“Pretend you don’t know about it.” She cries harder. “What difference does it make? He didn’t do anything. Oh, the poor baby. Who knows what he’s been through. He was shaking and had blood on him. He didn’t do anything except get scared and escape, and if you take him you know what will happen. They’ll put him to sleep. Oh, please, let me keep him. Please! Please! Please!”

“Why did he have blood on him?” Marino asks.

In the master bathroom, Scarpetta shines a flashlight obliquely over an onyx floor the color of tigereye.

“Bare footprints,” she says from the doorway. “Smallish. Maybe hers again. And more hair.”

“If what Madelisa Dooley says is to be believed, he had to have walked around in here. This is so weird,” Becky says as Lucy shows up with a small blue-and- yellow box and a bottle of sterile water.

Scarpetta steps inside the bathroom. She pulls open the tiger-striped shower curtain and shines the light inside the deep copper tub. Nothing, then something catches her attention, and she picks up what looks like a piece of broken white pottery that for some reason was between a bar of white soap and a dish hooked to the side of the tub. She examines it carefully. She gets out her jeweler’s lens.

“Part of a dental crown,” she says. “Not porcelain. A temporary that somehow got broken.”

“I wonder where the rest of it is,” Becky says, crouching in the doorway and peering at the floor, turning on her flashlight and shining it in all directions. “Unless it’s not recent.”

“Could have gone down the drain. We should check the trap. Could be anywhere.” Scarpetta thinks she sees a trace of dried blood on what she estimates is almost half of a crown from what she believes is a front tooth. “We have any way of knowing if Lydia Webster has been to the dentist lately?”

“I can check it out. There’s not that many dentists on the island. So unless she went elsewhere, it shouldn’t be hard to track down.”

“It would have to be recent, very recent,” Scarpetta says. “I don’t care how much you neglect your hygiene, you don’t ignore a broken crown, especially on a front tooth.”

“Could be his,” Lucy says.

“That would be even better,” Scarpetta says. “We need a small paper envelope.”

“I’ll get it,” Lucy says.