“Yes, I’d say so,” Scarpetta says. “I’d say he’s been unhappy. Misses Florida and is sorry he moved here, and probably doesn’t like working for me. This isn’t a good time to dwell on the trials and troubles of Marino.”

She feels Benton’s eyes on her. She makes notes on a legal pad and checks other notes she’s already made. She checks preliminary lab reports even though she knows exactly what they say.

“He hasn’t moved,” Lucy says. “Or if he did, he left all his stuff behind.”

“And you saw all this through a window?” Captain Poma says, and he’s very curious about Lucy.

He’s been watching her since everyone assembled in this room. He seems slightly amused by her, and her response is to ignore him. The way he looks at Scarpetta is the way he looked at her in Rome.

“Seems like a lot to see through a window,” he says to Scarpetta, even though he’s talking to Lucy.

“He hasn’t gone into his e-mail, either,” Lucy says. “He might suspect I’m monitoring it. Nothing between him and Dr. Self.”

“In other words,” Scarpetta says, “he’s off the radar screen. Completely.”

She gets up and pulls down window shades because it’s dark. It’s raining again, and has been since Lucy picked her up in Knoxville, when the mountains looked like they weren’t there because it was so foggy. Lucy had to divert wherever she could, flying very slowly, following rivers and finding lower elevations. It was luck, or perhaps God’s good grace, that they weren’t stranded. Search efforts have been halted, except those conducted on the ground. Lydia Webster hasn’t been found alive or dead. Her Cadillac hasn’t been seen.

“Let’s organize our thoughts,” Scarpetta says, because she doesn’t want to talk about Marino. She’s afraid Benton will sense how she feels.

Guilty and angry, and increasingly afraid. It appears Marino has pulled a disappearing stunt, got in his truck and drove away without a warning, without any effort to repair the damage he’s done. He’s never been facile with words, and he’s never made much effort to understand his complicated emotions, and this time what he needs to fix exceeds his capacity to cope. She’s tried to dismiss him, to not give a damn, but he’s like the persistent fog. Thoughts of him obscure what’s around her, and one lie becomes another. She told Benton her bruises are from the hatchback of her SUV accidentally shutting on her wrists. She hasn’t undressed in front of him.