She understands why Benton couldn’t say a word, but it’s not right. Dr. Self and Marino e-mailing each other, and all the while she’s under Benton’s nose at McLean. He doesn’t warn Marino or Scarpetta. He doesn’t warn Lucy as the two of them watch Marino on camera in the morgue, giving Shandy a tour. Lucy making comments about Marino, about his e-mails to Dr. Self, and Benton just listens, and now Lucy feels stupid. She feels betrayed. He doesn’t mind asking her to break into confidential electronic files, but he can’t tell her that Dr. Self is a patient and is sitting in her private room at the very private Pavilion, paying three thousand fucking dollars a day to fuck everyone.

Sixth gear, tucked in, and passing cars on the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge with its soaring peaks and vertical cables that remind her of the Stanford Cancer Center, of the lady playing incongruous songs on her harp. Marino may have been messed up already, but he didn’t bargain for the chaos Dr. Self could cause. He’s too simple to comprehend a neutron bomb. Compared to Dr. Self, he’s a big, dumb kid with a slingshot in his back pocket. Maybe he started it by sending her an e-mail, but she knows how to finish something. She knows how to finish him.

Racing past shrimp boats docked in Shem Creek, crossing the Ben Sawyer Bridge to Sullivan’s Island, where Marino lives in what he said at one time was his dream home—a tiny, run-down fishing shack on stilts, with a red metal roof. The windows are dark, not even a porch light on. Behind the shack, a very long pier cuts through the marsh and ends at a narrow creek that snakes to the Intracoastal Waterway. When he moved here, he bought a drift boat and enjoyed exploring the creeks and fishing or just cruising and drinking beer. She’s not sure what happened. Where did he go? Who’s living in his body?

The patch of a front yard is sandy and dappled with spindly weeds. Under the shack, she picks her way through an assortment of junk. Old ice chests, a rusting grill, crab pots, rotting fishnets, garbage cans that smell like a swamp. She climbs warped wooden steps and tries the paint-peeled door. The lock is flimsy, but she doesn’t want to pry it open. Better to take the door off the hinges and get in that way. A screwdriver, and she’s inside Marino’s dream house. He has no alarm system, always says his guns are alarming enough.