"I understand bureaucracies. I've worked in them all my life."

"As have I."

"Then you must be clear on what I'm saying."

"I am."

"They want her in Richmond with me until next semester," I said.

"Then that is their verdict." He reached for his coffee again.

"Exactly. And that's easy for them, but what about my niece? She's only twenty-one years old. Her dream has just blown up mid flight What is she supposed to do? Go back to UVA after Christmas and pretend nothing went wrong?"

"Listen." He touched my arm with a tenderness that always made me wish he were my father.

"I will do what I can without the impropriety of meddling with an administrative problem. Trust me on that front?"

"I do."

"In the meantime, if you don't mind a little personal advice?" He motioned for the waitress as he glanced at his watch.

"Well, I'm late." He looked back at me.

"Your biggest problem is a domestic one."

"I disagree," I said with feeling.

"You can disagree all you like." He smiled at the waitress as she gave him the check.

"You're the closest thing to a mother Lucy has ever had. How are you going to help her through this?"

"I thought I was doing that today."

"And I thought you were doing this because you wanted to see me. Excuse me? " He motioned for the waitress.

"I don't think this is our check. We didn't have four entrees."

"Let me see. Oh, my. Oh, I sure am sorry. Senator Lord. It's the table there."

"In that case, make Senator Kennedy pay both tabs. His and mine." He handed her both bills.

"He won't object. He believes in tax and spend." The waitress was a big woman in a black dress and white apron, and hair stiffened into a black pageboy. She smiled and suddenly felt fine about her mistake.

"Yes, sir! I sure will tell the senator that."

"And you tell him to add on a generous tip, Missouri," he said as she walked off.

"You tell him I said so." Missouri Rivers wasn't a day younger than seventy, and since she'd left Raleigh decades ago on a northbound train, she had seen senators feast and fast, resign and get reelected, fall in love and fall from glory. She knew when to interrupt and get on with the business of serving food, and when to refill tea or simply disappear. She knew the secrets of the heart hidden so well in this lovely room, for the true measure of a human being is the way he treated people like her when no one was observing. She loved Senator Lord.

I knew that from the soft light in her eyes when she looked at him or heard his name.

"I'm just encouraging you to spend some time with Lucy," he continued.

"And don't get caught up in slaying other people's dragons, especially her dragons."

"I don't believe she can slay this dragon alone."

"My point is that Lucy doesn't need to know from you we had this conversation today. She doesn't need to know from you that I will pick up the phone on her behalf as soon as I return to my office. If anybody tells her anything, let it be me."

"Agreed," I said.

A little later I caught a taxi outside the Russell Building and found Benton Wesley where he said he would be at precisely two-fifteen. He was sitting on a bench in the amphitheater outside FBI headquarters, and though he seemed engrossed in a novel, he sensed me long before I was about to call his name.

A group taking a tour paid no attention to us as they walked past, and Wesley closed his book and slipped it into the pocket of his coat as he got up.

"How was your trip?" he asked.

"By the time I get to and from National, it takes as long to fly as it does to drive."

"You flew?" He held the door to the lobby for me.

"I'm letting Lucy use my car." He slipped off his sunglasses and got each of us a visitor's pass.

"You know the director of the crime labs, Jack Cartwright?"

"We've met."

"We're going to his office for a quick and dirty briefing," he said.

"Then there's a place I want to take you."

"Where might that be?"

"A place that's difficult to go to."

"Benton, if you're going to be cryptic, then I'll have no choice but to retaliate by speaking Latin."

"And you know how much I hate it when you do that." We inserted our visitor's passes into a turnstile and followed a long corridor to an elevator. Every time I came to headquarters I was reminded of how much I did not like the place. People rarely gave me eye contact or smiled, and it seemed everything and everyone hid behind various shades of white and gray. Endless corridors connected a labyrinth of laboratories that I could never find when left to my own devices, and worse, people who worked here did not seem to know how to get anywhere, either. Jack Cartwright had an office with a view, and sunlight filled his windows, reminding me of the splendid days I missed when I was working hard and worried.

"Benton, Kay, good afternoon." Cartwright shook our hands.

"Please have a seat. And this is George Kilby and Seth Richards from the labs. Have you met? "

"No. How do you do?" I said to Kilby and Richards, who were young, serious, and soberly attired.

"Would anybody like coffee?" Nobody did, and Cartwright seemed eager to get on with our business. He was an attractive man whose formidable desk bore testimony to the way he got things done. Every document, envelope, and telephone message was in its proper place, and on top of a legal pad was an old silver Parker fountain pen that only a purist would use. I noticed he had plants in his windows and photographs of his wife and daughters on the sills. Outside sunlight winked on windshields as cars moved in congested herds, and vendors hawked T-shirts, ice cream, and drinks.

"We've been working on the Steiner case," Cart- wright began, "and there are a number of interesting developments so far. I will start with what is probably most important, and that's the typing of the skin found in the freezer.

"Although our DNA analysis is not finished, we can tell you with certainty that the tissue is human and the ABO grouping is 0-positive. As I'm sure you know, the victim, Emily Steiner, was also 0-positive. And the size and shape of the tissue are consistent with her wounds. "

"I'm wondering if you've been able to determine what sort of cutting instrument was used to excise the tissue," I said, taking notes.

"A sharp cutting instrument with a single edge."

"Which could be just about any type of knife," Wesley said. Cartwright went on.

"You can see where the point penetrated the flesh first as the assailant began to cut. So we're talking about a knife with a point and a single edge. That's as much as we can narrow it down. And by the way" -he looked at Wesley"-we've found no human blood on any of the knives you had sent in. Uh, the things from the Ferguson house." Wesley nodded, his face impervious as he listened.

"Okay, trace evidence," Cartwright resumed.

"And this is where it begins to get interesting. We have some unusual microscopic material that came from Emily Steiner's body and hair, and also from the bottoms of her shoes. We've got several blue acrylic fibers consistent with the blanket from her bed, plus green cotton fibers consistent with the green corduroy coat she wore to the youth group meeting at her church.

"There are some other wool fibers that we don't know the origin of.

Plus we found dust mites, which could have come from anywhere. But what couldn't have come from anywhere is this. " Cartwright swiveled around in his chair and turned on a video display on the credenza behind him. The screen was filled with four different sections of some sort of cellular material that brought to mind honeycomb, only this had peculiar areas stained amber.

"What you're looking at," Cartwright told us, "are sections of a plant called Sambucus simpson ii which is simply a woody shrub indigenous to the coastal plains and lagoons of southern Florida. What's fascinating are these dark spots right here." He pointed to the stained areas.