“What I’d like is for you to quit changing the subject. See, with image recovery, it’s next to impossible to totally get rid of a digital image that’s on a disk or memory stick or whatever. You can delete stuff all day and we can get it back.” This isn’t entirely true, but Marino has no compunction about lying.

Madelisa looks like a cornered mouse.

“You know what I’m getting at, don’t you?” Marino says, and he’s got her where he wants her but he doesn’t feel good about it, and he himself isn’t quite sure what he’s getting at.

When Scarpetta called him a while ago and said Turkington is suspicious about what Mr. Dooley erased because he kept mentioning it during the interview, Marino said he’d get an answer. More than anything right now, he wants to please Scarpetta, make her think something’s still worthwhile about him. He was shocked she called him.

“Why are you asking me?” Madelisa says, and she begins to cry. “I said, I don’t know anything other than what I already told that investigator.”

She continues glancing past Marino toward the back of her small, yellow house. Yellow wallpaper, yellow carpet. Marino’s never seen so much yellow. It looks like an interior decorator peed on everything the Dooleys own.

“The reason I bring up image recovery is I understand your husband erased part of what he videotaped out there on the beach,” Marino says, unmoved by her tears.

“It was just me standing in front of the house before I had permission. That’s the only thing he erased. Of course, I never did get permission, because how could I? It’s not that I didn’t try. I have manners.”

“I really don’t give a shit about you and your manners. What I care about is what you’re hiding from me and everybody else.” He leans forward in the recliner chair. “I know damn well you’re not being totally honest with me. Why do I know that? Because of science.”

He doesn’t know anything of the sort. To recover deleted images from a digital recorder isn’t a given. If it can be done at all, the process is painstaking and would take a while.

“Please don’t,” she begs him. “I’m so sorry, but please don’t take him. I love him so much.”

Marino has no idea what she’s talking about. It occurs to him she means her husband, but he isn’t sure.

He says, “If I don’t take him, what then? How do I explain it when I leave here and I’m asked?”