“Because he couldn’t handle being around women he wanted desperately to impress, and worse than not being impressed, at least in the way he’s always wanted, we had no interest in him except in a way he’s never been able to handle,” Lucy says. “We wanted to relate to him as one person to another, and so what does he do? He tries to grope my girlfriend right in front of me. Of course, he was drunk.”

She gets up from the work station and walks over to the counter where her aunt is now preoccupied with removing color markers from a drawer and taking off their caps, testing each one to make sure the ink hasn’t been used up or dried out.

“I didn’t put up with it,” Lucy says. “I fought back. I was only eighteen and I called him on it, and he’s lucky I didn’t do something worse. Are you going to keep distracting yourself as if somehow that will make it go away?”

Lucy takes her aunt’s hands and gently pushes up the sleeves. Her wrists are a bright red. Deep tissue damage, as if she’s been clamped hard by iron manacles.

“Let’s don’t get into this,” Scarpetta says. “I know you care.” She pulls her wrists away, pulls down her sleeves. “But please leave me alone about it, Lucy.”

“What did he do to you?”

Scarpetta sits.

“You’d better tell me everything,” Lucy says. “I don’t care what Dr. Self did to provoke him, and we both know it doesn’t take much. He’s gone too far, and there’s no going back and there’s no exception to the rule. I’ll punish him.”

“Please. Let me deal with it.”

“You aren’t, and you won’t. You always make excuses for him.”

“I’m not. But punishing him isn’t the answer. What good will it do?”

“What exactly happened?” Lucy is quiet and calm. But inside she goes numb, the way she gets when she’s capable of anything. “He was at your house all night. What did he do? Nothing you wanted, that’s for sure, or you wouldn’t be bruised. You wouldn’t want anything from him anyway, so he forced you, didn’t he? He grabbed your wrists. What did he do? Your neck is raw. Where else? What did the son of a bitch do? All the trash he sleeps with, no telling what diseases…”

“It didn’t go that far.”

“How far is that far? What did he do.” Lucy says it not as a question but as a point of fact that demands further explanation.