She selects a violet light in the 400-to 430-nanometer range and she, Becky, and Scarpetta walk into the living room. All the shades are open, and beyond them is the black-bottom pool where Holly Webster drowned, and beyond that dunes, sea oats, the beach. The ocean is calm, and sunlight flashes in the tide like small silver fish.

“There’s plenty of footprints in here, too,” Becky offers as they look around. “Bare footprints, shoe prints, all of them small, probably hers. It’s strange, because there’s no evidence he wiped down the floors before he left—like he must have done to the window. So you would think there’d be shoe prints. This shiny stone, what is it? I’ve never seen blue tiles like this. It looks like the ocean.”

“That’s probably what it’s supposed to look like,” Scarpetta says. “Sodalite blue marble, maybe lapis.”

“No shit. I had a ring made out of lapis once. I can’t believe someone’s got a whole floor of it. Hides the dirt pretty good,” she says, “but it sure as hell hasn’t been cleaned in recent memory. A lot of dust and stuff, the entire house is like that. You shine a flashlight at an angle and you see what I mean. I just don’t understand why it doesn’t appear he left a single shoe print, not even in the laundry room where he came in.”

“I’m going to wander around,” Lucy says. “What about upstairs?”

“I don’t think she was using the upstairs. Doubt he went up there. It’s undisturbed. Just guest rooms, an art gallery, and game room up there. Never seen a house like this. Must be nice.”

“Not for her,” Scarpetta says, looking at the long, dark hair all over the floor, at the empty glasses and bottle of vodka on the table in front of the couch. “I don’t think this place gave her a moment’s happiness.”

Madelisa hasn’t been home an hour when the doorbell rings.

In the past, she wouldn’t have bothered to ask who’s there.

“Who is it?” she calls out from behind the locked door.

“Investigator Pete Marino from the medical examiner’s office,” a voice says, a deep voice with an accent that reminds her of the North, of Yankees.

Madelisa suspects what she feared. The lady in Hilton Head is dead. Why else would someone from the medical examiner’s office show up here? She wishes Ashley hadn’t decided to run errands the minute they got home, leaving her alone after what she’d been through. She listens for the basset hound. Thank goodness he’s quiet in the spare bedroom. She opens the front door and is terrified. The huge man is dressed like a motorcycle thug. He’s the monster who killed that poor woman, and he followed Madelisa home to kill her next.