Drew charging the net and slamming a lob so hard it bounces into the stands. The crowd jumping to its feet and wildly cheering.

Drew’s pretty face on Dr. Self’s show. Talking fast, her mind jumping from one subject to the next, excited because she’d just won the U.S. Open, called the Tiger Woods of tennis. Dr. Self leaning into the interview, asking questions she shouldn’t ask.

“Are you a virgin, Drew?”

Laughing, blushing, hiding her face with her hands.

“Come on.” Dr. Self smiling, so damn full of herself. “This is what I’m talking about, everyone.” To her audience. “Shame. Why do we feel shame when we talk about sex?”

“I lost my virginity when I was ten,” Drew says. “To my brother’s bicycle.”

The crowd going crazy.

“Drew Martin dead at sweet sixteen,” an anchor says.

Rose manages to push the couch across the living room and shove it against the wall. She sits on it and cries. She gets up and paces and weeps, and moans that death is wrong and violence is unbearable and she hates it. Hates it all. In the bathroom, she retrieves a prescription bottle. In the kitchen, she pours herself a glass of wine. She takes a tablet and washes it down with wine, and moments later, coughing and barely able to breathe, she washes down a second tablet. The telephone rings and she is unsteady when she reaches for it, dropping the receiver, fumbling to pick it up.

“Hello?”

“Rose?” Scarpetta says.

“I shouldn’t watch the news.”

“Are you crying?”

The room’s spinning. She’s seeing double. “It’s just the flu.”

“I’m coming over,” Scarpetta says.

Marino rests his head against the back of the seat, his eyes masked by dark glasses, his big hands on his thighs.

He’s dressed in the same clothes he had on last night. He slept in them, and it looks like it. His face is a deep red hue, and he has the stale stench of a drunk who hasn’t bathed in a while. The sight and smell of him brings back memories that are too awful to describe, and she feels the rawness, the soreness of flesh he should never have seen or touched. She wears layers of silk and cotton, fabrics gentle to her skin, her shirt buttoned at the collar, her jacket zipped up. To hide her injuries. To hide her humiliation. Around him, she feels powerless and naked.

Another awful silence as she drives. The car is filled with the aromas of garlic and sharp cheese, and he has his window open.

He says, “The light hurts my eyes. I can’t believe how much the light’s killing my eyes.”