ambience that was deceptive. Nothing was sterile in this place. By normal medical standards, nothing was even clean.

'Do you want him in the fridge?' one of the squad members said to me.

'No. You can wheel him into the X-ray room.' I unlocked more doors, the stretcher clattering after me, leaving drips of blood on tile.

'You going solo tonight?' asked a paramedic who looked Latin.

'I'm afraid so.'

I opened a plastic apron and slipped it over my head, hoping Marino would show up soon. In the locker room, I fetched a green surgical gown off a shelf. I pulled on shoe covers and two pairs of gloves.

'Can we help you get him on the table?' a paramedic asked.

'That would be terrific.'

'Hey, guys, let's get him on the table for the Doc.'

'Sure thing.'

'Shoot, this pouch is leaking, too. We gotta get some new ones.'

'Which way do you want his head to go?'

'This end for the head.'

'On his back?'

'Yes,' I said. 'Thank you.'

'Okay. One-two-three heave.'

We lifted Anthony Jones from the stretcher to the table, and one of the paramedics started to unzip the pouch.

'No, no, leave him in,' I said. 'I'll X-ray him through it.'

'How long will it take?'

'Not long.'

'You're going to need some help moving him again.'

'I'll take all the help I can get,' I told them.

'We can hang around a few more minutes. Were you really going to do all this alone?'

'I'm expecting someone else.'

A little later, we moved the body into the autopsy suite and I undressed it on top of the first steel table. The paramedics left, returning the morgue to its usual sounds of water running into sinks and steel instruments clattering against steel. I attached the victim's films to light boxes where the shadows and shapes of his organs and bones brightly bared their souls to me. Bullets and their multitude of ragged pieces were lethal snowstorms in liver, lungs, heart and brain. He had an old bullet in his left buttock and a healed fracture of his right humerus. Mr. Jones, like so many of my patients, had died the way he had lived.

I was making the Y-incision when the buzzer sounded in the bay. I did not pause. The security guard would take care of whoever it was. Moments later I heard heavy footsteps in the corridor, and Marino walked in.

'I would've got here sooner but all the neighbors decided to come out and watch the fun.'

'What neighbors?' I looked quizzically at him, scalpel poised midair.

'This drone's neighbors in Whitcomb Court. We were afraid there was going to be a friggin' riot. Word went down he was shot by a cop, and then it was Santa who whacked him, and next thing there's people crawling out of cracks in the sidewalk.'

Marino, still in dress uniform, took off his coat and draped it over a chair. 'They're all gathered around with their two-liter bottles of Pepsi, smiling at the television cameras. Friggin' unbelievable.' He slid a pack of Marlboros out of his shirt pocket.

'I thought you were doing better with your smoking,' I said.

'I am. I get better at it all the time.'

'Marino, it isn't something to joke about.' I thought of my mother and her tracheotomy. Emphysema had not cured her habit until she had gone into respiratory arrest.

'Okay.' He came closer to the table. I'll tell you the serious truth. I've cut it down by half a pack a day, Doc.'

I cut through ribs and removed the breastplate.

'Molly won't let me smoke in her car or house.'

'Good for Molly,' I said of the woman Marino began dating at Thanksgiving. 'How are the two of you doing?'

'Real good.'

'Are you spending Christmas together?'

'Oh yeah. We'll be with her family in Urbana. They do a big turkey, the whole nine yards.' He tapped an ash to the floor and fell silent.

'This is going to take a while,' I said. 'The bullets have fragmented as you can see from his films.'

Marino glanced around at the morbid chiaroscuro displayed on light boxes around the room.

'What was he using? Hydra-Shok?' I asked.

'All the cops around here are using Hydra-Shok these days. I guess you can see why. It does the trick.'

'His kidneys have a finely granular surface. He's very young for that.'

'What does that mean?' Marino looked on curiously.

'Probably an indication of hypertension.'

He was quiet, probably wondering if his kidneys looked the same, and I suspected they did.