The road winds through golf courses, and over short bridges that briefly span narrow canals and small ponds. On a grassy embankment, an alligator looks like a log, and turtles are quiet in the mud, and a snowy egret stands on stick legs in shallow water. The conversation in the front seat is centered on Dr. Self for a while, and light turns to shadow in the shade of huge oak trees. Spanish moss looks like dead, gray hair. Little has changed. A few new houses have been built here and there, and she remembers long walks and salt air and wind, and sunsets on the balcony, and the moment all of it came to an end. She envisions what she believed was him in the charred ruins of the building where he supposedly died. She sees his silver hair and incinerated flesh in the blackened wood and filth from a fire that was still smoldering when she arrived. His face was gone, nothing but burned bone, and his autopsy records were false. She was fooled. Devastated. Destroyed, and she is forever different because of what Benton did—far more different than she is because of Marino.

They park in the driveway of Lydia Webster’s sprawling white villa. Scarpetta remembers seeing it before, from the beach, and it seems surreal because of why they’re here. Police cars line the street.

“They got the place about a year ago. Some tycoon from Dubai had it before that,” Turkington says, opening his door. “Real sad. They’d just finished a massive renovation and moved in when the little girl drowned. I don’t know how Mrs. Webster stood being inside the place after that.”

“Sometimes people can’t let go,” Scarpetta says as they walk over pavers toward the double teakwood doors at the top of stone steps. “So they stay embedded in a place and its memories.”

“She get this in the settlement?” Lucy asks.

“Probably would have.” As if, in truth, there’s no doubt she’s dead. “Still in the middle of the divorce. Her husband’s into hedge funds, investments, whatever. Almost as rich as you are.”

“How about we stop talking about that,” Lucy says, annoyed.

Turkington opens the front door. Crime scene investigators are inside. Propped against a stucco wall in the foyer is a window with a broken pane of glass.

“The lady on vacation,” Turkington says to Scarpetta. “Madelisa Dooley. According to her statement, the glass was removed from the window when she came in through the laundry room. This pane here.” He squats and points to a pane of glass on the bottom right-hand side of the window. “It’s the one he removed and glued back. If you look, you can just barely see the glue. I made her think we didn’t find the broken glass when officers first looked here. I wanted to see if she changed her story, so I told her the glass wasn’t broken.”