“Like, for instance, are you telling the truth about your not going inside the house after your wife told you what she did.” Investigator Turkington is getting very unfriendly now. “I find it unusual you didn’t go in and check out your wife’s story for yourself.”

“If what she said was true, there’s no way I was walking in there,” Ashley says. “What if some killer was hiding in there?”

Madelisa remembers the sound of running water, the blood, the clothes, the photograph of the dead tennis player. She envisions the mess in the huge living room, all those prescription bottles and vodka. And the projector turned on with nothing playing on the movie screen. The detective doesn’t believe her. She’s in for a world of trouble. Breaking and entering. Stealing a dog. Lying. He can’t find out about the dog. They’ll take him and put him to sleep. She loves that dog. The hell with lies. She’ll tell lies all the way to hell for that dog.

“I know this isn’t my business,” Madelisa says, and it takes all her nerve to ask, “but do you know who lives in that house and if anything bad’s happened?”

“We know who lives there, a woman whose name I don’t care to divulge. It just so happens she’s not home, and her dog and car are gone.”

“Her car’s gone?” Madelisa’s lower lip starts to tremble.

“Sounds like she went somewhere and took her dog, don’t you think? And you know what else I think? You wanted a free tour of her mansion and then worried someone might have seen you trespassing. So you made up this wild tale to cover your butts. That was almost clever.”

“If you bother to look inside her house, you’ll know the truth.” Madelisa’s voice shakes.

“We did bother, ma’am. I sent a few officers over there to check, and they didn’t find anything you supposedly saw. No pane of glass missing from a window by the laundry-room door. No broken glass. No blood. No knives. The gas grill was turned off, clean as a whistle. No sign something had recently been cooked on it. And the projector wasn’t on,” he says.

In the arrangement office where Hollings and his staff meet with families, Scarpetta sits on a pale gold-and- cream-striped sofa and goes through a second guest book.

Based on everything she’s seen so far, Hollings is a tasteful, thoughtful man. The large, thick guest books are bound in fine black leather with lined creamy pages, and because of the magnitude of his business, three to four books a year are required. A tedious search through the first four months of last year’s hasn’t produced evidence that Gianni Lupano attended a funeral here.