She moves on and parks, waiting for the black Tahoe driven by Dr. Franz, the director of the materials science lab. She always follows him in. No matter how many times she’s been here, she not only can’t find her way, she wouldn’t dare try. Getting lost inside a facility that manufactures nuclear weapons isn’t an option. The Tahoe rolls up and turns around, and Dr. Franz’s arm waves out his window, motioning for her to proceed. She follows him past nondescript buildings with nondescript names, then the terrain dramatically changes into woods and open fields, and finally the one-story labs known as Technology 2020. The setting is deceptively bucolic. Scarpetta and Dr. Franz get out of their vehicles. She removes the brown-paper- wrapped window from the back, where it was held safely in place with the seat belt.

“What fun things you bring us,” he says. “Last time, it was a complete door.”

“And we found a bootprint, didn’t we—that nobody thought was there.”

“There’s always a there there.” Dr. Franz’s motto.

About her age and dressed in a polo shirt and baggy jeans, he isn’t what comes to mind when one conjures up the image of a nuclear metallurgical engineer who finds it fascinating to spend his time magnifying a milled tool part or a spider spinneret, or pieces and parts of a space shuttle or a submarine. She follows him inside what would look like a normal lab, were it not for the massive metal chamber supported by four dampening pillars the diameter of trees. The VisiTech Large Chamber Scanning Electron Microscope—LC-SEM—weighs ten tons, and required a forty-ton forklift to install it. Simply put, it’s the biggest microscope on earth, and its original intended use wasn’t forensic science but failure analysis of materials such as the metals used in weapons. But technology is technology, as far as Scarpetta is concerned, and by now Y-12 is used to her shameless begging.

Dr. Franz unwraps the window. He places it and the coin on top of a three-inch- thick steel turntable, and begins positioning an electron gun the size of a small missile, and the detectors lurking behind it, lowering them as close as he can to suspect areas of sand and glue and broken glass. With a remote axis control, he slides and tilts. Hums and clicks. Stopping at end stops—or switches—that prevent precious parts from crashing into samples or one another or going over the edge. He closes the door so he can vacuum down the chamber to ten-to- the-minus- six, he explains. Then he’ll backfill the rest of it to ten-to- the-minus- two, he adds, and you couldn’t open the door if you tried, he says. Showing her. And what they basically have are the conditions of outer space, he explains. No moisture, no oxygen, just the molecules of a crime.