At the end of the pier he stops, breathing hard, eaten alive by what feels like a million invisible teeth as tears flood his eyes and his chest heaves rapidly, the way he’s seen a man’s chest heave right after he’s gotten a lethal injection, right before his face turns dusky blue and he dies. It’s so dark and overcast, the water and the sky are one, and below him bumpers thud, and water softly laps against pilings.

He cries out something that doesn’t seem to come from him as he hurls his cell phone and earpiece as hard as he can. He hurls them so far, he can’t hear them land.

Chapter 19

Kay Scarpetta 15 - Book of the Dead

Chapter 19

Y -12 National Security Complex. Scarpetta stops her rental car at a checkpoint in the midst of concrete blast barriers and fences topped with razor wire.

She rolls down her window for the second time in the past five minutes and hands over her identification badge. The guard steps inside his booth to make a phone call while another guard searches the trunk of the red Dodge Stratus that Scarpetta was unhappy to find waiting for her at Hertz when she landed in Knoxville an hour ago. She’d requested an SUV. She doesn’t drive red. She doesn’t even wear red. The guards seem more vigilant than they’ve been in the past, as if the car makes them wary, and they are already wary enough. Y-12 has the largest stockpile of enriched uranium in the country. Security is unyielding, and she never bothers the scientists here unless she has a special need that has reached, as she puts it, critical mass.

In the back of the car is the brown-paper- wrapped window from Lydia Webster’s laundry room, and a small box containing the gold coin that has the unidentified murdered little boy’s fingerprint on it. In the far reaches of the complex is a redbrick lab building that looks like all the others, but housed within it is the largest scanning electron microscope on the planet.

“You can pull over right there.” A guard points. “And he’ll be right here. You can follow him in.”